Transcript: Trump Ballroom Fiasco Worsens as Economic Data Gets Brutal

Sargent: Yeah. You brought up these numbers—Gallup numbers—showing that Democrats kind of have this advantage on the economy in a sense, over Republicans, in a way that we’ve never seen before.

And as you point out, there’s kind of a through line with all these candidates, and it really crosses ideological lines in a big way. You’ve got Zohran Mamdani, who’s a democratic socialist, and you’ve got Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger, who are both pretty centrist Democrats—certainly not democratic socialists—but they’re all talking the same language.

And it’s all aimed right at the cost question, at exactly the moment when Trump is really tanking on costs. I think he was down by 31 points in a recent poll on costs and inflation.

Is there really the prospect for a reversal of fortune for Democrats here? I mean, candidly, it’s still pretty tough out there for Democrats. Can they actually grab the mantle of the cost issue and take it from Trump, or not?

Pancotti: I hope so. I hope they understand that the assignment is there and that the path forward is there.

I will say, I think, we’ve been doing a bunch of work on this to try to say—we find in all of our message testing and all of our research, when we talk to voters, this is the number one thing they talk about. We’ve talked to Trump supporters. We’ve talked to people who switched from Biden to Trump. We’ve talked to people who supported Trump in all three elections where his name was on the ballot for president.

And across the board, all voters just want to be able to put food on the table for their family and have a little bit of breathing room—that if your kid falls at the playground, it’s not going to put you into bankruptcy. And it just seems like real malpractice for politicians on either side of the aisle to not address that head-on.

And I think the Democrats are really getting the point there. And the nice thing is, Trump is not doing himself any favors between his tariffs and the rest of his policies, where he just continues to drive up the cost of both essentials and just the little extras, right? It’s just more expensive to take your kid to Disney World these days.

Sargent: And Democrats can connect it to the ballroom since it’s such a potent symbol, right? What might that look like? What could the Democratic discourse look like if they do that? Just to close this out.

Pancotti: Yeah, I think whether it’s the ballroom or Argentina, this is really what we did with Elon Musk successfully. I think during the DOGE thing, Democrats were really able to immediately—and this is, you know, here at Groundwork—we fielded a poll in very early January and got the results out to try to tank Elon Musk, to show people that Elon Musk was taking the approval of the Trump administration very early on.

And I think presenting Democrats with those opportunities—to show them where they can capitalize on this, whether it’s the ballroom or Argentina—to say, look, Trump campaigned on lowering prices on day one, that is what he vowed to do. And when he got into office, he handed Elon Musk the keys to the car—and he crashed it.

While you were standing in the line at the food bank, he was focused on building a gold-trimmed ballroom or sending your taxpayer dollars over to Argentina, instead of making sure that you could afford your health care.

So really, regardless of what the opportunity is, the thing is, this guy screws up every single day. And so capitalizing on that and pivoting back to an affordability angle, I think, is the path forward here for Democrats.

Sargent: Yeah. As long as Democrats sort of start with the basic premise that Trump is in a weak position right now, it sort of really unspools from there. Elizabeth Pancotti, thanks so much for talking to us. That was fantastic.

Pancotti: Thanks so much.