Transcript: Trump Unravels as GOPers Admit He Wrecked Their 2028 Map

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 9 episode of The Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

Republicans are now openly fretting that their disastrous midterm losses could badly complicate their path to victory in the 2028 presidential race. Big Democratic gains in the South and the Midwest will have unpredictable consequences for our politics that both parties are starting to think about right now.

All this comes as Donald Trump unleashed a string of crazed Truth Social posts about the midterm results, and vowed that he’s really, truly about to preside over huge successes any day now.

We think all this gets at a deeper story about the opportunities that Trumpism’s failures have created for Democrats to make geographic advances long term. So we’re talking to Paul Waldman, who has a good piece for the Public Notice Substack that sheds light here. Paul, good to see you.

Paul Waldman: Good to see you too, Greg.

Sargent: So Trump just uncorked a bunch of doozies on Truth Social. He posted in all caps that Republicans only lost because he “WASN’T ON THE BALLOT!” He raged over the stock market’s downturn, claiming it was, “because the Democrats had a big Tuesday.” He added: “So sad to see. You only have yourselves to blame!”

Paul, I guess he’s blaming the voters there. What I find interesting is he really thinks most Americans are already regretting their choice. What did you make of that?

Waldman: Yeah, you have to give him credit for giving it the old college try. He went on what was a pretty punishing schedule for an 80-year-old man. He did lots of rallies. But everywhere he went, it seemed as though he was actually hurting the candidates that he was trying to help. And he was imploring people to act like he was on the ballot.

What he’s saying now is that they didn’t do that sufficiently. But the truth is, that’s precisely why Republicans lost. It’s because, in some ways, people did see that he was on the ballot. And we have this extraordinary sweep that’s really bigger than anything we’ve seen since the 1974 post-Watergate midterms.

And Trump is not going to act the way that many presidents in the past have when they suffered a midterm loss. They would come out the next day, say, wow, I really got a thumping, and at least make some noises about how they’re going to reach across the aisle and try to work with the new majorities in Congress and make progress for the American people, blah, blah, blah. But of course that’s not really Trump’s style.

Sargent: I thought it was also funny how Trump responded to the market downturn by saying this: “Do not fear, we will soon, one way or the other, be BIGGER AND STRONGER THAN EVER BEFORE.”

Paul, you see, he’s going to rescue us from the voters’ catastrophic decision to elect Democrats. But I just can’t see him making any kind of positive contribution to our national life or to our country’s flourishing over the next two years, even if he says he wants to make deals with Democrats. I just think he’s going to be this blight that we just have to deal with for two more years until he’s finally gone.

Waldman: Yeah, it’s not like he’s going to make some major policy reversal, because the things that have damaged the economy, especially, are the things that he did, and not just sort of big broad forces. I mean, yes, there’s a lot of dissatisfaction with fundamental things about the economy, like the cost of health care, the cost of housing.

Those are sort of deep long-term issues. But Trump exacerbated them with the tariffs, which is the thing that’s closest to his heart. He’s going to keep doing that. He’s going to keep trying to find new ways to impose tariffs.

And the other question is the war in Iran. Now, he may look for a way out. That may be the one thing that he does, in fact, change. It’s entirely possible that he’ll look at how the public feels about the war in Iran—even JD Vance, his vice president, said that that was the main reason why they lost, which you can debate—but Trump may say, OK, now I’m going to see if I can find some way to get the heck out of there and declare victory.

And that actually might have a beneficial effect on the economy, at least, you know, within a few months, if that begins to bring down the price of gas and diesel. So that’s the one thing he can do, but we don’t know yet whether he’s really inclined to.

Sargent: Well, Republicans are really going to want him to do that, because they’re looking forward. He’s a lame duck, but they’ve got an election in 2028 to deal with, and they know it’s trouble. Politico talked to a bunch of Republican strategists who are admitting the debacle has blown up their 2028 map.

Bill Stepien, who actually managed Trump’s 2020 campaign, worried that this makes the mechanics of 2028 harder, saying this: “Waging a campaign for president in Texas is big, expensive, and not something Republicans have had to do for a long time.” They’re admitting flat out that the electoral map is really just almost like a snow globe that’s been shaken violently for them now.

Waldman: Yeah. If Democrats win Texas in any presidential campaign in the near future, there is absolutely no way Republicans can win the presidency. And if Democrats are smart, I think they would take a couple of billion dollars—that’s billion with a B—and open up an office in every single one of Texas’s 254 counties, and really start organizing on the ground, because that can be the entire ball game.

The places where Democrats won really are indicative of some shifting demographics, some new political realities. I mean, we looked at the extraordinary turnout among Black voters across the South.

That, among other things, means that there will probably be a Black Democrat elected to the Senate from Mississippi for the first time since Reconstruction. And one of the questions is, can you maintain that? Can you take it into a presidential campaign?

But Texas is obviously the biggest prize. And it’s just impossible to overstate what an earthquake it was there. You know, Democrats came into Election Day thinking, well, maybe we’ll be able to snag this Senate seat because we’ve got a really good candidate, they have a terrible candidate in Ken Paxton. But they won everything.

The governor, the lieutenant governor, the attorney general, the railroad commissioner, the school board. It was up and down. And they took one of the chambers of the state legislature. And now they’re in a position there to build something, if they can find the means and the will to invest in it. And that could be the biggest battleground of the 2028 election.

Sargent: Absolutely. We don’t know how durable the Dem gain in Texas is, but I think now Republicans have to worry about it in a new way. They’re going to, at an absolute minimum, have to spend enormous sums of money to prevent it from slipping away, for the reasons you said.

But you can even go broader and say that what happened in the South is big for the electoral map. I think North Carolina really might be coming into the Democratic column now. It’s still a swing state, very much a swing state. It’ll be incredibly hot, hard-fought in the 2028 presidential. But Trump only won it by three points in 2024.

This is something now that’s gettable for the 2028 Democratic nominee, given that Democrats made these inroads into rural North Carolina, into parts of North Carolina that nobody thought they could win in—western North Carolina and Appalachia, for instance. So this transformation of the South also upends the map. What do you think?

Waldman: It really will. North Carolina is a genuine swing state. There’s going to be a hot Senate race there in 2028, with Ted Budd up for reelection. And that was a state that not long ago was won by Barack Obama.

And there’s something else, kind of in the big picture, that I think it’s important to keep in mind. We are in an era where every election is a change election. If you go back 20 years, there’s really only one election that the president’s party didn’t lose, and that was in 2012, when Barack Obama got reelected.

Every other midterm and presidential election since 2004, the president’s party has lost. And the Republicans are still going to be the party in power, for all intents and purposes, in 2028, because that’s just a matter of who the president is.

Even though Democrats will have a lot of opportunities to exercise their newfound authority in Congress, when people go to the 2028 election, the Republicans are still going to seem like the ones in charge. And if you want to throw the bums out, you’re going to vote for the Democratic presidential nominee. And that is going to be another drag on whoever the Republicans manage to nominate.

Sargent: A hundred percent. Let’s go to Ohio and Iowa now. Trump turned those states red. That was one of his big achievements. But Democrats just won the gubernatorial and Senate races in both. GOP strategist Kurt Steiner, who’s from Ohio, told Politico that “Ohio should be considered a battleground”—meaning in 2028. And Bob Vander Plaats, who’s a big Iowa evangelical leader, said this: “Trump’s brand did a lot of good for the state of Iowa, but you can also die by the brand as well.”

Paul, that’s striking stuff. I mean, Trump’s coalition really did make those two states red. The uniqueness of his coalition really pushed those states far away from Democrats.

But then his agenda of tariffs and war, which hit the Midwest pretty hard, was uniquely successful in wrecking GOP standing in both. It’s really just a whiplash event, really, don’t you think?

Waldman: Yeah. And I think there’s a belief that when Trump took some of those states, like Ohio and Iowa, that used to be battlegrounds but haven’t been in a while, that he forged some kind of deep and sustained, almost spiritual connection with the voters there, and they were going to be Republicans for a long time. And I just don’t think that’s true.

Democrats have managed to find some really appealing candidates there, and it can change the way people understand the brand. So Trump did so much damage to a state like Iowa with all of his policies.

And then you get some candidates there like Rob Sand, the new governor, who is, you know, really dynamic and charismatic, and just won by an easy margin there. And that can begin to change how people in those states think about Democrats.

And also, the legacy of the Trump years makes it a lot easier for Democrats to say to them, you know, you got sold a bill of goods, and you don’t have to punish yourself for having bought it, but now we have something much better to offer you. And don’t forget what the Republicans did to you over the last few years.

They’re in a much better position to make that case now to voters in states like that than they were before, when voters just felt like the Democrats were barely even trying. But now they really can make that case.

Sargent: I think it’s worth pointing out as well that in places like Iowa and Ohio, and Texas too, there was also a rebellion against local Republican rule. And so now that Democrats are in control of these statehouses, they can show that they can rule locally better than Republicans did.

And they can actually do the work of fixing the Democratic brand in some of these places, so that the 2028 election may become something a little different from this one.

A lot of this one was just a reaction, a revulsion at Trump, a revulsion at local Republican rule. Maybe some efforts by these Democratic governors and local officials, who have taken all these new spots in these places, can start to sell voters on Democratic rule in some sense. What do you think? Is that possible?

Waldman: I think so. If you look at Texas, Gina Hinojosa ran in significant part on opposition to vouchers, which had been very unpopular in Texas, especially in rural areas. Because what happened was, Governor Abbott pushed through a voucher plan, and that sucks money away from public schools and sends it to private schools.

But in rural Texas, there are no private schools. People rely on their public schools. Even if you wanted to use a voucher, you couldn’t. And they proved very unpopular.

And that enabled Hinojosa and other Democrats to say, look, you’re being represented by Republicans up and down the ballot. They control everything here. If you’re not happy, those are the people to blame. And they’re doing things that are directly inimical to your interests. That was a compelling message for her.

And now the trick is, can Democrats in Texas find ways to do things that will reverse some of that, and make people feel like they’re getting something tangible out of Democrats being in charge?

It’s still a situation where dissatisfaction is going to be mostly aimed at Republicans, but there’s a real opportunity now that Republican rule has presented to Democrats in those places.

Sargent: So there’s one more really interesting quote, from Marc Short, who was in the Trump administration last time. He spoke to Politico as well. He pointed out that Democrats won big in the 2006 midterms, but then that Republicans really bottomed out even more two years later with Barack Obama’s 2008 victory, and suggested that what just happened could set the stage for something similar.

Paul, I think that in some ways it’s very hard to imagine a precise parallel to that, in part because this particular victory was so big. The Democrats won by at least a dozen points nationally, something like that, maybe 13. But, you know, it’s still possible that the stage is being set for something more significant, in the sense that a presidential race will involve a whole new set of voters across the country.

And I think after what just happened, you can no longer sort of conclude in advance that the presidential electorate helps Republicans, because without Trump there anymore to get out that particular demographic that he gets out in presidential years, and with the Republican Party having cratered so badly, you could see Democrats be able to start getting these more sporadic voters better than they have in the past. What do you think of all that?

Waldman: Yeah, I think that’s definitely possible. And one of the salutary things, I think, is that it’s going to make Democrats more ambitious. We can remember when Howard Dean was the chairman of the Democratic Party and had a 50-state strategy. That was really a great idea, but in some places it amounted to a relatively small investment.

And I think Democrats are now looking in places that they didn’t think they could be competitive and saying, OK, well, let’s actually invest some money there, let’s invest energy there.

And in places in the South, in the suburbs, which are really the battleground in so many different states—that’s where things are won or lost. And so I think it’s going to kind of expand Democrats’ minds in terms of what might be possible for them. And that can only be a good thing.

Sargent: One thing that’s really interesting about this is, if you think about it in kind of two tiers, you’ve got the Midwestern states that Trump had transferred to the red column, in a permanent sense, it seemed like, at least.

These are older, whiter states. But then, on the other hand, you’ve got these states in the South and the West, right? Like Texas and North Carolina, where a different type of demographic story is happening.

The old take on Democrats was that young voters, minorities, that was their future, right? But now you see them making these gains in both places, right? In the South and the West, on the one hand, in the places where demographics are favoring them, but also in these older, whiter states. That, I think, has to terrify Republicans right there, because it’s a double whammy, isn’t it?

Waldman: Yeah. And even in those places, they’re getting more diverse all the time. And so if Democrats can run up their numbers among minorities and younger people, they can make even small gains among white voters, and that might be enough.

That’s probably the case with Scott Colom in Mississippi, that maybe they got a quarter of the white vote, which sounds like it’s very small, but for Mississippi, that’s pretty good. And they got huge turnout among Black voters.

If you look at a state like Texas, I think it’s the fifth most diverse state in the country, if I’m remembering correctly. It has a non-white majority. And so in 2024, Republicans thought, well, you know, we won more Latinos, and we even bumped up our numbers among Black voters, and that’s something that we can sustain.

And there really is no evidence that that was about much more than the particular circumstances of the 2024 election. It doesn’t mean that, you know, Democrats have assembled any kind of permanent majority. But if they can keep their coalition together and begin to pull over a few of those white voters, especially younger white voters, that can be pretty close to unbeatable.

Sargent: Just to underscore your point, I’m going to pull up some demographic data from the New York Times here. Democrats almost reached parity with Republicans among white voters. They got 48 percent of white voters nationally, and Republicans got 51 percent. That was a swing of 12 points in the Democratic direction among whites.

And of course, at the same time, the swings were even bigger among Latinos. They moved 29 points in a Democratic direction, right? They won Latinos by 40 points, 69 to 29. And then they won Blacks by an even more lopsided margin there.

So that almost tells the exact story you’re talking about, doesn’t it? You know, they made big inroads with white voters and really got back on track with the demographics that were supposed to be favoring them for so long, but that Trump temporarily upended, right?

Waldman: Yeah. And it’s unlikely that the Democratic presidential nominee in 2028 is going to win by 13 points, which is the margin that Democrats won in the House vote this year. But they don’t have to win by 13 points. If they can just build on some of those gains they made and hold some of those people, then that will be enough. And the way that the vote looks like it could be distributed is going to be very much advantageous.

You know, for so long we thought the Electoral College just gave Republicans a natural advantage. And that’s why George W. Bush and Donald Trump were both able to win the presidency without winning the popular vote.

But now it may be that in the next couple of elections, Democrats will be the ones who start off with an Electoral College map that looks very much in their favor. And they don’t have to have a blowout in order to win. They could have a squeaker of a win, and the Electoral College will give them the margin that they need.

Sargent: Just stepping back a little more, the big story of the Trump era was that he created this coalition that just absolutely debilitated Democrats. He did that by supercharging turnout among white voters, pulling out all these white voters that hadn’t participated in the past.

He won them by enormous margins, especially blue-collar whites. But at the same time, he also chipped away at Democratic positions with minority voters, right? He chipped away at working-class Latinos especially, but also Blacks a little bit.

And now that’s reversed. The Democrats won by 40 points among Hispanics, and almost reached parity with whites. And that’s the story right there. It just took that immense gain that Trump made and completely reversed it, and then some.

And it’s hard to see—like, without Trump, there’s no way a Republican duplicates that Trump coalition. And now they’re even more on a back foot, having suffered this loss, I think.

Waldman: One other factor is that, you know, presidential races are so personal. If you look across the likely field of the Democrats and Republicans—this may be a topic for another day—but the Democrats have a whole bunch of really interesting, appealing potential candidates.

And I don’t see anybody on the Republican side about whom you’d say, wow, that guy is dynamite. And you know, if JD Vance is going to be their nominee, they’re going to have a lot to overcome.

Sargent: Wait, what about Ron DeSantis?

Waldman: True. Meatball Ron. You know, you’ve got to hand it to Trump. That was a good nickname.

Sargent: He’s good at that.

Waldman: Yeah, they just don’t have a lot in the charisma department.

Sargent: Right. And the Democrats are putting up these candidates that really are being very, very thoughtful in trying to appeal to a very wide range of people. I really think a new Democratic politics is being born here.

Waldman: Yeah, it may be. And you’ve heard me complain before about how Democrats have campaigned, or not campaigned, in rural areas, where everything was so apologetic, and basically approaching voters on their knees.

And there is a new generation of really bolder Democrats who do feel confident about speaking to anybody, and are really good—just good at politics, and are not kind of locked into the old categories of what is and isn’t possible for Democrats.

And even, as you say, candidates as different as Talarico and El-Sayed, they are both willing to go anywhere and make the argument to anyone. And I think that communicates a kind of strength that can open up new opportunities where Democrats haven’t had them before.

Sargent: Folks, Paul Waldman’s being a little bit modest here. He actually wrote a whole book about these voters. It’s called White Rural Rage. He wrote it with Tom Schaller. It’s a good book. Recommend it.

And if you want to find more from Paul, check out his own Substack, The Cross Section, or you can find him at the Public Notice Substack of Aaron Rupar. Paul, awesome to talk to you. Thanks for coming on, man.

Waldman: Hey, thanks so much, Greg.

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