Transcript: Trump Breaks Record Poll Low, Shocking Analyst: “Horrible”

As Trump hits a new bottom that outdoes his predecessors—even Richard Nixon—a veteran Democratic strategist explains how her party can do more to exploit his historic weakness.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 21 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.

Donald Trump is smashing his way to new record lows in the polls. A pair of new surveys shows Trump faring worse than his predecessors by several crucial metrics, especially among the independents who are absolutely key in midterm elections. As a new analysis from CNN concludes, his numbers are, quote, unquote, “horrible.”

And yet there are some signs this may not be translating into the advantage Democrats need in the midterm contests. In truth, the signs point in all directions right now. Trump’s travails are enormously important, but there are hidden structural factors here that could work against that. So today we’re trying to get to the bottom of what we know and what we don’t with Christina Reynolds, a veteran Democratic strategist who’s worked on a lot of midterm elections. Christina, good to see you.

Christina Reynolds: Good to see you too, Greg. Happy to chat.

Sargent: So we just had this new Washington Post poll that finds Trump’s overall job approval at 37 percent among Americans, with 61 percent disapproving. That’s 24 points underwater. Meanwhile, a new CNBC poll has Trump 19 points underwater. Average those together and you get around negative 22 points, which is pretty terrible. Christina, how important are presidential approval numbers in midterms, and why? Can you just lay that out for us?

Reynolds: Sure. I think they’re incredibly important, particularly with this party and this president, because this is a party that is driven—a lot of the turnout is driven—by people being excited about Donald Trump. That’s why we’ve seen wins in past cycles, and they’re not going to have that. This is a historically low, epically low number.

What’s particularly important here? I mean, Bush had low numbers in 2006 when Democrats took back the House. Obama had low numbers in 2010, largely because of Obamacare, when Republicans took back the House. Both of those were rationally political actors who understood what it meant to deal with those low approval ratings, who tried to keep the focus on things that mattered to voters, who maybe didn’t go out and campaign in the way you might have. And that’s not what we’re dealing with here.

We have a president with terrible numbers who doesn’t believe it, and does things like goes into Derrick Van Orden’s very at-risk district and does an event where he talks about the beautification of Washington and the ballroom that he’s building, in a district that could not give two you-know-whats.

So I think this is an important point—that Donald Trump is someone who is incredibly underwater and completely unaware that he is not on land. And that’s something that’s going to be a struggle for Republicans who are on the ballot this cycle to deal with.

Sargent: So you talked about George Bush and Barack Obama, and Trump faring worse than them in many ways. And so did CNN analyst Harry Enten. He had a long discussion of this on CNN and it was pretty fascinating. He talked in particular about Trump being an average of 22 points underwater in these two new polls. Listen.

Harry Enten (voiceover): Yeah, just how horrible are these numbers. It’s the worst this century for a president at this point in the second term when you look at an average of the CNBC and Washington Post polls. We’re talking about right here the average of CNBC and Washington Post, minus 22 points. Barack Obama was underwater, but not anywhere near this level. He was at minus eight. And George W. Bush, in the middle of the Iraq War, when that was going south, he was at minus 20 points. So at this point, Donald John Trump is in fact holding the record for the lowest net approval rating for a president in a second term at this point in the second term of any president in the twenty-first century.

Sargent: Just to recap, Trump is underwater by 22 points. Barack Obama was eight points down at around the same time in his second term, and George W. Bush was 20 points underwater. Let’s remind everyone, as you just did, that Democrats suffered huge midterm losses under both those presidents—in 2014 under Obama, and the GOP suffered pretty badly under Bush in 2006. Trump is in a worse place than either were. Your thoughts on all that?

Reynolds: Yeah, I think this is the thing that works to Democrats’ advantage right now, one of the major things. We have the right direction of the country—all of the indicators that we would look at and say, boy, this doesn’t look good for the party in power—don’t look good for the party in power, which is the Republicans. And so you have Democrats running a bit with the wind at their backs, simply because........

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