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“You have your own time, just go to shoppaputik.com/goodshine.”
Goodshine is on shoppaputik.com/goodshine. [Music] This is the Daily Blast from the New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I'm your host, Greg Sargent.
[Music] Donald Trump is really, really, really unpopular. This week brings a barrage of new polling that shows him tanking horribly by a whole host of different metrics. It's no accident that this comes as Trump and his propagandists are spinning wildly
to erase what everyone saw in New York on Monday night, which is that he was booed relentlessly, thunderously and mercilessly. Nobody understands better than Trump and Maga that perceptions of his unpopularity are lethal. Right now, they're feeding on themselves and driving him into a worsening downward spiral. We're parsing through all of it with Grant Wiles,
the VP of data and polling at next gen America, the youth mobilization group, which has its own polling, showing that Trump has completely lost the culture. Grant, good to have you on. Great to be here.
So Trump was at Madison Square Garden on Monday night. He was loudly booed twice.
Here's what the second one sounded like.
[Music] And here's what Trump had to say afterward about his reception. It was certainly amazing. It was loud and it was very enthusiastic. Okay, Grant numerous news accounts said he was booed.
The Times called them loud and rock us booed. The Washington Post described loud gears. The AP said he was booed loudly. But to Trump, it was great. Your reaction to all this?
“Yeah, I think we're just witnessing our president and real time experiencing the cognitive”
dissonance publicly of seeing that the vast majority of Americans simply do not like him. It's why we see many artists pulling out of the 250 event on the national lawn. He's gone from somebody who prided himself on his ability to have successful friends, who we can, you know, brag about to a situation where nobody wants to really be affiliated with him. You know, it's funny, Fox News recognizes how lethal this moment in Madison Square Garden really was.
Fox, for instance, according to Matt Gurts who flagged all this for media matters, had a Kiran up about this saying he got a quote unquote mixed reception, which is a really generous way to put it. Then Fox's Brian Kilmied said that it was mixed. "There were people cheering," he said, and he blamed the boo's on the security.
And then Fox's Lawrence Jones tried to explain away the booing by saying, quote, "You don't expect anything different from the same crowd that voted for Mamdoni. So I guess Fox's Lawrence Jones did hear the booing. What do you make of that? I think really what this means, Grant, is that Fox News really understands on a very
visceral level that the escalating perceptions of Trump's unpopularity are themselves deadly for. What do you think? Yeah, I'm just glad my paycheck doesn't rely on deluding the president into thinking that everybody likes him because it's getting increasingly difficult in this day and age.
Whenever we see anyone break with this trend or this delusion that they've conjured up for him, bad things happen to them. They lose Republican primaries, their opponents get indoors, they lose their jobs, they get replaced. Any number of things can happen to somebody who fails to prop up that delusion and
maintain it really delicately for our president.
But the reality is American people aren't so easily diluted anymore.
They know who he is.
I'll tell you, Fox News knows this as well as anyone because, for instance,
their pollster often finds pretty bad news for Trump finds pretty damning stuff about
his popularity and Trump tends to react by demanding very loudly and angly that Fox fireworks pollster. So Fox News knows that they're in this position where they have to tell the despot that his popularity is soaring that nothing that he's hearing about is on popularity is real as they did here.
“I think maybe Fox and friends, which is the morning show that I just quoted from”
really does try to puff up Trump. Maybe in a way that the polling outlet at Fox News does not. So that schism is itself kind of interesting, you know what I mean? Yeah, we know we spent a lot of time watching TV and reacting to these folks who are talking about him on TV and it's getting increasingly difficult slash impossible for them to even
spin his latest approval or favorability ratings in any way that's remotely positive. Because we've seen a study decline since he took office in 2024 and there's been almost no up to since. So let's get into some of the new polling that's just out. It's really bad for Trump. The new economist, you go of tracking poll has Trump's overall approval at 35% of Americans versus 60% who disapprove.
That's 25 points underwater. His approval on the economy is 29% to 63% disapproving on inflation.
It's 24% to 68%. So on the economy and inflation, the most important issues
to voters right now is in the 20s and on inflation, fewer than one in four Americans approve of his performance. That's bad, right?
“Yeah, I think it's important to note at the same time that just because he's down,”
doesn't mean we should take this for granted. You know, last cycle, we saw billions of dollars being poured into a PR campaign to support him and prop him up and the normalization of Trump happened at every level of the ballot where people felt like, you know, maybe he's a business man, the economy is an issue. We should potentially trust this person.
And they've even though we've seen since that that has been proven wildly false and to not be a good idea, it doesn't mean that once their Republicans spin up their machine again, you know, they won't have a lot of forces naturally working on their behalf again. So from our perspective, we want to make sure that we make sure that people
actually vote and they have the ability to vote and are equipped to vote understand how and that we can turn this disapproval of dissatisfaction with the administration into tangible election results. Just to build on what you're saying a little bit, there's tremendous institutional investment in propping up Trump, basically.
Fox News is an enormous organization. It's an enormous propaganda outlet. There's going to be hundreds and hundreds of millions spent maybe a
billion dollars by outside groups between now and election day,
trying to push up those numbers, trying to take the edge off as disapproval. So yes, there's a whole enormous barrage coming that's going to be designed to just drown out all this stuff we're seeing. That said, these numbers are very bad. And I guess it's on Democrats to make sure that those perceptions of
“Trump actually stick through the through election, right?”
Yeah, and more importantly, I think Trump and Republicans have seen how unpopular they are and they're laying the groundwork to actually rig these elections through voter suppression, the Save America Act, the newest version of the Save Act, you know, the Supreme Court ripping up the voting rights act, you know, in the power of black voters and through redistricting and
jerrymandering to them voter participation itself is an act of resistance. You know, we've looked at circles analysis of what the Save Act would do. And it would target the main ways young people read a show to vote, which is 70% of them read a show to DMV or online. Young people move twice as often as other demographics and less than half of
them have passports. So it's a very considered effort to restrict the voting rights and eligibility of young people in this country. And it's just one of many things we're focused on, addiction. I think it's worth just saying here that this effort to suppress the vote of young people is really telling in one sense.
The inroads that Donald Trump made with young voters in 2024 was one of his big success stories. It was one of the Republican parties, a bigger public opinion and political success stories of the last, I don't know, a couple decades. It was a really big deal. And it led to a whole lot of talk out there about how a new coalition
was coming into being behind this new working class, Trumpified Republican Party. And so now all the data shows us that
Every last little bit of his gains among young people is just
gone. Every last little bit's just gone. And so now they're at the
“point where they're coming up with new ways to suppress the vote of young”
people. And Trump is furiously raging at Republicans demanding that they pass this voter suppression thing in time to save them for the midterms. That alone is a big story and tells us a lot. Yeah, I mean, we looked at yells poll that they conducted in the spring. But every demographic on the generic ballot between last fall
on this spring and every single demographic has shifted on the generic ballot towards Democrats through significant numbers often. Granted, there are the least gains among the youngest parts of the electorate, specifically the 18 to 22 ranges. But there are massive gains in the 23 to 29 and 34 ranges. And we're seeing that
reflected across the space. Right. So you're basically talking here about really big gains for Democrats among some of these young voter groups. I just want to return to some of the polling. The economist, you've tracking poll that I mentioned earlier, we should note here is not an outlier. A new Reuters survey also has
Trump's approval of 35 percent. The New York Times average of
polls, which is pretty conservative and takes a lot of data in hasn't at 38 percent. That's really bad, especially for a polling average. He's probably in the mid 30s. He's now at the very least. He's firmly in the 30s now, right? Yeah, there's no doubt about it. We did analysis of all of the polls in 2025 that we could possibly get our hands on
and found similar information. His polling averages have been trending down the entire time. He's been in office. There's no sign of stopping at this rate. And he continues to do things that are deeply unpopular with the American public and very little to actually benefit them if anything. So people are wise to that. They know that economic situation is tough.
They're experiencing it. We just conducted focus groups and young people were saying, you know, just how difficult life has been from economic standpoint and just culturally. You know, one person said, Trump ruined my high school years, ruined my college years and now is ruining the rest of my 20s. And that is emblematic of how young people are feeling when a lot of them
didn't really know much about him until the 2016 election, even though he was quite normalized at the time, they've come a long way in their journey on
“an experiencing what life is like under Trump. And for them, it's economic”
anxiety. Well, I'll tell you what, what I think you're getting at there is the degree to which Trump is this kind of malevolent, destructive force in American life at this point. And I want to close on that.
First, I just want to talk about an interesting new poll from the argument
substact what they did is look at Trump's net approval state by state. I'm just going to cite a few examples. Trump is eight points underwater in Ohio, eight points underwater in Iowa, 10 points underwater in Texas, 18 points underwater in North Carolina. Those are all states. Trump won. And those all states with serious Senate races in them. Now, of course,
winning in those states for Democrats will be very hard, but still, Trump now looks like a truly big drag on Republicans in all these places. Again, places that are pretty red, you're thoughts on that? Yeah, I mean, Republicans are in the really unfortunate situation of having to defend the president's record while himself not being on the ballot.
You know, we've seen that he often is the driving force of a lot of new Republican voters to the polls. But when he's not on the ballot, like you saw in 2018 and 2022, the Republicans that are have to deal with the consequences and defending his horrible record. So as you pointed out, you know, there's he's underwater disapproval rise in those states.
Even when you look at the same data that folks are referencing on the generic ballot, you'll see that there are really tight races in Texas in Ohio. This is not a pipe dream. Like Texas is very much in play this year. And this is a real election with a strong candidate and Trump decided to
intervene at the last second to put PACS in up. And being someone from Texas,
I think that's a horrible idea. They're going to regret this decision. Well, speaking of the Texas Senate race, there is a new poll this week, a new independent poll from the Texas Pulse that finds James Teleri go the Democrat three points ahead of state attorney general Ken Paxton, the Republican. It's 47% to 44% with Teleri going the lead.
Now, nobody's going to pretend here that Texas is easy. A shit-tum of stuff can still go wrong. It's an incredibly hard state to win.
“But I think it's probably worth focusing a little bit on what you just said,”
which is that if Texas is going to be win-able,
It's because of Trump in two ways, right?
And number two, Trump forced Republicans to nominate Ken Paxton who is absolutely a weaker candidate in just about every conceivable way than incumbent Senator John corn in this.
“So there you have Trump's toxicity really kind of represented in two dimensions, don't you?”
Yeah, and you also have a candidate who's even more improperly than Trump, believe it or not,
Ken Paxton, as a very low provoking, he is as a million issues as a candidate, and
that's even before you take into account that he's on the hook for defending Trump's record, you know? It's it's going to be a very tough race for them. It's going to be a very tough race for us, but I feel much better with Teleri Co as a candidate than I do as Paxton. Okay, well, I want to close on this point that you made earlier. Next, Gen America, your group recently released some research. I want to focus on one of your findings,
which was that you found highly negative views of Trump as a person and as a cultural phenomenon, with many discussing Trump as someone who's really wrecked our political and social life. Can you describe those findings? They seem to me to get at that point. I raised the little earlier that he's really this kind of malicious and profoundly destructive force in American life right now.
“I think that that is really what we're seeing in some of these public displays of rejection of”
him and so forth. What did you find on that front? Yeah, one of the most striking takeaways I had from that focus group that we just ran with Tulsh and research, you know, they were Bernie's poster in 2020, a really highly respected poster in the space. We found that Trump's brand is so damaged, compared to the last time we talked to young people. He's not getting the same benefit of the doubt or credibility as a businessman as he was at the start of his term or in 2024. You know,
young voters have fully seen who he is and they don't like it. You know, one of them called
him quote a malignant narcissist who is out for himself and the powerful and in both the groups
we ran for young men and young women. You know, they were asked for gut reactions to Trump, you know, they offered up words like horrible infuriating, predatory, criminal and egotistical
“loser, con man, cult leader, the list goes on, but there was pretty much uniform agreement that,”
you know, he's had a really negative effect both on the culture of this country and on the policies that affect their daily lives, specifically regarding the economy. Amazing stuff, you made a point earlier, I just want to really finish out on, which is there's almost like a double whammy effect here. On the one hand, Donald Trump's not on the ballot in this false midterms, which means he's not going to be seriously getting out that sort of low information, low engagement voter that really only
Donald Trump can get. It seems like he may be the only figure in American life who's really able to mobilize those constituencies on that kind of level with that kind of juice. So you have that on the one hand, he's not there bringing out those own voters yet at the same time because of the structural ways in which midterm elections work, his increasing toxicity, his increasing unpopularity, his disastrous policies are weighing down on the party in power because in midterms,
what happens is voters turn out against the party in power. And so it's like a too layered effect here of Trump toxicity in a way, isn't it? You know, we've seen this pattern in presidential years where democratic support is often overestimated, you know, in addition to sort of the margin of error effects, we saw polls consistently finding Democrats doing better than they actually did. We call that polling error. And when you look at the midterm elections, you know, 2018, 2022,
we saw the opposite happen where Republicans were getting overestimated on the congressional ballot. So it's very possible that this trend continues in 2026 and that Democrats are actually stronger than they look in reality on these polls. But, you know, we're not taking anything for granted. We want to make sure that they are people are equipped to vote. They know how to vote. You know, they're right-supported and very harmful legislation like to save America act.
You know, never gets past. I'll say, Grant, while that the pieces are all in place here
to win a really tremendous midterm victory, but the forces arrayed against that happening are going to be considerable. We're talking about a billion dollars and an enormous crush of voters suppression and God knows what they're going to try to do with the military and ice. Bottom line is it's not going to be easy even though Trump is an utter disaster for his party.
Grant, while it's awesome to talk to you.
Thanks for having me.
