Weekly Skews - S6 Ep16: Good Skews – Congressional Retirements with Tom Schaller

Episode Date: March 27, 2026

Congressional retirements are hitting a modern record heading into the 2026 midterms, and author, political scientist, and professor Dr. Tom Schaller joins Matt to break down what it all means. More Republicans are fleeing the House than at any point in the last century — tied with Trump's own first midterm in 2018 — and historically, that's a very bad sign for the party in power. Tom and Matt dig into what the retirement wave means for Speaker Johnson's razor-thin majority, which races to watch, and why the fundamentals of 2026 look increasingly like a Democratic wave election. Plus, they get into the cracks forming inside the MAGA coalition, Trump's cratering approval numbers, and whether the dam with Trump voters is finally starting to break.This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. BetterHelp makes it easy to get matched online with a qualified therapist. Sign up and get 10%  https://www.betterhelp.com/skews This episode is sponsored by ZBiotics. Go to https://www.zbiotics.com/SKEW now. You'll get 15% off your first order when you use SKEW at checkout

I'm Matt Hildreth, and you're listening to Good Skews here on Weekly Skews. Today, I'm talking with author, political scientist, and professor, Tom Schaller. We're breaking down the record-setting wave of congressional retirements heading into the 2026 election. More members are bailing on Congress than we've seen in decades. And we discuss why this is very good news for Democrats. All right, Tom, thanks for joining me. I feel like, does anybody ever call you Dr. Schaller?

I feel like I should call you Dr. Schaller because you have a PhD and I know how hard it is to earn a PhD. A, you should not and be, not really. Like people who don't know me or random emailers will call me Dr. Schaller, but my students just call me Shaller. And I call them by their last names. I find that to be respectful but familiar. So if you were in my student, one of my classes, Matt, you would be Mr. Hildreth at the start. But by week two, you'd just be. Hildreth. Well, you just put out a piece on public notice. That's what I wanted to talk to you a little bit about. So we're going to talk a little bit about Republicans heading for the doors, which I thought was a very good headline. It gave me a little bit of joy to read through that article. But before we get into that, people might remember you from being on the main show with your book, White Rural Rage. But maybe just remind folks where you're coming to this work. You know, where'd you grow up? What got you into politics? And what you're up to now kind of.

on a daily basis. Well, my day job is college professors. We discussed at University of Maryland, Baltimore County over near BWI Airport. I've been there 28 years. And then side hustle-wise, I guess. I write books and articles and used to do a lot of blogging over the years. I started with Daily Coast and American Prospect and Salon. I worked for Nate Silver at 538 for a couple of years.

So I published just as many words, I think, outside my books is in my books at this point. I don't have an exact total, but I know it's over a million words. And I got into politics because I ran for student body president when I was an undergraduate and that gave me the taste of the political bug. I was actually a communications major as an undergrad and a political science major for my master's and doctorate. So I guess I'm using all my degrees. It's fascinating when you look at your area of interest. Am I right that you teach a class called rural politics? I taught at once. Yeah, it's not on our regular curriculum, so I taught it as a special topics class after the book came out.

I've taught some other special topics class. Like in the last 10 years, Matt, just to keep things fresh for myself, in addition to the classes I teach on a regular rotation, like the presidency, campaigns and elections and interest groups, I've created a bunch of special topics classes that I've taught once or maybe twice, like conservatism from Goldwater to Trump, rural politics. I created a class on conspiracies and disinformation and propaganda. So the rural politics came out of the book. Maybe I'll teach it again, but in the near term, no plans for that. How did the students respond to a class like that? It was good. You know, at least one of the students that I had Veronica Gunnan, she met you up in Pennsylvania.

She's from southeast Pennsylvania and grew up in rural America. And I think we had 12 students total in there. The special topics classes tend to have smaller enrollments because students are confused that you can take a special topics class 409 more than once as long as it's a different topic. So after they've already taken one, they think they can't take a different one, even though they can. So the upside of that is it's much more intimate. We had a lot of guest speakers join us, and I thought it went pretty well. You know, it's always a challenge when you're teaching a class for the first time. You feel a little less confident, of course, but I had just written a book about it, so that helped.

You were one of the guest lecturers, if I recall correctly. That's right. I think that's where I heard about it because I spoke in it, but it was Zoom. So sometimes I just get on Zooms and I don't really know who I'm talking to. But the class seemed really, really interesting. Did you have any surprises coming out of it? I mean, do you feel like this next generation of Gen Z understands rural politics similar to previous generations? I'm more of an elder millennial, but do you feel like there's a shift in how people are understanding rural politics?

There might be. I think the real challenge, as you probably know, we're not really building any new universities outside of these online campuses, which we have one, University of Maryland Global Campus or Southern New Hampshire University and this kind of stuff. And because we're not building bricks and mortar campuses anymore, because the size of the nation and the share of the people that want to go to college, have been going up. It's made it more competitive. And what we've seen, and I talk about this a lot, not in the context of rural politics per se, but when I first started there, Matt, I'd say about a third of the students in my Polly 100 classes, which is a good sort of, it's not a perfectly representative sample, but it's a pretty good general sample of the freshman sophomore class is about a third of them. We're second-gen college, about two-thirds, though, were first-gen college, them and their siblings or cousins. Now it's the other way around.

now it's like two-thirds. So we've gotten more diverse, but we've gotten more affluent. And so one of the things I do, I don't ask them about first-gen, second-gen college. I just ask them what county they're from. And what you find is that the poorest parts of Maryland, and I'm sure this is true at a lot of other flagship universities in their states, have serious under-representation. So we have almost no kids from Baltimore City. We have very few kids from the two rural, most rural parts, which is the western part of Maryland, the Pan handle that goes up and reaches out over West Virginia and the eastern shore. And typically in a class of 40 students, I'll have three, maybe four students from the seven counties, nine counties on the shore and the four counties in Western Maryland, not counting Frederick County, which is basically a bedroom county now, too, to Baltimore and D.C. Most of our students come from the wealthy, affluent suburban counties along the 95 quarter. Baltimore County, Annarundle County, Frederick County, Howard, Prince George's, and Montgomery County. I think, look, there's rural parts of even Montgomery County, an affluent county, the largest

county in the state with a million people. If you go to the western edge, just rural parts of Howard County, certainly northern Baltimore County along the Pennsylvania border, I'm sure you've driven through there. So I'm not saying those counties are entirely rural, but I think most of the students coming from there are coming from the affluent suburbs, and they don't really have a rural experience at all, many of them. And so I think that's a very, I may not be the answer you want, but that's an indirect answer to your question,

which is there's not really much exposure to it. And when they come to campus, you think, oh, well, they're going to meet people from different parts of the state. And they do, but they just meet people from different affluent suburbs in the state. Yeah. I've seen some reports out there that are probably a couple years old now, maybe pre-COVID, so you never know how it all shook out post-COVID. But they were saying that, like, one of the highest indicators that a student

would drop out of college was whether or not they came from a rural community and the rural dropout rates are just so high. And it's because the kids are dealing with, you know, obviously the challenges of going from high school to college, but then also just the cultural shift of going from a pretty rural area to much more populated area. So I know that's a huge, huge, huge challenge for folks, even if they do get in or kind of do make it. So, but interesting to see that there's a class out there on rural politics. I think that's one of the only classes that I was aware of. I've talked with other professors that do topics on rural issues,

but it was always interesting to see that you kind of went all in on it. Well, I think a lot of political science departments, I know a lot of political science departments have a state and local politics class, however it's named. And usually there'll be a piece of that because you sort of do, you know, the state legislature and the governor and you do the dynamics and demographics and the geography of the state. And so there might be one or two days.

days that focus on rural issues or rural politics or rural politicians. But there's usually not just a local politics class. And so you don't really get down to the county level. And if you don't get down to the county level, as you know, rural people are only 20% of the country, but most of the counties are rural. And every state, even very, very urbanized populated states like Maryland still have rural counties. Every state and union does. So I just think, it's an artifact of the reality that political science departments tend to have a national government class, American politics, which I teach Polly 100, and then they have a public policy class and a public management class, and then they have a state and local class, and maybe you get

a little carve out in there with a rural piece, but that's often it. Yeah, and with some of the numbers say that by 20, 40, 70% of the United States population will live in 15 states. That's right. And so when you look at the Senate. There's a huge, huge, huge influence in the Senate from rural voters. So anyway, super, it's always interesting to chat with you. But you've been, I always like talking with you, especially when it comes to what's happening in the Republican ecosystem, I think, because you understand the rural communities and you grew up in upstate New York. Is that right? That's right. Yeah. I always feel like you kind of have that insider, but also outsider perspective on DC and you just wrote a piece for public notice that I found to be really interesting.

Do you want to set that piece up for folks just who probably haven't read it yet? But they should check it out on the public notice substack. But maybe set that up and then let's dig into that a little bit. Yeah. Thanks for setting that up. The piece is entitled, geez, I just had it up here. I can't. I want to get the title correct so people can search.

House Republicans are heading for the exits. Usually you don't write your own title. So I didn't remember it because I didn't write it. and I wrote for Aaron Rupar over a public notice, as you said, and he's got a big following, so it gets a lot of traffic compared to if I just wrote it on my own substack. And what happened was about two weeks ago, now I guess it's three, I noticed something when I was teaching campaigns in elections, which was somebody had put a chart out showing that over the last hundred years, which is 50 midterms. the most retirements for the Republican Party was fast approaching this cycle. There were 30 Republican retirements announced when I put that visual up in the PowerPoint when I was teaching my campaigns in elections class.

That would be three weeks ago tomorrow or Wednesday. And I thought, boy, that's a lot. And then I looked at what year has the record. And it turns out it's Trump's first midterm, 2018, with 34. And since I pitched the piece to Aaron for public notice, four people retired on the Republican side. So it's now tied over the last 100 years, which is only 50 cycles, not 100 cycles, for the most Republican retirements with Trump's first midterm. And to be fair, as you know from reading the piece, many of those people aren't retiring from politics altogether.

Many of them, like 21 of them are running for governor or senator. And maybe they feel like, you know, it's just an opportunity because there's a senator retiring or the governor's turned out. and they would have ran anyway and they don't feel at risk. And many of these Republicans aren't, they could have run for re-election and probably won in their house seats. But you do have what, you know, people like me and pundits and sophologists, political prognostical, the thermostatic, you know, politics, which is essentially a clever word for anti-incumbent. And we know historically that since 1934, FDR's first midterm, there's only been two times that a president's party has picked up seats in a house midterm. and that was 1998 in the backlash to Gingrich because of the Clinton impeachment over Lewinsky.

And four years later, actually, they're back-to-back midterms. And that was because Bush got a huge tailwind out of 9-11 and the war. But the standard loss is, I believe, 27 seats in a midterm. So that's kind of your benchmark or baseline. I think the Democrats will come pretty close to that. Maybe they'll exceed it. They flip 40 seats in Trump's first midterm in 2018, capturing the House. And by the way, that's not an uncommon pattern.

Obama lost the house in 2010. Clinton lost the house in 1994. Biden lost the house in 2022. Trump lost it, as I already said, in 2018. And obviously he's going to lose it because they have such a thin margin. They don't even need 27 seats. So you're going to see, essentially, with the exception of Bush in 2002, because he had the advantage of that windfall from terrorism and the rally around the flag effect.

And Clinton, of course, had already lost the House in 1994, so he couldn't lose it in the second midterm there in 1998. You see historically in the sort of post-dealignment period that we're in, it's very hard for president's parties in their midterms, first or second, but usually first, to hold their majorities. And so, you know, if I had to bet the mortgage on it, I'd say the Democrats are going to be in the majority. Do you have a sense of over the last couple of years, especially when you go back to the Trump's first term? Do we expect more retirements between now and election date? Like, when is the peak retirement period? Are we through that? Or is there still time for people to retire?

Yeah, we're mostly through it only because primary season encroaches. Some of the states already have primary. Some states have them in April, May, June, right? It's up to state parties. You know, it's federalism, you know, classic example of federalism, when they have their primaries. And usually, not always, but usually candidates mostly as a courtesy of the party, if they're not going to run, announce. And also, like I said,

for those 21 of the 34 House Republicans who have already decided that they're going to run for governor or Senator, they got to run in that primary. So they need to get out or at least announce they're retiring. They're not retiring immediately. They're retiring at the end of their term. They're not resigning, I should say. But in order to run for the other primary, you have to kind of signal that you're not running for your seat again. So I don't know that there'll be another one or two or three maybe, but there might be. And if there's even one, since it's tied with 34, it's going to set the regulations. for Republicans over the last century, but not by much. I think the retirement season is mostly over. I was shocked, actually, that four Republicans retired within a week of me pitching this story

to Aaron Rupar at public notice. Talk a little bit about what this means for Speaker Johnson, like tomorrow. How is this changing his math when it comes to things like the war, when it comes to things like DHS spending and all these other issues? How are things changing for him with every retirement. Well, I think he knows he's going to lose even without the retirement advantage because there's something like 22 Democrats are retiring too. So it tends to be the out party has fewer retirements and the majority party sensing this thermostatic backlash.

If you have the presidency also, I should be clear, which the Republicans have the House and the presidency sort of running for the hills. But that doesn't mean some Democrats aren't retiring. Of course, some of them are running for Senator-Governor as well because they have what's called progressive. ambition is the political science term for leaving office to run for higher office. But I think what it means for Johnson is that he's going to have to spend more resources than he normally would. Incumbens are generally safe. They already have their own bank rules. They already have their

own fundraising networks. And so many of these states are still going to be Republican. Let's be clear about that because their districts that Trump carried by 12 were 15 or 20 points and they've been held by a Republican, maybe even before the current Republican is in them. So it's not, some of those retirements are not going to net out a flip. But when I looked at the seats that are retiring, there are more Republican retirements from competitive seats according to either Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball or Charlie Cook's Cook Political Report, not by a lot, but by a few. And so that just forces, you know, that just forces Mike Johnson and the D-Triple C chair, which is Richard Hudson from North Carolina's 9th District, who's in charge of obviously

electing and re-electing Republicans to the House. It forces them to spend time in recruiting and trying to get the right candidate there and raise money for a novice candidate, might not be a political novice, might be a state senator or a state assembly woman, in a way that an incumbent already has his or her fundraising network. They already know what messaging works. They're already a tested candidate. And so, you know, you have a situation where scarce resources have to be spent in places you'd rather not have to spend. And does it, increase primary spending as well? Well, yeah.

So a lot of the money will be spent by Republicans fighting for that seat. And that may make it, you know, that might be a little bit of a drain for people in district who are like, well, I wrote a check for 250 to my preferred Republican candidate for the nomination. And she lost. So I'm not going to write a check for the guy who just beat her. And I only had $250 budgeted anyway. So usually, though, you know, good candidates.

candidates can raise money and and that's where you know that's where the i said d triple c but i meant to r ncc i think i misspoke there the republican national campaign committee not its counterpart to d triple c so you know that's where hudson's job is to try to shore up you know weak seats and seats with open that are open seats with brand new republican nominees even if they're republican leaning seats are a little bit more risky again than running an incumbent except in battle incumbent so like gonzalez retired from texas announced his retirement he didn't resign republicans calling for him to resign because of the scandal involving his former staffer who committed suicide by burning herself to death, which is insane, and it's tragic. Obviously, not all incumbents are safe,

and he would have been in a lot of trouble. But generally speaking, all else equal, you'd rather have your incumbents running for re-election than open seats where you might get a candidate who's not fully vetted and they become the nominee and then some scandal breaks or they just can't raise the money and you've got to step in as chair of the RNCC like Hudson and fine. out of state, out of district owners to help them over the finish line. Weekly skews is brought to you by Zbiotics. Man, March out here trying to kill me socially.

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Carvana. Delivery fees may apply. And do these retirements suggest that the Republican Party's future is up for debate? Or what is the status of the Republican Party right now where Donald Trump is looking weaker and weaker and weaker? And I'm seeing just anecdotally from the people that I talk to who are Trump supporters, they're really not happy with Trump's advisors who all. happen to be people who are positioning for 2028. So, for example, most of the people that I know that voted for Donald Trump are kind of annoyed by Donald Trump, but they really hate J.D. Vance and they really hate Marco Rubio. What is happening right now in the Republican Party with so many

retirements and so many new people coming onto the stage? Do you anticipate a shift anywhere? You know, I tried to look through these retirements to see if there was like a MAGA or an anti-Maga, you know, but it's hard because even some people who privately don't like Trump and don't like the MAGA movement, you know, they have to sing the party line. So I was looking to see if like, oh, it's all the liberal Republicans who are abandoning ship in, you know, the Don Bacon, for example, in Nebraska who's been voted against Trump more than any other House Republican has been vocally critical of him. I didn't see a pattern where it's like, oh, the most moderate members of the House are like, we're out of here. And it wasn't even a pattern where it was like all the members who have a plus five Republican district that Trump barely carried and they're almost certainly going to get swept out of office. There are a few of them, of course. I think progressive ambition, to be honest, explains a lot of it. Somebody just sees like Tillis is retiring and so I'm going to run for that Senate seat or your governor's term limited and I want to run.

And this is my chance to do it. And even though it's not going to be a good Republican cycle, I'm in a red state. and I should be able to win statewide, and now's my chance to do it. So I didn't really see a MAGA or anti-Maga, and I really didn't see a moderate centrist versus, you know, hard-right ideological difference in the retirees as a class. But there were districts, obviously, that are more competitive, that are open, and I spoke about a few of them in there, including two districts in Iowa, which were marginally won by Trump that could flip, that aren't,

retirements. There's three, four seats in Iowa. The Republicans have all four of them. One of them's a retirement, Ashley Hinson, and two of them are incumbents running, and their districts are actually closer in the Harris-Trump results in district than Hinson's. And so you could have a situation where, you know, the open seat actually stays Republican and the two incumbents lose. I wrote in there, keep an, you know, a hawk eye on Iowa, because I think if the Democrats, flip two or three out of four seats in Iowa. That will be a big national story. And maybe it'll be carried to bring this full circle a little bit. Maybe it'll be defections in rural Iowa that make a difference. We'll see. Yeah, I'm wearing a Hawkeye hat right now. I know we're just doing it.

Oh, yeah, you are. I didn't even notice. But long family history in Iowa and live there for a number of years. And this year we've been looking at it for my day job. We've been looking at Iowa quite a bit. And it does seem to be a pretty fascinating story, mainly because it's the three out of the four that seem like they're at least somewhat in play. That Iowa's fourth district is very conservative. That's where Steve King was from. You know, friend of the show, J.D. Shulton, I think he's been on the show a couple times. And it ran a pretty good race in 18. But when you look at J.D. Shulton's race in 2018 versus the second race in 2020, you really see.

the power of the midterms for Democrats. It seems like in my lifetime, Democrats have moved to have more of an advantage in the midterms. I don't know if that's just the result of Trump being such a dominant force or what, but it seems like Trump did kind of bring in a lot of low propensity voters into the ecosystem who don't tend to show up in the midterms. So it does feel like that old conventional wisdom, that midterms were good for Republicans. that's pretty much shifted, I think. Or is that what's the current thinking on that?

Yes. I mean, there's some evidence on this that has nothing to do with Trump because it was starting to shift before he came around. What we know, generally speaking, holding party aside, holding race, age, I guess not occupation because it's related to class. We know that more affluent voters turn out in midterms or they turn out at a higher rate in midterms relative to people who are less affluent who only turn out for the presidential.

And so for years, it was presumed and it was correct that Republicans were advantaged in midterms because low turnout would favor them because they're the more quote unquote affluent party, you know, sort of country club Republican era. But that has shifted as the Democratic Party, for better or worse, many people write a lot about the Democrats and the white working classes. The Democrats are clearly the party of affluent suburban whites. and I think the conventional wisdom has shifted now, and there's data to suggest that this is true, that midterm election turnout now favors the Democratic Party holding all of the things constant, like whether there's an award, the state of the economy, or the inflation or unemployment rates, or how popular the president is, or even which party the president is. So in other words, this is an ideal cycle for the Democrats in the same way that 2018 was

because you have the incumbent party president historically loses in the House. that's a long-term effect. And then you have the more recent effect of Democrats having higher turnout rates in, you know, less prominent non-presidential cycles. This can apply an odd year cycles as well. But for the most part, let's talk about even-numbered midterm cycles. So those two things are moving in concert, right? Whereas, say, in 2022, they're moving in opposite directions.

You're expecting maybe a little bit of higher turnout among the more affluent whites who are high propensity voters in 2022. but then you've got incumbent Biden and you've got high inflation and people are still freaked out by COVID working against. And, of course, you know, Biden lost the House that year. So this could be, you know, in terms of like, you know, I don't want to call it perfect storm kind of stuff. But like those two factors are moving in the same direction. You've got an not just an incumbent president who's of the other party, but a very unpopular incumbent president in Trump right now, even more unpopular than he was in 2018. And they control the House and the presidency and the Democratic. Democrats should get a higher turnout rate among their base than the Republicans do.

Then you look at things like, which I didn't write about it in here, but I think I put some links in. If you look like enthusiasm levels and the generic congressional ballot, those are all, as of the least right now, favor the Democrats as well. I've seen generic congressional ballots where the Democrats are up by as much as eight, up by as little as four or five. So you split the difference and say that's a six point advantage there. That should be enough to swing a couple dozen seats at the very least. So as you're looking to this election in November, what races and is there anything that we can pull from the primary or is there any early factors that we can start seeing how real the perfect storm is? What do we know before election day in terms of managing that or monitoring that enthusiasm? Because I know one of the hardest things right now for me is to understand who's going to.

going to turn out and vote and who's not? And I say that because it looks to me, when I'm looking at some of the polling, I was just digging deep into the Marist poll. It looked like white working class voters were starting to peel off from Trump. Not a lot, but it looked like there was enough people mainly because everybody else has already kind of peeled off from Trump. But I was seeing numbers where back in mid-last year, last spring, it was like in the low 40s and now it's into I'd have to actually go back and look, but it looks like it's dropped 10, 10 points or so since last year. But what are the factors that we look at to see if this is real? Is it voter registration?

Is it, how do we start monitoring that? Well, the canary in the coal mine is usually these special elections and these odd year elections and the Democrats have done really well in them now. Some of them is just some odd open Senate Democrat or Democratic seat in some state or, you know, we saw some, you know, judicial elections. whether the Democrats want or lost, they overperformed relative to the Harris-Trump baseline. And so far, all the indicators there are like Democrats are overperforming, often by double digits. In some cases, 20 and 30 points in some of these state legislative races and county-level races. Now, I do put some stock in that. I'm a little hesitant when it comes to that because these are odd year.

They're special elections in a weird time. and people are much more familiar with November voting. So I think high turnout, high enthusiasm gets magnified in those special elections because it's really the high propensity voters who are most angry. And so that should favor the Democrats. I don't think you're going to see 25 and 30 point swings in every House district. If you see that, Mike Johnson is going to have about 100 members, right? I mean, there'll be no Republican Party in the House and they'll definitely lose the Senate.

You're not going to see 20, 25, 30 points swings like we're seeing in some of these special elections. But that still is a good bellwether or canary in the coal mine. The other thing is, in addition to the white non-college or the white working class, whether you define it by level of occupational attainment or income level, is he's really hamaging support among Latinos and younger voters and those young men. The largest gender gap in 20, 24, as you probably know, Matt, was among under 30s. It's just remarkable. I've got two nieces in that group that are 25 and 21.

And it's just remarkable how different because, you know, usually under 30 people, they're low propensity voters. They're not politically actualized yet. They haven't had a formative political experience and things like that. So, you know, you would think it'd be the smallest there. It was actually smallest among my generation, Gen X, which was the most Trump generation in terms of Trump's performance. But I was shocked at how big the gender gap was. And it was really driven by men and the sort of barren Trump. and I wrote a piece for public notice, the previous piece for Aaron Rupar about the manosphere.

So I was sort of writing about that phenomenon. The polls so far show that Trump has lost a lot of those people back, young voters, particularly men and Latinos. And here's, I mean, I don't want to speculate that this is going to happen. But, you know, the Republicans may have overplayed their hand in Texas by going after those districts. And if this is a huge wave election and they've cut their margins a little to, too thin to try to maximize the number of seats coming out of the Lone Star State, you could see a Latino shift away from Trump take down some seats that they carved as 53, 54 percent Republican majority seats, assuming that they weren't going to have this title wave against them.

So I think the biggest storyline, in addition to Tala Rico, who's doing a pretty good job, I think, with rural voters, by the way. If Tala RICO wins and the Republicans either get net zero. seats or lose net house seats in the Texas, that will be the story of the cycle. Now, I didn't predict that that's going to happen, but I do predict that will be the story of the cycle if it does happen. Yeah, I just don't even know where the public is at right now. It feels like it's so hard to gauge because there are so many fault lines that I'm seeing

just in my own friends and family in terms of foreign policy in terms of, you know, domestic policy, gas prices, kind of everything. But one of the things that I've heard a lot from family members that used to vote for Trump is, you know, this whole idea of Trump playing four-dimensional chess or this, you know, the QAnon Trump crowd, the mega crowd always would say trust the plan. And that was basically like when things got crazy, you know, just trust Trump. He's got it under control. You know, he's so smart. You could never figure this out. But nobody buys that anymore.

And it's almost like the Trump voters that I've seen in the past. that are paying attention openly mock it. And I think there's still probably a lot of Trump voters that are not paying attention. But I think especially with this war in Iran, it just, it just, I'm even seeing friends that were in the military, you know, friends I grew up in high school that were in the military kind of reach out and be like, what is going on? This is just, this is just crazy. And then you look at Christy Noem and maybe I'm over indexed on Christy Noem's news articles

because I grew up in South Dakota, but the fraud way. and abuse with this um this this this ad campaign where she's spending more money on a dhs ad featuring herself than i think was spent on um on the oscar like movies that you would put up for an oscar and just today it broke that um she spent 20 thousand dollars renting a horse which is insane uh 20 thousand dollars renting a horse uh for the the ad that she was in um and i mean $20,000 would buy you a, you know, award-winning wars and to rent it. I don't, I mean, it was, it's just crazy stuff. And it feels like it's breaking through.

And it feels like people are starting to peel away. But I can't tell if they're going to go for Democrats. It doesn't really feel like they're going to go for Democrats. These are kind of the, the big Trump folks. But I'm also seeing like, and maybe this is true for both parties, but the number of people that are registering with the political parties has gone down quite a bit. bit, hasn't it? I don't know if registration rates have fallen off since the 2024 election. I mean, we had this massive surge, as you know, in 2020. Some people think it was because of mail-in-balloting

and COVID and all that other stuff. And of course, the Trump conspiracists will never be convinced that Biden got that many votes. And people are always like, how did he get 15 more million votes? But Trump got 11 more million votes compared to 2016. And they never mentioned that part. So, yeah, Biden did get 15 more million votes than Hillary Clinton, but people were so, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were the two most hated combined candidates, opponents in terms of likeability in the history of American presidential elections at that point. Nobody wanted to vote for either of them, if we're being really honest. And so it was a low turnout election.

And, yeah, Biden got 15 million more votes than Harris, and there was a massive surge in registration. But Trump got 11 more million votes than he did himself. And you never hear that side of the story from the conspiracist. And so that was the highest turnout presidential race since 1990, 120 years. And whatever else can be said, good or bad about Trump as a person or his policy or his judgment or his sanity, like he does motivate people on both sides to turn out. And I think the open question that Republicans are really panicked about, not just in this midterm, but in 2028,

is how many of these died in the world Trumpers are just, he's suey-generous and they are. are there for him and him only, and there is no substitute for him, and they're not going to be motivated to turn out even in a presidential election in 2028 if he's not on the ballot. And so we'll see. I think that's going to be an interesting test of, like, how much does the MAGA movement, can it stand up on its own without Trump? And is it still in its infancy in a weird way, and it's going to stumble all around the living room and crap its diaper, or is it a fully formed, you know, sort of whatever,

adolescent at the very least, it's still too young to call it an adult, and it certainly doesn't act like an adult. But to your larger point, if I can just take it a little bit of, I don't want to go too far afield, I know you want to talk about elections in the midterms, I can't prove this, and there's no comparable polling to be done across time on presidents on things like, how are you handling the economy and blah, blah, blah. But like, I think the things that really register, I call them V8 moments. You remember those old VAA commercials where you can't tell these stories to my kids or these metaphors because they don't know what I'm talking about in class, where you sort of hit your health on the head, hit yourself on the forehead and said, I should, I could

have had a V8, you know? I think there's like certain issues that I call V8 politics moments. And I think when Trump tears down the ballroom, I think when Trump attacks Rob Reiner, who directed, yeah, he was a liberal, but he directed movies that people love, like a few good men. And when Harry met Sally, and he desecrates that guy, you know, two days after he's murdered. And, you know, I think people are in, and putting his name on everything and know him with the airplanes and the stuff that you're talking about, people are starting to wake up to the fact that Maybe some of the things that Democrats and liberals have been saying, which is it's all about him. This is really a vanity project.

He wanted to stay out of prison and fly on Air Force One and be in charge and I have everybody call him Mr. President. And he doesn't really care about all the people. He says he cares about one person and one person only. I think people are starting to finally see what the rest of us could see 10 years ago, that he is a vaing, glorious, narcissistic, dangerous, aging, corrupt politician who has surrounded himself with only yes, men. and yes women this time, unlike the first term. And so they're just like they're like vultures. They're picking the bones of every last dollar. It looks like they manipulate the stock markets with announcements

and there are people betting stuff on polymarket to win money hour before the war starts. And they look like they're people that are using the government to enrich themselves and name it after themselves rather than govern for the citizenry. It's a little bit unbelievable that it took all of this to get to this point. but I do feel like for a couple of years I thought nothing would shake

these Trump voters I thought they were locked in and I think I think 25, 30% are going to always be locked in but I was seeing numbers recently that he's down as far as 34% on approval

I mean and you're getting to what Nixon levels at that point to George W. Bush post Katrina after that and I think there's probably still 30% of the United States population that thinks Nixon was a good president. So I don't know if there's much lower to go than what we're seeing right now. No, I think he's down to the core, the core of the MAGA, the people who show up with those rallies

and they're wearing eight pieces of Trump garb and nothing. I mean, there are voters out there who I often joke, like Trump could eat a live baby on television and they would spend, if you asked him what they thought about it, they would just praise the virility and courage for him to keep going as the baby was screaming and crying and how tough he is for finishing off the same. second leg after the first leg. I mean, I mean, you just can't shake them from Trump, but they're not enough to win elections and they're not enough. They're enough to scare the Republican Party, though. And that's really the sad thing about the MAGA movement and the Republican Party is that Mike Johnson and everybody in that Republican House caucus that we started this conversation,

they're petrified of Trump voters. We know that they're literally petrified for their lives. We know that they voted against Biden certification and told the Washington Post and the New York Times in the Wall Street Journal, without attribution, of course, that they weren't just scared for their political electoral futures. They were scared for the lives and livelihoods and safety of themselves and their own family because they were being docks. They saw Mike Pence be threatened by people who voted for him twice and voted for him as recently as eight weeks ago calling for his head. And so there's loyalty only to Trump and they're petrified of their own voters. And you cannot have a democracy, Matt, when one party is afraid of its own voters. There's the healthy

fear like, oh, I'm afraid I'm going to get thrown out of office if I don't vote the right way. That's, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about people who are literally, you know, have Lindsey Graham, I'm told, has full-time security now. He's like, these guys are scared. They're literally scared. And they're, yeah, they'll talk tough about how the violence is coming from the left, but they know damn well that they're scared of their own side, not the other side.

Yeah, I think that's right. And I think that, um, what I've seen is, is obviously you still have a lot of that concentrated anger amongst a small group, but there's a lot of people right now that I've seen in the past that were out there on Trump in support of Trump. I think of my own neighbors that had their flags up. Those are all kind of quietly coming down. And like I said, I don't know that they vote for Democrats. I don't know that they vote, but I think they're at least over this mega Republican moment.

And I don't see them. And this was the big question that I had going back to the beginning of this year is, do people start shifting over in mass to the next 20? 28 Republican candidate, and I am not seeing that. And in fact, I think there's a lot of people right now who will say till the day they died, Donald Trump was a good president. He just surrounded himself with corrupt people. Now, obviously, I know that's a bunch of bullshit because Donald Trump is the core of it.

But from a political standpoint, if that's what they think, fine. I mean, if they think J.D. Vance is a corrupt person who sold out Trump voters to Peter Thiel, great. If they think, you know, Marco Rubio is a corrupt politician. who sold out Trump voters to promote his own foreign national, you know, his, his foreign policy agenda, fine, that they can think that. But I, I do not see anybody effectively taking over the mega mantle right now. And I do worry about some of the more shady figures in the far right. I think that they're going to, you know, there's that governor candidate in Florida that's just insane. There's, you know,

a bunch of candidates out there. But I think they are going to speak to a smaller and smaller base. And I think it's going to keep pushing the Republican Party out of step with the mainstream of the United States. And so I think there will always be Republican congressional districts out there. But I almost am feeling like those heavily gerrymandered Republican districts are going to be so much of a liability for the rest of the party that it's going to be hard for them to walk and shoot gum at the same time. It's going to be hard for Republicans in Florida to get Latino voters, for example, or Texas Republicans to get Latino voters and also have some of the open white nationalist influencers having control over the party or Stephen Miller having control over the party. So it just feels like they've built a coalition that can no longer sustain itself. Yeah, and there's a lot of rifts in the party that the Democrats didn't even create and have to, even though the Democrats, I think,

think suck at wedge politics, generally speaking, and they're terrible at playing it. But, you know, the wedge on the Israel question, I mean, you see what's happening between the sort of Tucker, Megan Kelly wing of the party and the Nick Fuente's wing of the party and the Ben Shapiro crowd. And they're at each other's throats. And it goes to your point about these Trump excuse makers who are like, oh, I love Trump, but he surround himself with the wrong people, as if he suddenly doesn't have agency. Like in one breath they're like, he's, like, He's the toughest, strongest, baddest, ombray dealmaker of all time. And then it's like, well, how does he have the Secretary of State?

Well, he appointed him. That's how he's got him. And he could fire him at any time. And so you're starting to see that to put those two points together. You're starting to see people who are saying, like, Trump is a tool of Israel, right? And, you know, as if Israel would have started this war without Trump, like, saying it's okay. They'd be crazy to have done that if Trump had said, look, you fire on Iran. We're firing on you.

And that would have ended Beebe's dreams overnight. And so people blame Mark. RICO Rubio's comment about Israel and like Trump doesn't have control over things like that. I think people can take Trump for a ride. I think he's gullible. And I think he's not particularly smart and he can be tricked into things. But it's not like he's not making these decisions. He might be making bad decisions and he might be poorly served by advice.

He's either in charge or he's not. And you can't love him for what a tough, strong, confident, take no prisoners guy he is in one breath and then say, oh, he's a victim of his staff the next breath. That's just a cop out in my view. Yeah, I think there's going to be a lot of Republicans looking for a cop out, though, I think. And I don't think it's, I mean, I don't think it's going to come down to one thing. That's the really interesting thing. I think you're right.

It's going to be the Rob Reiner. It's going to be Trump coming out and saying he's glad Mueller was, is dead. I mean, there's just, there's just things like that. And I say this, having, you know, talked a lot of voters on the doors over the years, when you ask them, and I've seen a couple of reporters in recent clips, ask this question. It's a good question. If Trump was here now, what would you tell? him. And when you frame it that way, it gives the voters the space to talk in a language that they, that's familiar to them. They get, you know, when you just talk to voters and you go

straight into the issues, you kind of shut them down because they get nervous. Like, oh, I don't really pay attention to these things. So like, I need to have a smart answer about this. I need to have a smart answer. But when you phrase a question in that way, it gives them the freedom. And most of the time what they would say is shut the hell up. And that's even going true. That's true back even into his first term where they would say, day, we like the policy platforms that you have put out there. Now, nobody could defend what the, or define what those policy platforms were. But it was sort of like, we hear on Fox News that you're a pretty good politician, but we don't really like what you're saying. And we don't like

the rhetoric that you use. I saw in the first term people were actually rural voters, are mostly who I talked to, but I think it's true across the board. A lot of voters were actually very uncomfortable about like what he would do with a reporter who had a disability. And a lot of people just really found that to be gross. And I think now that he feels like he's on the decline, people feel a little bit more comfortable criticizing him. But I feel like it's a long, like there's a, when I, when that, when that damn breaks with Trump voters, I've seen my own personal family, they go back and we'll sort of go back

and admit like, yeah, all this other stuff was crazy. I knew it was crazy. I just didn't want to admit it. So within the context of good news for our show, good skews, I think this is all positive developments. But I just want to say thanks for joining us. For those that want to follow you in your writing, where's the best place for people to track? I mean, I'm on substack, but I don't really publish under my own name. I do publish under a public notice for Aaron Rupar. So that's a good place to watch me there. And that's about it for now. You can follow me on Blue Sky or Twitter. I'm

at Shower 67 on both. But I really don't traffic in Twitter as much anymore because Elon Musk has destroyed that platform and just turned it into a Nazi fiefdom and it's the algorithms just suppress all the things you should be reading and elevate the things you should not but there are still I have a still have a lot of friends on there who swear by it in its reach and that we have to stay there and fight I think it's a futile battle I as soon as he took over I lost 20% of my followers and every post I put up gets maybe one retweet it's just absurd they clearly I put the algorithm out there to elevate Elon content and suppress everything else. But I am on Twitter.

I am on Blue Sky. And I write on Substack periodically. All right. Well, Tom, thank you so much for joining us. Great to be here, Matt. Cheers. Carvana's so easy. Just a click.

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