I mean, what's happened if you look at the party ID and what's called the generic ballot, the whole battlefield has shifted between 7 and 12 points towards the Democrats.
And historically, when that happens in an off year like this, it means the party has a very good, you know, us, the party that had that kind of shift towards us, would have a very good midterm election.
And I think that, you know, Trump is now facing both incredible levels of unpopularity, but what's more important for the Republican candidates in the Republican Party is that his agenda is more unpopular than he is.
And they have to run on that agenda.
They just tried to run on that agenda all across the country and failed.
And so I do think the Republicans are in trouble now.
Well, what he's done as president, the economic agenda that has slowed the economy and raised our prices, the attempt to gut health care, raising electricity prices, throwing people into foreign gulags and trampling our civil rights and civil liberties, the broad agenda that has done enormous harm to the country and to the American people was roundly rejected.
I will tell you, as somebody who's been doing this a long time, right, this is like my 16th or 17th election cycle since I came to Washington.
Well, and in Maine, we had a ballot initiative the Republicans brought to limit voting.
That won by over 20 points.
The retention races in Pennsylvania for the three Supreme Court justices, which was heavily contested by the Republicans, we won by more than 20 points.
You know, the candidate in Miami mayor, where we haven't had a Democratic win since the 1990s, you know, won more votes in his leading going into the runoff in December.
These were huge margins.
The California vote, right, was over 20 points.
And you just don't see 20, 25-point victories like that on things where Republicans contested it, right?
These weren't things that were sort of willy-nilly that they weren't fighting.
And so I think for anybody who is being honest about the data, Democrats performed at the very upper end of what was possible for us in this election, meaning we didn't just win, but we won big, and it was a clear repudiation of Trump and his policies.
If you've got a question on the future of the Democratic Party, a question for our guest, Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist, you can start calling in now.
The lines are by party.
So Democrats are on 202, 748, 8,000.
Republicans, 202, 748, 8001.
And Independents, 202, 748, 8,002.
So exit polling, ABC News exit polling in Virginia shows that the most important issue was affordability and cost of living.
I know you can't speak for Republicans, but do you think that they just missed that, that that is so important to voters and that they didn't emphasize that enough?
No, I think that, look, the problem they have is that Donald Trump has made things worse for everybody.
And when I think about, if I were a Republican, they have to defend the indefensible.
They have to defend the tariffs that have raised our prices and slowed the economy and created large deficits in America.
They have to defend the health care cuts that are going to make health care more expensive and people are going to lose their care.
They have to defend raising electricity costs.
I mean, one of the most interesting polls that I've seen the last few days, a little bit of data, is that when you ask people what costs are rising and what's causing them pain, number one is groceries, but number two is electricity costs.
I mean, I think this is a much bigger issue that people haven't really settled on.
And electricity costs are rising because of Republicans and the big, ugly bill that they passed earlier this year.
So the reason I think that we did so well is that Republicans have actually made the lives of people worse.
And in the grand scheme of this business, this was not a hard argument to make.
Things have gotten more expensive because of their policies.
And Donald Trump, that was his central promise that he betrayed to the American people.
He said he was going to lower costs.
They've gone up, and I think they've paid a big price for it.
We have Democrats running in individual races just like we had all across the country, and voters will be able to make up their mind based on the Democrats and Republicans that are in those races.
I mean, look at the agenda that Democrats are pursuing in the House and Senate, what Mikey Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger ran on, what our candidates all across the country ran on.
Yeah, I mean, New York is a very unique place.
I'm from there.
I grew up, I was born in New York.
My family, both of my parents grew up there.
New York's got its own dynamic.
And I think what happened in this election is that candidates who fit their districts and fit their states won.
And I think the diversity of the Democratic Party is our strength.
I mean, a healthy party is one that has diverse voices and has strong internal debates about the future.
I think that's what we're having now.
And I think it's a sign of health for us, not a sign of weakness.
I want to get to calls, but I want to ask you about the shutdown, the impact the shutdown had on the election, and what impact you think the results will have.
Well, I agree with Donald Trump that the shutdown had a big impact on what happened.
And I think it did in two ways.
I think one is that Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer showed that they were going to fight.
And I think for Democrats, that fight, the fact that we were fighting Trump more aggressively, was a motivator for us in this election all across the country.
The second thing is the polling data is very clear.
I mean, people blame the Republicans much more for the shutdown than the Democrats.
And so I think that Trump's assessment that the shutdown contributed to their losses was correct.
I mean, we have, this is our best election since 2020.
You know, we've had some, we had a tough election last year, a year ago.
We've been on the losing side of these things.
But, you know, I'll tell you, as somebody who's been involved in these elections for a long time and been on both sides of waves and been on winning presidential campaigns and been on losing ones, is that this was an earthquake election for the Republicans.
And any attempt to sort of mitigate, to sort of pretend otherwise and sort of look away means that they're not paying attention to what the message the voters just sent them of this discontent against.
I wanted to make the point that what goes on in one county in one state doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to be the same in every county and in all the states.
I think the direction the Democratic Party needs to go is more of a diffuse policy.
The old saying is, all races are local.
And I guess I'm making that point.
And it just seems to me like we want to attach too much importance to the outcome of one particular election in one particular place.
And I think we do that as a country, not only as a party, for that matter.
Going back to New Jersey, which you know the Republicans were very optimistic about, Mikey Sherrill not only did much better than Kamala Harris, but Jack Chitterelli did far worse than he did four years ago.
So, you know, they fell backwards in New Jersey from where they were in 2021.
This is why it's a blue state.
But their candidate who they rallied behind, and I think if you're a Republican candidate across the country right now, you have to be worried about 2026 because Donald Trump did not campaign for these candidates.
He didn't campaign.
And, you know, he could have gone to various red parts of the country in the last few weeks and been out there making the case.
I think they should have spent, he's got $500 million or whatever it is in a bank account, a political bank account.
He should have spent $10 million in Virginia and New Jersey to show that he was the leader of the party and fighting for his candidates.
And what he did is he threw him overboard.
And so for all these people who are running in 2026 as a Republican, and you're wondering whether or not you can run on this awful agenda that's deeply unpopular, that people fail to be successful all across the country.
And now you're wondering whether Donald Trump is really going to show up for you because he didn't show up for the Republicans in 2025.
And as somebody who's been around a long time, I think the White House made an enormous error by not looking like they were trying and that he was out there fighting for Republicans as they went into battle.
Of course, but I think that in this town where people read body language and sort of know things, I think there's probably a big concern about whether or not he's going to take care of me.
I mean, look what's happened in California, the redistricting that happened in California.
A bunch of Republican congressmen's political careers are over now because of Donald Trump.
And so, you know, he's got very small majorities in the House and the Senate.
And the question is: you know, can they only lose three seats in the Senate on any vote?
I mean, three votes.
They lost the tariff vote three times last week.
We started seeing enormous cracks in his congressional coalition.
The cracks in the House are so severe that they've had to keep the House out for most of the last three months because they've lost ideological control of the House.
And I think now the question of whether or not Donald Trump can maintain this kind of congressional loyalty that he's had, given now that his agenda has proven to be unpopular and Republicans got mowed down all over the country, I think it's going to weaken his control over Congress itself.
And this is going to be very important for the coming budget negotiations.
My question is: now, with Mondani being elected and being a socialist and, you know, how the Democrat Party feels about that, also, the Democrat Party seems to like anything that is anti-Republican.
As far as Mandani or the New Jersey Attorney General race, look at the they elected a guy that threatened to kill, wanted, fantasized about killing Republicans and their children.
Now, to me, that's the Democrat Party gone kind of crazy.
As a Republican, I would vote for the best person.
If you're a Democrat and you say the right things and you're going that way, and your Republicans are not offering it, I'm going to go to Democrat.
But what I see the Democrats doing now is the juice they have drank has just turned them all, I guess, crazy.
I mean, one thing that's interesting just from the calls today is that we had Democrats won all over the country, right?
We won in places like Ohio and Texas.
We won in Mississippi.
We won in all across Pennsylvania.
There were thousands of elections.
Focusing on one election in a broad, diverse country like this and making it somehow the symbol of the party is absurd on its face.
I'm just going to say this, right?
It was a single election.
We had moderate centrist candidates win in New Jersey and in Virginia by much bigger margins than Mamdani won in New York, for example.
And so this attempt to sort of paint us with a brush from a single candidate, I think, is incredibly dishonest and is not going to fly with voters.
People are going to make up their own minds, as the caller just said, about each individual candidate running in their district.
And I think the second thing I just wanted to say is that, you know, I'm very proud that in the last few weeks, Democrats have actually worked with Republicans.
I mean, we had a big moment last week where Democrats and Republicans came together in the Senate to repeal and voted three times to repeal Trump's terrible tariffs, as I call them.
So we're not always attacking Republicans.
We can work with Republicans.
The other way we worked with Republicans recently is that we voted to release the Epstein files in the House at the end of July, right?
There was a bipartisan effort to release the Epstein files.
The Department of Justice has continued to not follow through the vote that happened and not produce the information they're required by law to produce to the House.
So Democrats can work with Republicans, and I hope that we can work together, for example, in the next few weeks to restore the ACA subsidy cut.
There's this kind of negotiations happening now to say, look, let's go ahead and open the government, and then the Senate's going to promise a vote on the ACA.
But Donald Trump told the Republican Party yesterday they lost the elections because they've mishandled the government shutdown, which I think is actually true.
And so I think that we are in negotiations now.
Look, Republicans control Washington.
This notion that somehow Democrats shut the government down is absurd.
First and foremost, let's understand that the Republicans passed a big, beautiful bill by themselves.
And Donald Trump has refused to even let go of funds that were already authorized.
So we're dealing with a liar to begin with.
And there's no assurance that he won't continue to withhold funds.
But my call is more concerned about what's happening in the school board elections.
In Bucks County, Pennsylvania, considered ground zero for right-wing groups, okay?
Democrats flipped control of both boards in 2023.
And on Tuesday, they ousted every Republican from both of these boards except for one.
The Penbridge School Board is now eight to one with Democratic members in control.
The Central Buck School Board is nine to zero.
In Washington State, all four conservatives on the Douglas County School Board were up for reelection, and progressive candidates were leading in all these races.
And Ernest, what do you think that means?
Well, to think that this is just a little bit of a tremor for the Republican Party is outrageous.
I mean, I think that it's been hard, I think, in the aftermath of this election to sort of see the total scope of the victory.
But anecdotally, and from friends of mine around the country, there were these kinds of school board races and mayor's races and local city council races all across the country.
And Democrats routed Republicans in Republican areas.
I mean, this is the point.
Like, Republicans were unseated.
This wasn't just Democrats electing more Democrats.
And the way that we flipped the Virginia governor's race and the Attorney General race, there were lots of flips all over the country.
I mean, in Texas, we flipped a bunch of, we won a bunch of seats.
We didn't think we were going to win.
So this was a wave.
And as you know from other guests you've had on and through history, that when a political party in this first year after the presidential election goes through a wave election like this, usually what happens next is another wave that happens and comes in the next one against them.
And, you know, if the election has shifted, if the electorate has shifted seven to 12 points towards the Democrats, that means there are a lot of Republican candidates who thought they were going to be safe that are now going to have to be in competitive races.
It means the Senate is actually, I think, going to be in play for us.
I'm not going to tell you we're going to win it, but I think it's certainly going to be competitive.
And the chance of us winning the House back has grown very dramatically in the last few weeks.