Midterm campaigning enters home stretch

The midterm elections are well underway. According to the University of Florida's Election Lab, 22 million people have already cast ballots. Shout out to any listener who has that level of punctuality. I aspire to it. Today, in our weekly roundup, we're unpacking election stories from Ohio, Michigan, and more. Let's get into it. It's the MPR Politics Podcast. I'm Miles Parks, I cover voting. I'm Dominican Montanero, Senior Political Editor, and Correspondent. And I'm Mara Liesen, Senior National Political Correspondent. And we're going to dive into a bunch of the political stories we have not had a chance to dive into yet on the podcast this week. Dominican, I want to start with President Trump and his travels. So he's been going to a lot of places that are traditionally Republican states. Nebraska, South Carolina, Kentucky, for instance. Obviously incumbent presidents always campaign for their party at a midterm, but have you taken away anything from the places that he has chosen to go? Yeah, I mean, the White House's theory of the case here is that Trump needs to be able to be out there to help Republicans boost their floor with other Republicans, because it's a midterm year. And they've got to be able to have Republicans go out and vote, because the opposition party is usually the ones the most fired up in a midterm. You see a 30% drop in overall turnout. Only 42% of registered voters on average since 1992 even show up to vote at all. So getting the floor up for the people that Trump can turn out is where the White House sees this as important. The problem for the White House and for Trump is when he says things like vote like I'm on the ballot, you know, he's not technically on the ballot. But when you're saying that to people, that's making the election about him. And he has record low approval ratings across both terms. 61% disapprove in the average of the polls. That's the highest ever for Trump across both terms. So that makes him really toxic in swing states, in swing districts with independence and with Latinos right now. Donald Trump has never shown much interest in reaching out to independent voters or swing voters. He is a base politician. And his strategy now is since he's pretty much given up on independence or converting Democrats. He's not a persuasion politician. He's a motivation politician. And he wants to gin up the base. He's relying on something that sociologists call negative partisanship. It's one of the biggest motivators of voter behavior. People go into the booth and they cast a vote to stop someone from being elected, not because they're thrilled with the person that they're voting for. And Domenico talked about his low approval ratings. He is down to the bare metal base of the Republican Party. I don't know if any Republican can go lower than 35% that is the core base of the Republican Party. And the other problem for him, because he's told people vote as if I'm on the ballot, pretend I'm on the ballot. Democrats are taking him at his word. He is a turnout machine for both parties, for people who like him, the mega base, and for people who are really angry at him. Democrats independence. I mean, do you see this decision to go to red states also as a sort of inherent recognition from the president and from Republicans that some of these states that we're not traditionally competitive are looking more competitive as well? Absolutely. We're looking at Alaska, Texas, Kansas, Ohio, and Iowa. All the places Trump is in, the places you outlined, then those five toss up Senate races, which by the way, Democrats are probably enough to win a majority of those Senate races to be able to win the Senate. He won by an average of 13 percentage points in 2024 in the presidential election. What's notable about that is Democrats overperformed in special elections. And on average, since Trump was sworn in for that second term, by guess what? 13 percentage points. So that's why you're seeing with the national mood and environment the way it is and the way Democrats have performed these races being toss-ups. That also tells you why these are very tough races for Democrats to win, even though they've gotten them into the toss-up territory, because they're just so red. There are so few independence and Democratic voters to to gin up in those places. Their Democrats are going to have to be persuasion politicians, not just motivators. They are going to have to convince Republican voters in those red states not just to stay home, but to cross the aisle and cast a vote for a Democrat. Right. And that is one of the structural limitations that Democrats have in both the House and the Senate. Because when you look at the competitive House races, for example, about 90% of them were places that Trump won also. So when you're looking at that and you're trying to think about the strategy for winning in those places, yeah, it makes sense then to have Trump go to a lot of red places to try to get more Republicans out. Because when you're trying to fight in those places, there are a lot of Republicans there that Trump can turn out. I want to switch gears here and talk about the polls, Dominico, which I feel like the moment I say that your ears probably just perk up. You get all warm inside and fuzzy. Or I cringe because I have to listen to people misinterpret them. There was a controversy this week in Michigan, where it was revealed that a poll that came out earlier this year that was polling for the Michigan Democratic U.S. Senate primary came from a firm that was not real. That essentially it was fake. Can you walk us through what happened here? It was a group called Wedgewood polling, not an organization that those of us who've covered polling for a long time have ever heard of. And one of the places that they supposedly pulled, that they didn't poll in because they were fake, but they've released results in, was in Michigan. And one of the candidates in that race, in fact, said that one of the factors in her decision to drop out of that Senate race was a fake poll. Now we know fake poll to show her behind. And this reminds me of what happened in Wisconsin and Los Angeles with another group that also was posting results online. That weren't real results that were never conducted. You never interviewed any voters, completely fake. And websites that, you know, try to look at these things, try to figure out whether or not these organizations are real. We're asking questions. You're asking for transparency. You're trying to figure out whether or not you know how they conduct their polls, who they interviewed. The jig was up. Essentially they had to admit that they weren't real that the polls were fake. And then they tried to say that these were experiments to show that it's possible to have fake polls. You know, I don't know. That seems like a fake response. You know, the reason this is really tragic for American democracy is because there are real serious pollsters out there trying to do a good job, trying to understand which is the correct model. What is the electorate going to look like? Then you have this game of polling, you know, fake polls. It's just like all that disinformation and misinformation. The couple cycles ago, we had the polling environment flooded with partisan polls, mostly Republican leaning polls because they wanted to affect the averages, because a lot of websites produce polling averages, which they think gives you a better idea of the electorate. And that was also became part of the game of polling. I think it's really unfortunate, along with super negative campaign ads and campaign messages, all it does is further destroy the voters' faith in American politics. Yeah, and there's a lot of cynicism around polling, and I think that this makes it even worse, and really by no fault of the people who are conducting good, rigorous public opinion research. And I have to say, you hear us talk about polls. You'll hear me talk about polls a lot and data, but you very rarely hear me talking about specific leads. That's because in a lot of these places, the races are close, there's margins of error, and all you need to know is that the races are close, and we don't know what's going to happen on election day. What's really much more interesting are the numbers below the surface that can tell us a story about why people feel the way they do. All right, let's take a quick break more in just a moment. And we're back. And before we get into this next story, I just want to say we'll be talking about the sexual abuse of minors in this part of the pod. We're going to talk about Ohio and the Ohio governor's race, where Republican Vivec Ramaswami's campaign released an ad featuring the estranged mother of his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton. In this ad, Acton's mother says Ohio voters can't trust Acton because she's a liar, but Amy Acton was removed from her mother's custody when she was 12 years old after her stepfather was indicted on charges of sexually assaulting her. Her mother, though, denies that that happened and remained married to Acton's stepfather until he died in the early 2000s. Acton herself has said she hasn't spoken to her mother in roughly 50 years. Dominico, a lot to unpack here, but this is an ad that has got condemnation from both Republicans and Democrats, right? Yeah, it's really been one of those ads that has sparked a lot of controversy here. You've had a lot of Republicans like Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, Ohio Senator John Heustead, who's running for re-election. They both said that they think that this ad was a mistake that it should never have been run. Now, the vice president of the United States, JD Vance, who's a former Ohio senator, said that Republicans should stop quote unquote whining and try to win the election. Donald Trump, the president of the United States, came out and said that this is a great ad, something that he thinks should be run and that people should be thankful that this ad is out there, which is not something I think we should be really surprised by, given Trump's history and the kinds of tactics he's used, the kind of language that he's used. But it's one of those things that you rarely see split the Republican Party in this kind of way in the Trump era. You're even hearing Republican strategists who are saying who generally do tend to side with Trump and the administration, not the sort of never Trump strategist, saying, you know, this is not whining, it's a warning. I heard one of the strategists say, so you know, it's one of those things. I think it's going to be really interesting to see how this winds up playing and being interpreted. In the state, you know, the Vivek Ramaswani himself, his campaign, that put this ad out. He said that he feels that they add his legitimate because it plays into a pattern of lying as he sees it. And that, by the way, acting ran an ad that he felt was slanderous toward him so the media has a double standard. So when those strategists talk about a warning instead of whining, what they're warning about is that this ad could backfire. And I think in a lot of ways, the controversy about this ad is like a metaphor for the whole campaign because Republicans have to resort to this kind of attack because they're struggling so much in red states like Ohio. But at the same time, because Trump has become so toxic, Republicans, some Republicans are more willing to break with him and criticize him, whether it's on the Iran War, on tariffs. You see that in Michigan or now on this extremely controversial ad. I still find myself a little bit shocked though that this would be something that a campaign would even consider touching, considering I feel like sexual violence is one of those things that is nonpartisan. It feels bipartisan. We saw this with a political energy around the Epstein files in the last couple of years. I mean, are you both surprised at all that the campaign would even consider an ad like this? No, not at all. I mean, look, we're in the access Hollywood era where nothing is off base. And you had the President of the United States who said during his first campaign, he could grab women by the genitals. I mean, most of the operatives I've talked to interpret this as a desperation move by Ramaswami. And this is what politicians resort to when they're worried about losing. Yeah. And I will say that, you know, there's a couple of reasons for why the Ramaswami campaign would try almost anything to try and win. Number one is because Ramaswami's negative ratings are worse than Amy Acton's negative ratings in Ohio. And Ramaswami's very well known. Remember, this is somebody who ran for President in 2024. So he built his profile up. That's why he was even able to get in this race in the first place. He has high name ID. He's got lots of money. So he was able to run that kind of a campaign. The problem is when you're a net negative favorability rating. And the person you're running against is winning in the polls and beating you in how people think about them, the only option you have to win and this is cynical, but it's the reality in politics is to try to drag the other person down into the gutter with you and make them less liked than even you are. And that can take some really, really, really dirty stuff. And that's what we're seeing in this campaign right now. And just don't forget, we're talking about a super red state, Ohio, with a candidate, Vivek Ramaswami, who is a billionaire and is self-funding. I mean, for him to find himself in this situation shows you what an unusual midterm election we're going through. All right. That's a good place to leave it. We'll come back with "Can't Let It Go." And we're back. And it's time now for "Can't Let It Go." The part of the show where we talk about the things from the week we just cannot stop thinking about politics or otherwise. Maura, get us started. Okay. What I can't let go this week is a story in the New York Times about some ads attacking main Democratic Senate candidate, Troy Jackson, popped up in Portland, as in Portland, Oregon. Not Portland, Maine. A Republican super PAC got all confused and spent $25,900 on a YouTube ad attacking Jackson. That happens in the craziness of a campaign, but they wasted a lot of money. But then what made it even more incredible to me is a friend of mine said, "I was just in Ashland, Oregon, and I'm seeing ads for James Tallerico. Maybe they thought they were trying to run them in Ashland, Texas. But no, they were doing it on purpose, unlike the anti-Troy Jackson ads. They were running it to boost his national name recognition and drive out of state grassroots fundraising. So just in terms of a little lesson for our devoted political junkie listeners, if you see an ad for a candidate in your state and he's not running in your state, you know he's really trying to get you to give him some money. Same thing if you see candidates appearing on tons of national news shows, CNN, et cetera, instead of sticking to their knitting and staying on their home state news programs, same reason they want to raise money. I kind of feel bad for those voters in those other places. They're like, I specifically picked a non-swing state so I didn't have to see presidential ads or candidate ads and they're still fighting. Sorry, no, sorry. We would have really mixed things up if they were advertising in Portland, Texas. Is that a place? Which is a place. It is a place. And there are not a big place, but it's a place. Texas is one of those places that has a lot of cities named after other places. Dominica, what can't you like of? I'm going to take it outside of politics for a minute and talk about the painting, the Starry Night painting that everybody knows by Vincent Van Gogh, right? And what's notable about this, and there's an interesting story from the Associated Press about how there's been this sort of quest to go and find the actual sky that he had painted from which night that was, which Starry Night exactly this was. But art historians have thought that they dated this back to June of 1889, some night while Van Gogh was staring out the window of an insane asylum that he was after cutting his ear. As we know famously, after an argument with the French painter Paul Gauguin. But another team, led by a South Korean telescope maker, now believes that they have pinned it to the night specifically around July 22nd, 1889, which is just fascinating to think that they could even try to narrow down based on what the skies looked like from that angle. What an amazing kind of job that is in the first place to even try and go into that. What a peaceful existence. I will say though, this is not quite solved, it appears, because there was a physicist who has looked at this and he basically replied in the story still, I would see the July date as an intriguing hypothesis rather than a settled answer. All right, noted. From my cant let it go this week, honestly, same cant let it go that I did two weeks ago, because my baseball team is still alive. And until the Tampa Bay rays have been eliminated from the majorly baseball playoffs, they are all I cannot let go of. They play in the World Series tonight against the Milwaukee Brewers, and the reason I bring it up today on the podcast, I had an interesting conversation with my wife this morning about, if the rays do win the World Series, and this has been my favorite sports team, I have been following pretty much every game, close to every game for the last 25 years, and I ask the question, if they win, do we think I am going to cry? Like I have never cried from a sports experience in my entire life, and I just started thinking about it, I shouldn't even let myself get that excited or get that far ahead, but I did have the thought. I was like, and her response was, man, an election season, you're pretty fragile, I could totally see it happening. Are you kidding me, you're on the cusp of crying right now, of course you're going to cry. I would cry, if the Mets ever won the World Series, there's no doubt about it, there would be tears streaming for my face, but it's probably never going to happen, so I don't have to worry about it. All right, so you guys both think I'm going to cry? Up? A hundred percent, but let's get there first. All right, let's get there. All right, let's leave it there for today. Before we go, a reminder that new episodes of the MPR Politics podcast come out every week day afternoon, usually between four or five PM Eastern time, and the best way to make sure you get all of those episodes as soon as they're available is to follow this podcast. On Apple, that means looking for the big plus sign on our show page, on Spotify and on the MPR app, there's a big follow button that you can hit. Make sure you have the latest development, whether you're walking your dog, washing the dishes, whatever you do while you listen. All right, our executive producer is Matoni Maturi, Hasing Morrell, Edith the podcast, our producer is Berea Suggs, special thanks to Dana Farrington, Anna Yukoninoff, and Kelsey Snell. I'm Dabana Kamantanaro, Senior Political Editor and Correspondent, and I'm Mara Liesen, Senior National Political Correspondent, and thank you for listening to the MPR Politics podcast. [Music]