The Midterm Races Republicans Are Worried About

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states. It's Wednesday, October 21st. Where are the tightest races? Follow the money. We start here. As President Trump goes on a cross-country tour stumping for GOP candidates, some donors are throwing in the towel. We're seeing some tighter-than-expected Senate races. Which races they feel confident about and which ones they clearly don't. Homes are getting way more expensive if you can find a home to buy in the first place. Buyers who had thought maybe this could be the year they were finally going to buy have really found that that's not happening. The new numbers alarming economists. And her world was turned upside down by multiple sclerosis. Now she's been told that's not what she has. It's great to hear that you don't have MS. But where does that leave you? I think it's really complicated. Christina Applegate's misdiagnosis might be more common than you think. From ABC News, this is Start Here. I'm Brad Milkey. We are officially in the midst of a midterm blitz. With less than half a million people dying. We're in the midst of a midterm blitz. We're in two weeks to go. Whatever hands you need to shake, now is the time to shake them. Whatever money your campaign has, now is the time to spend it. Actually, the money is an interesting part of this on its own. Months ago, it became clear that Republicans were going to have a huge cash advantage in these elections. Democrats were worried they could get outspent 5-1. And yet, that has not stopped dead-even polls from swinging toward Democrats. It hasn't stopped Republican advantages from becoming dead heats. Republicans are now in kind of a campaign finance triage. Where do we invest our money? Where do we invest our remaining dollars? And which of our candidates do we cut loose? There is also still one campaign surrogate you can't put a price tag on, or a prediction for that matter. It's President Trump himself. If you had any doubt about how impactful this could be on a national level, all you need to do is look at President Trump's own travel schedule these last few days. However, this is a podcast you might be driving. You don't actually have to look at his schedule. We've got President Trump's travel schedule right here. Her name is Karen Travers, our White House correspondent, who's been traveling with the president. And for many days now, Karen, his travel schedule sounds so surprising in so many ways. Where is he going and why? Yeah, I mean, the president has said he was going to be out there campaigning hard for Republican candidates. And, Brad, he has kept up a really aggressive pace on the campaign trail. Hello, Georgia, and hello, Dortmund. We like Dortmund a lot. It was over the weekend in Georgia and Kentucky. On Monday, it was Kansas. Last night in North Carolina. Hello, North Carolina. This is great. He's going to have stopovers. He's going to have stops later this week in South Carolina, Iowa, and then is expected to be in Michigan and Georgia over the weekend. And yesterday, he teased that he would be back in Ohio next week to campaign for Senator John Husted. Not yet scheduled, but already announcing that he is going to be doing that. So, also look for a Texas stop, likely, too, in that critical Senate race with Ken Paxton and James Tallarico. When you look at all that together, you know, midterm years are always different than presidential years. We have that battleground map that everybody is predicting. That's something that we're pretty familiar with in presidential election years. But midterm years are sometimes they surprise us a little bit. And this one especially has been very surprising because of where Republicans are clearly concerned about their races and where we're seeing some tighter than expected Senate races, where they're defending turf and where the president is putting time and money. President Trump is not going to fly two and a half hours to Kansas on a Monday, two weeks ahead of the midterm election. If they are not worried about Senator Roger Marshall beating this Democratic challenger, Adam Hamilton, you just don't do it. There are other places you could go. I love you, Kansas, but I'm here for a guy named Roger Marshall. While the president says, you know, I go to these rallies, I do it, I rev up my base, and it makes a dramatic impact in the polls. I mean, we don't actually see that. There's not a quick turnaround of 24 hours later, suddenly a candidate has a four to five point boost. He is going out there. To remind people about his own star power, if you will. I was going to say, when he does show up somewhere, then what is the Trump message? Yeah, within seconds of getting to the microphone in Kansas on Monday night, the president said, pretend I'm on the ballot. He was pleading with the thousands of people that were in that arena in Kansas to pretend he was on the ballot. We get 49 percent more votes than we do in voters than we do when I'm not. So please pretend I'm on. The problem is, when you look at poll after poll after poll, Americans are not really liking what he's selling right now. So pretend he's on the ballot. Well, OK, Democrats are like, yes, let's do that. Let's pretend you're on the ballot because you have a record low approval rating right now. They're paying six dollars and 40 cents a gallon for diesel fuel. They've doubled the price of their fertilizer. You know, again and again and again, people who have been strong supporters of Trump are paying the price for decisions made in Washington, D.C., that are harming them. But, you know, it's where Republicans. Say it's not about that number. It's about how we do within the base. And as long as people in the Republican Party still like him, even though that number has slipped in terms of its robust strength, then you want to get that enthusiasm high. So they turn out. The worst thing that can happen for the president right now in Republicans is Republicans just stay home because they don't really feel great about what the president is doing right now. Well, another thing that caught my eye, Karen, is like Trump is going to states like North Carolina. You know, a couple of weeks ago, GOP donors effectively threw up their hands and said, like, we're not we're not spending any more money on this race. So is there a disconnect between what President Trump sees as possible and what Republican donors see as possible right now? What's the money telling us? Yeah, the outside money was paused on behalf of that race. You know, they they pulled it out in terms of ad spending in North Carolina in early October. The president himself has said that he is worried about that race. He's worried about Michael Watley, the Republican. Candidate, but thinks that he'd be a great senator. The voters of North Carolina need to decide which candidate is going to fight for them. I was in North Carolina with the president a couple of weeks ago for a rally for Watley, and it was not a very big crowd compared to some of the other events the president has done out on the trail. That is an important race for Republicans because it is a open seat. Tom Tillis is the retiring Republican senator. He's retiring in part. Because he's just going at it with so much with the president and came under such fire from the president after voting against his signature legislation. But Democrats see this as a major pickup opportunity for them. They need someone who will represent them, not the billionaires, not the big corporations that are already doing OK. They're running Roy Cooper, the former governor. He's popular. And even though the president won that state three times, the polls are showing Cooper with a pretty substantial. So it's actually kind of surprising in some ways that given the money was pulled out of there and focused more on states that are tighter, where they feel they need to defend that the president felt the need to go back to North Carolina for another round for Watley. I mean, the fact that you're throwing money into Texas, not just into a Senate race, but now into a governor's race that at one point looked safe and even to house races in gerrymandered districts that you gerrymandered so that they'd be safe Republican seats. Even some of those, according to local polls, at least look in doubt now. Obviously, a lot of uncertainty with polls. But as far as just following the money, really bright red sirens going off in Republican circles right now. Karen Travers on the road with the president. Thank you. Have a great day. Next, I want to start here. OK, so think about how much gas prices have affected this election already. Well, the average American pays 200 bucks a month in gas. Compare that to mortgage and rent because those prices are heading even higher. We're back in a bit. Today, I want to tell you about our friends at Layla Sleep. 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Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates price and coverage match limited by state law. Earlier this year, I was talking to a real estate agent about buying a home and the question came up. When do you want to do it? When would you want to move in? I was like, I haven't thought about that. Don't we want to do it ASAP? She said, well, you got to understand most of the time it's busier in the fall months. You're going to have more options then. But then she said the magic word mortgage rates. You don't know what mortgage rates are going to do. So you might as well just go with what you got now. Well, good Lord, look at what's happened since. Mortgage rates have just gone through their fastest two-month surge in years. And yesterday, a new report showed that as a result, way fewer Americans are buying and selling homes in the first place. Let's bring in ABC's Elizabeth Schulze, who covers economics. Elizabeth, we knew mortgage rates were bad, right? And yet when you, Elizabeth, saw these numbers yesterday, you said, yikes, why? Brad, this is a really bad number. And it's not just mortgage rates. It's the actual number of homes that are getting sold. The National Association of Realtors said pending home sales. So these are homes that are under contract selling right now or for the month of September hit the lowest level on record. They dropped 7%. It is very bleak when you see at a time of year, like your realtor said, typically in the fall, the second busiest time of year to buy a home. Spring is actually the busiest because that's when a lot of people want to buy. They can move during the summer. Your kids start school in the fall. But we do tend to see kind of a lot of October and then it slows down again over the winter. But what a lot of economists are saying now is this freeze in the housing market has already started. We are seeing a drop in sales that is mostly because of this huge spike in mortgage rates that's happened over the past couple of weeks and really going back a couple of months since the start of the Iran war. Once we get on the other side of this Iran conflict, the energy market is going to be well supplied and we will move down towards the Fed's target and mortgage rates and the tenure will come back down. That has made it just frankly unaffordable for a lot of people who were maybe looking to buy to say this just is not an option for me when you're looking at these borrowing costs, when you're looking at these rates. How many people like what do we have a sense of like when mortgage rates go up this much, this many fewer homes are going to get sold or this many fewer people can afford to buy houses? So the National Association of Realtors actually ran these numbers for us because it really puts into perspective how people are getting priced out when rates go from 6% to 7%. And just at the end of February, right before the Iran war started, we had just dipped below 6%. Now we're at 7.4%. So, you know, even bigger jump. When you have that one percentage point increase in mortgage rates, nearly 6 million fewer Americans can afford the monthly payment on the median priced home in the U.S. So just think about that. The median price single family home, about $435,000. Obviously, that's going to vary depending on where you live. It's a bigger number, smaller number. But it's going to vary. It's going to vary. It's going to vary. It's going to vary. It's going to vary. But that can be the difference between like middle class families affording homes in your neighborhood and only middle to only upper middle class family. Like, is that sort of a thing? Exactly. And we're talking about a 10% down payment, you know, so this is already a lot of money you're putting forward. So when you have an increase in borrowing costs, when your mortgage rate goes up that much, what they're saying is based on people's income levels, it prices out millions of people. It's just really difficult because, I mean, buying a home, it costs like three, four times as much as it did 10 years ago. And it shows you why we track these rates so closely, first of all, because that's a big indicator in how much is actually going on in the housing market, but really how a lot of buyers who had thought maybe this could be the year they were finally going to buy have really found that that's not happening because of what we're seeing with mortgage rates. I'm 27 now and I don't want to wait another 13 years to pay a home. Keep in mind, 7% mortgage rates, that is not a historic high. We have seen rates much higher than that in the past. But one thing that's different about the are still very elevated. And also a lot of people, half of mortgages are below 4%. So you've got so many people locked into lower rates that this is a big increase when you're looking kind of the impact on the overall market at a 7% rate on average. But that's what I wanted to ask you about was like the whole expectations thing, because that matters, right? Like how people feel about the economy can matter as much as what the actual economy is doing. That makes what the economy, what it is. We were just talking to Karen Travers about voter frustrations. How does the housing market end up? impacting the broader economy and how Americans and voters feel about it? Housing is the biggest expense that many families, most families pay for every single month in the budget. I mean, when you think about your rent or your mortgage, there are very few things you're paying as much as that for every single month. And actually, another estimate out yesterday from Pantheon Macroeconomics found that about 40% of people's income or your take home pay, not even just your income, all the money you get bring in after taxes, right now, if you're trying to buy a home, you're going to go toward your mortgage. That is a huge chunk of your money going toward housing, Brad. And that's why we see in our latest ABC News, Washington Post, Ipsos poll, there is overwhelming sentiment among voters that housing is not affordable. Half of voters say housing or rent is unaffordable. Because keep in mind, even if you're not trying to buy a home, if all of these people who want to buy can't, that means they're still renting and that can keep rent prices high. So there's this sort of vicious cycle where you've got high prices, people feel the impact of these prices. They know that this is very clearly an issue for a lot of people when they're thinking about their budget and hard to imagine that it's not an issue when they're thinking about their votes too. Right, which speaks to actually, again, in that ABC News, Washington Post, Ipsos poll, it's not just that people feel like things are unaffordable, they are signing blame. You've got more Americans say they trust Democrats than Republicans on the economy. That is different from some other polls we've conducted in the past. So you see this changing in real time. Elizabeth Schulze, thank you so much. Thank you, Brad. Yesterday, we heard about an NFL star. Being diagnosed with blood clots. The reason I think it's important is not just for NFL fans, right? It's important because so many of us might be faced with a similar circumstance at some point. It's important to understand what issues may and may not be addressed, even by some of the world's top doctors. Well, then later on yesterday, we heard another startling claim about a different case entirely. Christina Applegate, the actress who rose to fame on Married with Children, then Anchorman, then more recently, the Netflix show Dead to Me, shed new light on her medical struggles. You see, a few years ago, I was on the show, and I was on the show, and I was on the show, a few years ago, Applegate had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, the autoimmune disorder that can affect the central nervous system and eventually even break down key functions in the body. There is no cure for it. She talked to Robin Roberts on Good Morning America. Where are you now with the grieving process of MS? Still sucks, Robin. It really does. This was a devastating blow to an actress that had already reinvented her career and now had to carefully select roles around her new medical reality. Systems has started in the early part of 2021, and it was like literally just tingling on my toes. And by the time we started shooting in the summer of that same year, I was being brought to set in a wheelchair. Well, yesterday on a podcast called The Messy Podcast devoted to MS, she revealed that apparently she didn't have it. It's hard to say that she came into my room and she said, congratulations, you don't have MS. Not because she'd been lying or something. She said recently she'd been lying. She said, I don't have MS. I don't have MS. I don't have MS. I don't have MS. I don't have MS. I don't have MS. I don't have MS. She had been told by doctors she had been misdiagnosed. And while that might sound like good news, it also prompts questions about how accurate these life-altering diagnoses can be, particularly in the murky world of autoimmune disorders. Let's go to Dr. Alana Katsan. She's a neurologist at Mount Sinai in New York who specializes in MS. Dr. Katsan, first off, can we just back up? Can you explain what MS is and how it affects patients? So multiple sclerosis is an autoimmune disease that affects the central nervous system, meaning the optic nerves, which are the nerves that go to the eyes that enable us to see, the brain, and then the spinal cord. And so symptoms of MS can be related to lesions in any one of those areas. So they can be focal, for example, having difficulty seeing or double vision. They can be things like having difficulty walking or numbness and tingling. And then because MS is actually a whole brain disease, it can also cause things like difficulty with cognition, memory, and mood. Okay. So then with that in mind, with how serious it is, how does this happen? How does somebody go five years? I mean, this is not a recent diagnosis. Christina Applegate almost became the face of MS for a lot of younger Americans. How does it turn into a misdiagnosis several years later? It's actually not as uncommon as you might think. So there's a lot of different things that can happen, but most commonly new information just comes to light. So when we make an MS diagnosis, it's not as if there's a simple test that says, yes, you have it or no, you don't have it. It's actually kind of a combination of a bunch of different things. And if pieces of information change over time, then that diagnosis may change as well. So there are a lot of different ways that an MS diagnosis can present. So someone who has MS may come in with something like optic neuritis, which is inflammation in the visual system causing difficulty seeing. They can come in with things like numbness and tingling or weakness somewhere in the body. There are a lot of different symptoms that people with MS experience. In terms of making that diagnosis, the clinician has to kind of put together what the patient is saying to them. And they have to add to that. So they have to do a neurological examination where they are checking all the different functions in the person's body. They'll get an MRI of the brain and the spinal cord. And they're looking for a very particular pattern there when we're talking about MS. And then they may need additional diagnostic tools. So sometimes we'll recommend something like a spinal tap to get additional information. even more tests that we sometimes do when things are unclear. But that's so interesting because I feel like there are so many diseases where it's like, let's take you in for testing. They do a blood test. They say, yes, this was in your blood. We found the pathogen. That's not necessarily the case with this disease or so many diseases like it. It's not the case at all, actually. We don't have a test like that. And so we have to rely on the application of our diagnostic criteria, which really should only be applied if someone comes in with a fairly typical presentation. At least some piece of it has to be typical for MS. So in terms of the symptoms the person's experiencing, the findings that you see on your neurological exam, the findings that you see on the MRI or the results of those additional tests, there has to be some piece of it that's really typical for MS. And when all of the pieces are typical, that's great because that makes things kind of easy for us. I have every symptom of someone with MS, every single one. Now, we both know that there are many things. The problem can be that sometimes not everything fits exactly well. And so then it's on that clinician to kind of decide what is the best fit here. Is MS the best fit? Is something else the best fit? And sometimes there's new information that comes to light later or new technology that comes out. That means that we have to change our mind. Which then might be, you'd presume, what sort of happened with Christina Applegate here. Is it a good thing? Because I think theoretically you'd be thrilled to know you don't have this. But then it seems really difficult to not know what you have. And she was kind of describing it like, this is not like amazing news for me. I think it's very relatable. I really understand what she's saying because this is something that I go through with people all the time. If anything, I've gotten worse in some ways. And so I'm back at square one that I don't know what's going on with me. Yes, of course. While no one wants to hear that they have MS, once they hear that news, they feel like they can plan. They have some closure. They know what to do. They can come up with a plan with their doctor in terms of treatment. They might even have like a community of other people to talk to. Exactly. They have a community of other people to talk to. They can get that support. There's a lot of different things to do. It's like I had a reason. I had a f***ing reason as to why my day sucked every day. And now I don't have a reason. And it's very unnerving and it's really confusing for me. I think hearing, yes, we understand that you're having these symptoms, but we don't know what's wrong with you is really, really challenging. So it doesn't surprise me at all that she's feeling very emotional this time. Right. And I do think it's so frustrating for people who have these disorders where your immune system is turning on you and there aren't clear cut answers as to what you have. They don't all fit the exact same symptoms. For doctors to sort of check off as they're going down lists. And then you've got kind of the uncertainty even years later of like, was that initial diagnosis actually the thing that I've got today still? And what does that mean for the rest of my life? Dr. Alana Katz-Sand from Mount Sinai, really helpful perspective. Thank you. Anytime. Thanks for having me. OK, one more quick break. When we come back, it's not just you. Music is getting sloppier. One last thing is next. You're listening to this podcast, so I know you've got a curious mind. Here's a helpful fact you might not know yet. Drivers who switch and save with Progressive save over $900 on average. Pop over to Progressive.com, answer some questions, and you'll get a quick quote with discounts that are easy to come by. In fact, 99% of their auto customers earn at least one discount. Visit Progressive.com and see if you can enjoy a little cash back. National average 12-month savings of $946 by new customers surveyed who saved with Progressive between June 2024 and May 2025. And one last thing. There is a new ABC News-Washington Post-Ipsos poll just out this morning showing most Americans think artificial intelligence is a bad thing for society. Six in ten oppose building new data centers. It's a problem for politicians who have tied themselves to AI, and as loud as the debate has become, AI is capable of producing a lot more noise than that. Yesterday, Spotify put out an update for its customers saying it's been hard at work removing so-called AI slop from its platform. What is AI slop? Well, some music critics would tell you. It sounds like this. This is a track from a persona on Spotify who goes by Jack Shade. Their profile reads, Yes, I'm AI. Get over it and enjoy my music. How much music like this is out there? Guess. Guess how many songs? Well, Spotify says it's already removed. Get ready for this. 75 million tracks identified as, I was not just shocked there were that many songs on Spotify. I was shocked it was possible to write this many songs ever. And that's the thing. For humans, it's not possible. Computer-generated music is nothing new, but AI programs are now able to generate entire songs from nothing more than written prompts. No music making necessary, which means you could create dozens, hundreds, or if you ran a bot farm, thousands of songs. Now, why would you want to do that? Well, think about how musicians make their money nowadays. It's not really about album sales, right? It's about how many times you are streamed online. Well, when you finish listening to an album or a playlist, Spotify starts serving us up assortments of new songs they think we'll like, whether we've heard of the artist or not. That's where these programmers are hoping to slip in. And maybe a thousand streams gets you a few cents from Spotify, which is not worth a lot to the indie songwriter who spent years on their own music. Well, you know what? It's not worth a lot to the indie songwriter who spent years on their own music, but it's worth a thousand. It's worth a thousand for your opus. But if you can keep spamming Spotify with your automated programs at scale, hey, that's free money. The main concern that people have is that it's already so cutthroat to try to make it as a musician today. So if you're Spotify, how do you even spot the spammers? Most of them are not advertising that they're artificial. The company says it's taking into account whether these artists are playing concerts, interacting with fans, and how often people are clicking away from their songs. But consider artists like Sienna Rose, Sienna Rose has been publishing songs on Spotify for years. She's got a real following, and she's prolific. She puts out dozens of popular songs per month. Well, now she has a Spotify tag next to her name, clearly labeling her an AI artist. Human musicians say this is why an even larger crackdown is needed. Streaming revenue is all about quantity, and it's become impossible to keep up with computers as they get smarter, even if they say the music itself is getting dumber. I cannot wrap my mind around these numbers. Spotify says it's got 100 million songs and then they just removed 75 million AI songs. Hey, by the way, huge news. Remember those Signal Awards I was telling you about? Well, we won, you guys. We got the top prize for editing in a news show. We also got listener's choice in that along with two other categories. This is all because of you guys. I'm very aware you did not have to spend your time clicking on links for our sake, but we really do appreciate it. I'm Brad Milkey. I'll see you tomorrow. With the Name Your Price tool, you tell them what you want to pay, and they'll show you options that fit your budget. Visit Progressive.com to find a rate that works for you with the Name Your Price tool.