STEVE INSKEEP, BYLINE: Let's hear more about this from Ron Brownstein. He's a senior political analyst at CNN, a Bloomberg opinion columnist and an occasional guest here. Ron, welcome back.
RON BROWNSTEIN: Steve, good to be with you.
INSKEEP: Is Trump really needed in Oklahoma?
BROWNSTEIN: Well, if Trump is needed in Oklahoma, he's got bigger problems than Oklahoma, right?
INSKEEP: Yeah.
BROWNSTEIN: I mean, this is about as reliably red of state as there is on the map, you know, and if he's going there, I think, first of all, it's an indication of how reluctant many Republicans may be to be with him at this point. So starting in Oklahoma, I think is really - just tells you kind of the overall situation is - a little over a month out - looking pretty tough for Republicans right now.
INSKEEP: I'm thinking about that comparison to the 2006 election when George W. Bush was very unpopular.
BROWNSTEIN: Yeah.
INSKEEP: He was president, and they weren't happy about it. Is that just a reality Trump has to deal with, and so he might as well get out and make an argument?
BROWNSTEIN: I think that is the reality. I think the clear evidence is that since the 1990s, at least, the single most important factor in midterm elections are voters' views of the incumbent president. So I think Republicans can run, but they can't really hide. To a greater degree than in most midterm elections, the Republican candidates have their fingerprints on the policies that are driving away voters from Trump. I mean, they have all voted repeatedly - the incumbents - to support his tariffs, to support the war in Iran, to support the One Big Beautiful Bill that made the cuts in Medicaid that are hurting them in many places. So, you know, it's tough to get away from the undertow of an incumbent president, and it may be especially tough this year because the Republican incumbents have so directly signaled their support for him through their votes.
INSKEEP: There's an even more incredible layer of this, Ron, because it seems that in many cases, Republicans obeyed Trump by voting for priorities or letting Trump get away with things...
BROWNSTEIN: Yeah.
INSKEEP: ...That they publicly disagreed with, they, in other occasions, had said they believed to be wrong.
BROWNSTEIN: Right. Absolutely. Republicans, I think, in swing and competitive areas, I think, bought the argument that 2024 was a fundamental realignment of the electorate that was going to shift the entire baseline in a Trumpy direction. You know, his approval rating now is significantly lower than it was in 2018. It's lower than Biden '22, Barack Obama 2010 and Bill Clinton, 1994. Significantly lower than any of them. And it has eroded, in many cases, the most among the groups that moved the most toward him in 2024, a kind of a, you know, last-in first-out phenomenon. And so if you were betting as a Republican that Trump's support in '24 created a new baseline, and that was the underpinning of many of these gerrymanders, right? - like in South...
INSKEEP: Yeah.
BROWNSTEIN: ...Texas or in Florida. That is what is going to be tested this November, and I think the answer is going to be pretty sobering to all of those who are crowing about a multiracial, working-class coalition, you know, coming out of the 2024 election.
INSKEEP: Oh, now I have to ask about one other thing because in this redistricting, of course, Republicans added some risk. They might have, hypothetically, four incredibly safe districts, and they changed...
BROWNSTEIN: Yeah.
INSKEEP: ...That into six districts in which they have an advantage. Is it possible in this scenario that the Republicans could actually lose some of those districts and do worse than they would otherwise have done?
BROWNSTEIN: I don't know if they're going to do worse than in a lab test case where this never happened at all, the gerrymanders. But I think the evidence is pretty clear that they are not going to win all the seats that they were anticipating from the gerrymanders. You know, there are a few at the very top end that Republicans have created that are virtually impossible for Democrats to win and where Trump is probably still popular.
But if you look at South Texas or some of the Florida seats or the Ohio seats or the North Carolina seats that Republicans thought they had made a gimme, these are competitive races, and Democrats are likely to hold their own in them because those places have not been immune to the general decline in his approval. Even the staunchly Republican blue-collar and rural areas. There's lots of evidence that his support is fracturing, even if those voters remain dubious of Democrats in many cases. You know, take us back to where we started.
INSKEEP: Yeah.
BROWNSTEIN: I mean, the president is in Oklahoma, which tells you everything you need to know about how big a battlefield has emerged in this campaign, even if Democrats don't win anything in Oklahoma. Although, I will note that they did win unexpectedly an Oklahoma House seat in 2018. As someone was saying to me this week, the lesson of these wave elections is that every time you wake up on the morning after Election Day, and there's somebody who lost who no one saw coming. And maybe there's someone in the White House who saw a loss somewhere in Oklahoma coming.
INSKEEP: Ron Brownstein of CNN and Bloomberg. Pleasure talking with you.
BROWNSTEIN: Thanks for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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