Could we see Texas go over into the Democratic column in 2026 the way California did after Pete Wilson?

That's what I'm really struck by, Joe.

I mean, it's so remarkable to me to see Ted Cruz as the lone surviving Republican in Texas.

So it's a good time to go to Cancun, Ted.

But I'm struck.

We're so focused on what this means for the day after and for the next two years.

But I'm really struck by what this means for 2028, as you're saying, because think about it.

Is this going to be, given what has happened, a potential moment where they, in order to do what Adam Hamilton wants to do, which is work together and get something done, Take the opportunity to break from Trump at times.

Are they going to do it?

Listen, they spent a lot of time in the desert.

I think they found water.

I think they figured it out.

And look, they've got so much to run on the agenda on the corruption stuff.

And just down the line, there's so much.

I mean, this will be like FDR after Herbert Hoover.

McCain-Feingold.

So Mark, how do you use this?

Well, I'm a shallow media guy, so I've deferred to Dave and Cornell on a lot of this.

But let me just tell you from my vantage point as the media guy.

First of all, I'll just say by polling in general, and this is the point that Cornell is making.

Everything that polling does is based on past performance, political polling.

I mean, so projecting what's going to happen is 100% based on what we've seen before, and we may see something we've never seen before.

So there's no way to predict it based on past performance because it could be different.

Given what's happening in France, can he pivot the conversation now back to one of his real strong suits?

Highly unlikely, Leland.

Voters are listening to the president talk about France, and they say, quit talking about France.

Let's talk about what's happening right here in this country.

Let's talk about the promise that you made to never put us in a forever war, which is causing all the economic hardship.

And yes, historically, it doesn't often happen that the president power retains the Congress, but I was there in 2002 when George Bush did it, and he did it by making tough, unpopular decisions like the surge in Iraq.

So that was a tough decision.

Are Republicans successful right now? And it seems to me that they are starting to gain traction in making this a referendum when it comes to the Senate, for example, in Michigan, on Abdul El-Sayed rather than on Donald Trump and the economy.

But are they up for grabs? Or were they really just still going to vote the team?

100% they are, particularly in this election.

Ken Paxton doesn't just have a Bush problem.

He has an everyone problem.

I've seen banned candidates and I've seen corrupt candidates.

I've never seen a bad, corrupt candidate like this in my life.

And I'll tell you, I've talked to, there's not a single Bush Republican in Texas that I've talked to that's going to vote for Ken Paxton.

And I think it comes into play here the same way right now Democrats are wrestling with was it an overreach to have a candidate like Abdul El-Sayed? I think there are some MAGA Republicans that were like, was this an overreach? Was this the guy at all costs?

Is there anything Republicans individually can do to help themselves here, or are they just sort of at the whim of the president?

Not much, Peter, especially when you're getting news breaks like the inflation being even worse today.

This is that phase of the campaign where Mississippi Governor Haley Barber used to say, good gets better and bad gets worse.

It's really hard to change the physics of the campaign in the last couple of weeks.

because the basic narrative has been set now and Donald Trump is doing nothing but drawing attention to himself.

That's the two things.

I mean, that's the one thing that both Donald Trump and Democrats agree on is to make it all about Donald Trump.

That corruption is really caught on as an issue, I think.

Is it motivating anybody else?

No, I mean, this is the desperation phase of the Republican, uh, campaigns.

Uh, you all are familiar with the great, uh, Mississippi politician Haley Barbour.

We're in the phase of the campaign where Barbour used to say, "Good gets better and bad gets worse." You know, uh, the, the, the Democrats are, are on offense, Republicans are on defense.

There's just not much at this point where you can foresee anything fundamentally happening that's gonna change the nature of these races or the environment.

So, uh, so you've got people like Bannon just, you know, throwing out scare tactics there to the base.

The, the, the...

[laughs]

Do these have an effect in a place like Texas?

Well, Audie, thanks for having me.

James Talarico has run an exceptional campaign, uh, throughout.

I, I think this was kind of a stumble for him because I, I, I don't think there's any question that he had the flu.

Uh, uh, but to go, to be in a Texas Senate race, a, a US Senate race, high-profile race for this, like this, and to just go off the grid for almost two weeks without being more transparent about it, I mean, I think that he should have said at the very beginning, "I've got the flu." Show some pictures of him, him working at home, which he said he was doing.

That would've been fine.

But to just leave it, uh, to leave that vacuum, the Republicans filled it, obviously.

What are you gonna be watching for on election night? Are there specific counties or something that would help us understand, um, whether for once Democrats have a chance at taking Texas?

... for many decades

... as an example, uh, we did a deep dive on this on our show, The Circus, st- uh, on, on voting and, and I did it in Colorado, where we have, uh, voting by mail, which is something else that Donald Trump thinks is fraudulent.

In Colorado, 98% of people vote by mail.

Every single ballot, not randomly, every single ballot is certified by an FBI-trained analyst.

It's more safe than voting in person.

So this notion [laughs] that there's something wrong with mail or the machines is simply a way for Donald Trump to, to have a backstop in case things don't turn out the way he wants them to.

Mark?

Well, uh, Peter alluded to it.

But the fact that he is on the trail more, Mark, and that he's being asked by these candidates that aren't asking Harris or Newsom or Bernie to come in, that it's him, what does that tell us?

Well, it tells us he's the best communicator in the Democratic Party, which he clearly is.

He can go anywhere, talk to any audience.

He goes on Fox all the time.

He's terrific.

The thing that I think is relevant here, a good point to look at, Leland, is let's take Texas, for example.

In 2018, you had the congressman from El Paso, Beto O'Rourke, make a real race of that.

People didn't understand how much, at the time, Democrats had done.

So manipulated, the convention did not help.

Well, what's extraordinary about this, Katie, is, first of all, not that he said it or that it was leaked, but that it's true.

I mean, think about what he's saying here, that the president of the United States, the head of the Republican Party, went to Texas, held this huge convention that was supposed to rally the troops for the midterms, and Paxson's polls went down and Republicans' polls went down.

I mean, first of all, why would Paxson have any reason to lie about that fact? two donors.

I mean, he's admitting that his numbers went down and the president had something to do with it.

What an indictment.

What an indictment of the president that the guy who the president has come to his defense and spent over $100 million now to defend it gave him the nomination over a guy who would have walked into the Senate without having to spend a dime.

What what a loss, Mark McKinnon.

... standoff affect how Trump's message is getting out?

Well, first of all, I think you saw from the, the coverage at the UN that, that, the, people are gonna find lots of different ways to cover him, but it's not gonna be the coverage that he wants, and that's what he's trying to do.

He's trying to control this.

Back up just a little bit.

I mean, all that Trump really cares about, people say he ran for the m- power, he ran for the money.

No, no, no.

At the end of the day, Donald Trump ran for president because that's the best way to get attention.

Do you think the balance of that relationship has changed in the past year in terms of who needs what more?

What do you think of this argument that he's making that the press is a threat to national security?

Well, Katie, as we all know throughout history, it's been the media that's told the truth about the war, not administrations.

So that's not that doesn't fly at all.

What's really at the point of this and the reason I think ultimately is just going to drive Donald Trump crazy.

It doesn't make that much difference because that much news is not actually made out of the White House.

And, you know, it gets covered in collateral ways.

Donald Trump ran for president, not because he thought he was going to be president.

Is that the way out of this? The government starting to employ people again, to work for people, to give them a life? that they believed they were promised, Mark? Look back to the 50s, take what worked and leave what didn't?

It's all about to get worse.

Yeah, in politics, Nicole, as you know, if you're explaining, you're losing.

There's just, there's nothing that Republicans have to campaign for, uh, that there's nothing that they can defend, uh, because it's defenseless.

You know, our job as communicators, Nicole, in campaigns at the White House is to kind of net things out and try and really get to the core of what people are feeling other than all these individual issues, and it's, it increasingly seems to me like it's becoming chaos versus control.

People just have a sense that they've lost control, that Trump has lost control of the government.

He's lost control of the war.

He's lost control of the economy.

[laughs]

And social media is small potatoes compared to AI.

Well, we waited too long on social media.

We're not going to have that opportunity with AI, Stephanie.

You talked about taking a deep breath.

I'm hyperventilating now.

I read a great newsletter in the morning from John Ellis, who's the cousin of George W. Bush.

And he does a whole AI feed that's really eye-opening and scary as hell.

Then do you have any faith that this could be something that we could see bipartisanship around, given how dangerous it is?

Why should we think ourselves smarter the third time and say Republicans are going to get shellacked this time around?

Well, Leland, the reality is that it's a midterm election and that this is an election where not usual voters turn out to turn out in presidential elections like they did for Donald Trump.

These are not casual voters.

These are voters who pay a lot of attention.

And there's a huge gap right now between the perception about Democrats and Republicans.

Democrats have a huge advantage.

But the most important thing is that Democrats have an even bigger advantage on who's actually excited about going to vote, who's animated.

Let government, specifically let us Democrats, who kept you all in masks and kept your kids out of school and made people take vaccines and, by the way, created 40-year high inflation, we should be the ones who take back control.

Is the tolerance still there?

Well, the fact is, I think that Donald Trump's voter suppression efforts, which they clearly are, are only going to backfire.

I think it's just the awareness of all this is going to activate Democrats to double down on their efforts to mobilize and get out and vote.

The greatest voter fraud perpetuated on the American public is this notion that there's any voter fraud.

I was kind of stunned by the attorney general's appearance today.

because I expected him to have some very forceful comments about the Supreme Court ruling.

All he basically did was say, we're going to comply with it.

Mark, last word on this.

Oh, it's happening, the blue

wave.

And I've always been the guy tapping the brakes.

Just because I spent a lot of time in Texas, I know how conservative it is.

And the thing driving that mythology is an increasing demographic, particularly of Hispanics, and people think, oh, more Hispanics, that means they're going to vote Democratic, and it'll finally shift.

Well, Hispanics in Texas are very conservative, as witnessed by the last election when many of them along the border voted for Trump.

Mm-hmm.

It's do you think we're going to have a free and fair election in November? And what do you think is going to happen? Will Republicans lose control, not just of the House, but the Senate, too?

That's one of the questions Indira asked Republican Mark McKinnon, who was an advisor to President George W. Bush and Senator John McCain, as well as a founder of the centrist political group No Labels.

The, the biggest problem with this is it, it just smells of desperation because first of all, it's, it's completely, nobody believes that this is actually gonna happen.

Uh, I mean, this is sort of like Mexico's gonna pay for the wall.

Um, first of all, there's, no matter what happens, it's almost certain that there'll be a Democratic Congress.

They're not gonna vote for it.

Uh, but Republicans may hold the, the, the Senate.

But the big question is, you know, first of all, I thought it was a pretty good idea to have a convention when they announced it a while back, a good, a, a good time to get the faithful together, get on the same page, get on the same message.

[laughs]

chance.

Madeline makes some fair points.

You live in the Middle East, so I know you feel strongly about these issues.

I would like to see you two go at it because, I mean, I think it says a lot that the people of Michigan who know him better than we do have nominated him so they know something we don't know.

Or they just blindly went into this.

I don't think they blindly went into it.

I think they have a better sense of him.

I don't think that position, at least among a lot of Democrats in Michigan, especially the Arab world, hurts them that much.

Mark, your thoughts? Well,

first of all, I think the Democrats need a lot of tough love like Rahm Emanuel brings to the table.

So I'm glad that he's in the mix and hope he remains so.

Listen, it's remarkable.

Yes, there's going to be like 30 candidates.

It reminds me of 2016.

You kind of flip the deck here, though.

Go take it away.

We are hearing some whispers of a ton of Trump travel in October, possibly as much as a Trump rally a day in the most competitive states and districts.

Is that going to work? Listen, 49 percent strongly disapprove that.

That's an astonishing number.

And if you think about if you're Republican running, the last thing you want is Trump front and center really right now.

And, you know, a smart political operation would say, listen, boss, let's just take a seat and let the candidates run their own campaigns.

Not only is Trump now they're announcing is going to be out there campaigning, but there's also a huge war chest that is being reported that he's going to spend.

And what does he want him to do? Talk about Donald Trump.

They only they he only convinced Trump.

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[laughs]

Are you worried about that or are you worried about them doing something beforehand, like, I don't know, sending ICE agents to the polls?

polls?I'm worried about all of it.

I mean, I, I think all of this, or, or predominantly it's about trying to seed this notion ahead of time that there was fraud so when it turns out badly, which I think Donald Trump at least he's, has enough [laughs] realistic perception about the environment to understand that's likely to happen.

So he's doing everything in his power, um, to seed the notion that there's something wrong with the election so that he can say so afterwards, and he will have already made the argument.

Uh, by the way, uh, let me just level set from my perspective here in Colorado.

The notion that there's widespread voter fraud is the greatest fraud there is in American politics right now.

There simply...

Uh, is that necessary, number one? Number two, is Donald Trump, um, are all these efforts to, to sow, uh, uh, doubt, to claim fraud ahead of time, the, uh, threat of sending ICE agents or maybe declaring a national emergency or saying that certain people shouldn't be allowed to vote, does that create more incentive for people to get out there, more incentive for them to participate in a midterm election?

Does a couple hundred million dollars in advertising and putting those clips out between now and November change that?

I don't know.

I, [laughs] you know, I, I think you, you have your thumb on the pulse here, Leland, as does Madeline, just in the sense that this is, this is a lot more about just voter anger.

And the greater the anger, the more they're willing to put up with, and the more radical candidates they're willing to support.

I'm just reminded so much of being back in Texas in the 2009, 2010, the early days of the Tea Party, and having the sa- and hearing a lot of the same reaction to the Tea Party candidates.

"Oh, they're..." You know, "It's wild, crazy stuff.

This'll never fly." Uh, but that's, that's, that is a reflection of voters' anger and that sentiment.

Go ahead, Mark.