Transcript: Trump Tailspins as GOP Leaks Humiliating Truth: He’s Toxic

Sargent: Well, just to wrap this all up—I started this out by saying that, you know, maybe conventional patterns in midterms are reasserting themselves, which is a bit of a surprise given how Donald Trump has made everything topsy-turvy. But I think maybe, after talking to you, it’s a bit of a different story, which is: you’ve got the conventional patterns in a sense reasserting themselves, in the sense that the out party is hyper-energized and the in party is very discouraged.

But you layer on top of that this Donald Trump factor, which just supercharges everything. He’s actually supercharging the conventional patterns, in the sense—he’s really unpopular, he’s really hated by Democrats, and he’s fucking his own base in every which way. So he’s really making them discouraged. I think that might be the big story.

Cook: Yeah. I mean, my base case for the last year and a half has been that the patterns would reassert themselves—OK?—which would translate into Republicans losing a couple Senate seats, and losing, you know, less than normal because of the map this year, that they’d lose, you know, a dozen, two dozen House races. That was my base case. But we’ve now left far beyond that. I mean, I made fun—in my mind, when I heard people six months ago saying stuff like this—but the data didn’t support it then. And right now, the data does support that Republicans are just underperforming in places that have just been gimme putts, as I said earlier. It’s astonishing what’s happened here.