Trump is falling in the polls, but Democrats are doing even worse. Why is it that even with all the bad news Trump is getting, the Dems are still not doing so well? Ryan James Gerdusky joins me to explain why.
00:01:41.340So we're going to be joined by Ryan James Gerdusky.
00:01:48.440Let me get this pulled up and he will talk to us about what is currently going on with the Democratic Party and why it's not been going so well.
00:01:58.700So let me see if I can get this pulled up quickly.
00:02:12.720We were just talking about there's a semaphore article from Dave Weigel.
00:02:16.800It says Trump's polling is is dropping, but Democrats aren't benefiting.
00:02:21.300In fact, depending on which polls you compare, Donald Trump's approval rating in aggregate is 45 percent.
00:02:26.740Democrats favorability, according to a Fox News poll, is 41.
00:02:29.660And when you look at civics polling, you can see Democrat favorability is 31 percent to Republicans, I think, are at 38.
00:02:38.460So I'm curious what you're seeing and why the Democrats are doing so miserably, even with all the bad news Trump has been getting.
00:02:45.900So I did a whole sub stack post about this, my national populist newsletter, and I had a whole episode about this on my podcast called A Numbers Game with Ryan Gradesky.
00:02:55.140So check that out if you want all the details.
00:03:31.540If you look overall, they brought the aggregate up.
00:03:35.540It's much worse when you take those out.
00:03:37.160So I want to put a put a caveat and sit there and say the two most accurate pollsters sit there and say Trump's actually in a better place.
00:03:44.080And primarily because those two pollsters have a much higher support level among Republicans and among independents.
00:03:51.280Among Republicans, they average about 85 percent support for Trump, while all the other polls like the Fox News poll and the CNN poll have Trump closer to a 70 percent rating.
00:04:00.720And I kind of more believe the Atlas Insight and Qantas Insight polls, Atlas Intel and Qantas Insight polls than those Democrats face a problem with branding.
00:04:09.800People look at the Democratic Party and they think of it as weak on crime, weak on immigration, bad on the economy.
00:04:15.520Even though they don't like the tariffs and they have a lot of uncertainty about the tariffs and the messaging about the tariffs, the other party is has a branding problem where they just seem bad when their biggest name brands around them are the AOC's and the Bernie Sanders and the social justice warriors on social media who want to talk about trans and kids.
00:04:36.980That's just, I mean, a branding problem that they can't get away from, especially in like 100 days post the new year and 150 days post election.
00:04:45.960Is there anybody in the Democratic Party who is counter to the far left or the woke?
00:04:51.520Yeah, I mean, Josh Shapiro is considered more moderate.
00:04:55.000Wes Moore, Wes Moore already announced he's not running for president in 2028.
00:05:00.420I don't really know what Gavin Newsom is doing, trying to be a podcast host and, you know, having on right wingers and tell him how much how Charlie Kirk, how much, you know, his kids watch his show.
00:05:09.900So that's I don't really know what that is.
00:05:14.800But when the rubber meets the road, even like an Andrew Cuomo type who was considered a quote unquote moderate was the guy who said, hey, let's let all the criminals out of jail.
00:05:23.180So I have not seen a case where a Democratic leader has taken on his party in any substantial way on anything from the trans issue to the crime issue to the immigration issue.
00:05:35.780You know, you have Bernie Sanders saying there was saying saying on an interview recently, we need to enforce the border.
00:05:41.140We need to secure the border yet and still voting against every single Trump border policy.
00:05:45.300You had another congressman from South Southern Texas on the border who voted for the Lake and Riley Act and then immediately went on television to apologize for voting.
00:05:54.660So that's just I mean, that's just the hypocrisy of them right now is that there's two kinds of people, one who are doing messaging things and the other ones who are doing voting things.
00:06:04.360And when they vote, they have to unless they're in a ruby red Republican district, they have to apologize.
00:06:10.440There's a congressman in New York three is a district that Trump won by five points who says I am I am long.
00:06:20.460I'm a Long Island Republican Democrat, but I'm moderate votes immediately when he gets into Congress again, reelected votes immediately to start allowing transgender girls to play in female biological girl sports.
00:06:32.320It's an issue that you could not be more popular on.
00:06:35.140He just couldn't bring himself to vote for it.
00:06:36.860So I think there is a general fear among the party's base that the Jasmine Crockett's of the of the party really run the show.
00:06:44.540This is it just doesn't make sense there.
00:06:47.900It's patently obvious to any reasonable person.
00:06:51.900The trans in the kids, it's an 80 20 issue.
00:07:23.000Democrats are facing the same problem around the trans issue that Republicans were facing around abortion pre Trump's announcement, which was, hey, if we just don't talk about it, hopefully people will forget our position.
00:07:34.660And, you know, there's just but there were loudmouth, you know, conservatives who are sitting there and saying, you know, life, you know, life conception begins the moment the date starts.
00:07:44.800And like they were absolutely no, no wiggle room whatsoever on the abortion issue.
00:07:49.760And they were the face of the party on the left to the left on the right.
00:07:53.760There's a million people who are like, oh, no, this is OK.
00:08:25.100And that's their problem right now where they are too afraid of their own party.
00:08:28.200There was that one congressman from Massachusetts who immediately upon announcing that, you know, girls, biological girls sports be protected, his his chief consultant quit and they were protesting in front of his office.
00:08:57.000Yeah, but so I don't understand how they expect to actually win anything unless they actually just don't expect to win.
00:09:07.100Well, they expect to be they expect Trump's negatives to carry them through.
00:09:11.200And look, Trump does have high negatives in some polling and some constituencies in the country.
00:09:15.140The tariff messaging has been very wonky and people are a little a little nervous about it yet.
00:09:20.700And still, you have to be something in order to eventually be in the White House one day.
00:09:26.680And Democrats, I want to go a little further down the road.
00:09:29.740Democrats have a problem after the next presidential election in twenty twenty eight.
00:09:34.560The map is the same as it is now in twenty thirty two and beyond because of the way the population changed and people moving to Texas and Florida.
00:09:41.680Republicans can win the White House starting in twenty thirty two.
00:09:45.220So long as they just carry Ohio and the Sun Belt.
00:09:48.680So North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, Florida and Texas, as long as they care that they don't need Pennsylvania anymore.
00:09:55.020I mean, Michigan, they don't need Wisconsin.
00:10:32.900And and you have Gretchen Whitmer sitting there and cozy him to Trump and Gavin Newsom cozy him to Trump.
00:10:37.480But the ascending voices in the party are the AOCs and they are the people who are, you know, they're being anti-Trump is the whole personality.
00:10:47.540It's the entire purpose of them existing.
00:10:50.800Emanuel Rahm Emanuel, Obama's former chief of staff, and he was a former ambassador and mayor from Chicago.
00:10:57.460He's thinking about running for president.
00:10:59.200So he's doing this podcast tour right now.
00:11:01.040And he's getting absolutely battered because he's running on this moderate issue of like, hey, you know, this is not really great.
00:11:09.260And there are these podcasts, these left wing podcasts are ripping him to shreds because that's really where the party is.
00:11:15.280It is a party of college educated white women, black women and, you know, the alphabet soup mafia and and progressive nonprofits.
00:11:27.860It doesn't mean that they can't ever win a House seat doesn't mean they can't flip the House.
00:11:31.500It doesn't mean that Trump's negatives won't matter in these, you know, in these middle of the road House districts.
00:11:36.180But for a presidency, for the long haul, for these swing states, they have a brand that they have to sit there and either shed or fully embrace or figure out some other way.
00:11:46.060But there's a very, very, very short runway.
00:11:48.5602028 is going to be the last time before a decade of hurt comes their way, unless Georgia goes permanently blue or North Carolina does.
00:11:56.360But if either one of those two things happen, they have a very hard decade ahead of them.
00:12:01.720One of the things I was just bringing up is this is why they're so adamant on mass migration.
00:12:06.740With the net out migration from these blue states you mentioned, the only other solution is going to be bring in as many illegal immigrants as possible.
00:12:14.720So when that 2030 census happens, they can maintain some competitive numbers.
00:12:19.560But I'm curious if that like are they going to be able to do that?
00:12:24.360I mean, how many how many new illegal immigrants or migrants in general do they need to bring in to California to not lose any seats?
00:12:32.160I'm so glad you brought that up because I actually sort of piece about this for the Washington Examiner.
00:12:36.840So in 2022, right, and then they did the census where they sat there and said these are the estimate number of houses they're going to lose.
00:12:43.300Illinois, California and New York were a state or slated to win to lose 10 house seats, five from California, three from New York, two from Illinois.
00:12:51.440Because of both legal and illegal, both legal and illegal, a majority of Americans are leaving those states in droves because they are failed states.
00:13:03.960Both legal and illegal immigrants moved to those states.
00:13:07.380So when they readjusted it for 2024, that 10 seat loss was brought down to six seats because enough, both legal and illegal, it is legal immigration, too.
00:13:18.680But enough of them had moved to those states to offset the losses of Americans.
00:13:24.480Immigration is the only pipeline Democrats have.
00:13:28.080That being said, they're also moving to Florida and Texas.
00:13:30.860But North Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee were all slated to gain a house seat.
00:13:34.880None of them will gain a house seat now at the rate that they're going.
00:13:37.920But but nonetheless, all those states will lose seats.
00:13:43.300All you need is like two or three more seats.
00:13:45.320And once that once that's there, it's over.
00:13:47.900And Texas and Florida together without Arizona and Utah and Idaho are going to gain eight seats because both immigrants are going there and Americans are moving there in droves.
00:13:57.400And there's nothing they could do about it.
00:14:10.480We had we had 11,000 border crossings in the first two months of Trump's presidency, border apprehensions, rather than the first two months of Trump's presidency.
00:14:32.280Even the mass deportations, even the, you know, the ones that are getting huge media explosions, it hasn't moved the general public's opinion at all that immigration needs to be fixed and that we need both fewer numbers of legal immigrants.
00:15:02.640There is this proposal that Trump has that they're going to pay people $1,000 to leave the country on their own illegal immigrants.
00:15:08.940Sweden has a policy like that that's been moderately successful.
00:15:11.920They're actually just increasing to $35,000.
00:15:13.740But if we have a even a program where if you've been in the country for a year and we can prove it and you want to leave and you have a criminal record and $10,000, that's way faster and way cheaper than going through the courts.
00:15:42.780But think about it, Tim, that's an IQ test.
00:15:44.920Like, if you think, hey, I'm going to make less than $35,000 here, then we really don't need you.
00:15:52.920Like, I mean, that's a really good way of getting an IQ test going where if you're like, no.
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00:18:03.900So if you're in AOC's district, right, or you're in a district in Los Angeles, a very heavy immigrant district,
00:18:09.580you really only need like 90,000 votes to win because most people who live in the district who make it up aren't voting.
00:18:16.560If you live in Ohio or New Hampshire or a state with a district that's very populated, equally populated, but has a lot more registered voters,
00:18:24.620you need a quarter of a million or 300,000 votes to win.
00:18:27.840It really becomes an unfair system as a whole for candidates and Americans who have much their vote counts for.
00:18:35.300Your vote counts a lot more in a district that's heavily immigrant because most of those people who are represented in the census,
00:18:41.240represented in the district, cannot vote for or against you.
00:18:46.300And if we didn't, if we sat there and said, hey, let's have a freeze, let's reduce numbers and let's deport illegals,
00:18:52.540you know, maybe Texas and Florida would lose a House seat as well, as well as New York, California and Illinois losing a ton.
00:18:58.820But Ohio, Indiana, you know, North Carolina, those states with overrepresented populations of actual American citizens would also gain seats as well.
00:19:08.260And that is the only way Democrats are keeping these sinking ships alive.
00:19:12.080New York City, New York State, California, Illinois, these are, I mean, Illinois is such a failed state.
00:19:17.380A couple of years ago, someone won the lottery, the state lottery, and they couldn't even cash it because they couldn't pay the guy who won the lottery.
00:19:23.340Like imagine like quitting your job, telling your boss to F off and you can't get your lottery ticket cashed in.
00:19:27.680But that's how broke some of these states are.
00:19:30.520And they don't have, their only way of facilitating a, you know, anything is by sitting there and having immigrants come in and pour in.
00:19:41.040But there is a, this is a very immediate issue.
00:19:44.480One of the other issues that I've been tracking is the population decline.
00:19:48.000So Gen Alpha right now is projecting to end this year and there's only about 40 to 42 million, which is a dramatic drop off.
00:19:55.860You've got 69 million Gen Z, 72 million millennials, I think around 69 million Gen Xers.
00:20:01.940In the next 10 years, starting, starting right now, actually, they're calling it the demographic cliff, where because of the financial crisis in 2007, you didn't have anybody having kids.
00:20:12.540We're supposed to have a bunch of 18 year olds right now entering that workforce.
00:20:16.820And I don't know how Trump answers that.
00:20:19.000And I know he's offered up that, that baby bonus, but that's not going to do anything for us in the immediate in terms of the labor, labor force.
00:20:25.640Democrats have been arguing immigration reverses this.
00:20:29.120And there's even been some never Trumpers who have argued mass migration to replace our decimated workforce.
00:20:34.560Either way, it sounds like, you know, I feel like if we do that, then it's going to disrupt the like the American tradition.
00:20:42.460It's going to shift the culture dramatically.
00:20:54.040Yeah, this is this is my episode for a numbers game coming up for my podcast numbers game coming up this Thursday.
00:20:59.020So 2007, this class, sorry, 2025, the high school class is graduating right now is the biggest population, sheer population size of high school graduates that ever existed.
00:21:10.820It's gotten smaller every single class size since the graduating class of 2042 will be smaller than the class of 2025 because people had less and less children.
00:22:37.340The financial crisis took 6% of the labor force and they never came back.
00:22:42.7006% labor force never came back after the 2007 financial crisis.
00:22:46.720They need to be reengaged in some capacity whatsoever.
00:22:49.120And then as far as a baby bump goes, there are alternatives the government can do, both local, state, and federal, to sit there and increase birth rates.
00:22:56.340But they have to be very, very smart about it.
00:22:58.080Building condominiums in cities where they have a two-bedroom, two-bathroom, and 1,000 square feet is not how you facilitate growing families.
00:23:17.860There's a famous, famous book called Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam from 2000.
00:23:23.060The number one thing that degrades and declines civic engagement, civic nationalism, anything to do with wanting to be around people like you and different than you is mass immigration.
00:23:34.280It's the worst, worst, worst thing that you could do for a society when it comes to social capital and social trust.
00:24:07.640I think that's how you deal with it in the middle, and then you sit there and work on trying to increase birth rates going forward.
00:24:12.560Do you think it's possible that, I'll put it this way, the cultural issues we are facing, right?
00:24:20.180You've got millennials are finally starting to have kids in their 30s.
00:24:24.780They were failure to launch, developmentally delayed, whatever.
00:24:28.660I think that there was a major cultural shift, either intentionally, I don't know if it was intentional, but you have people saying the world's overpopulated, don't have kids.
00:24:37.740You've got the New York Times saying climate change, don't have kids.
00:24:40.780How do you reverse a cultural trend like that?
00:24:45.560You know, it's one thing to say, hey, we're going to make plans.
00:24:48.380We're going to encourage people to have kids.
00:24:49.740But you've got ingrained, entrenched ideologies in this country that say don't do it.
00:24:56.240So the only two countries, the Western countries that have large population of children, Israel and the nation of Georgia.
00:25:01.480And the nation of Georgia, they had actually really bad fertility rates.
00:25:04.260And the patriarch, basically their version of the pope, the patriarch of the Georgian Orthodox Church, back in 2000, I want to say it's 15, 16, announced that for every third child born in the country, he was going to personally baptize them and people get selfies and whatnot.
00:25:39.200And I think that if you have, listen, if you're a conservative parent and you have a daughter, make sure that they don't surround themselves by liberals who tell them that hating kids is the whole thing.
00:25:48.520I think people need to have a readjustment and the cultures of readjustment saying having kids is a sacrifice.
00:25:53.640It's a lot, but at the same time, the reward is far outnumbers the cost benefit.
00:26:35.060Yeah, but I do feel like for a lot of liberals, they're told that—we were just talking about this on the IRL the other day—maximize your pleasure, minimize your pain, so don't bother having kids because you're just living for the now nihilism.
00:26:59.880We are seeing that Gen Z, there's a huge uptick in Christianity, there is a trend towards the right, and there's a lot of people who think it's because we've won the arguments, that conservatives—I say we as in they.
00:27:13.120I don't consider myself to be overtly conservative, but this political space has a better argument, and young people are drifting towards freedom, meritocracy, etc.
00:27:21.220I actually think that's a tiny component of it.
00:27:28.620One, I think that a problem for millennials, and as a millennial, I think we were told that we have more time than we do.
00:27:33.640I think a lot of millennials were told, oh, no, everyone can have a kid at age 40 and have no problems whatsoever, which is not true.
00:27:40.320And secondly, I think that if places were really serious about trying to get people started younger in life and not due to Gen Alpha like they did to Gen Z, to Gen Millennials, rather,
00:27:51.540I don't see why we can't figure out accelerated programs in schools to get kids out of college by 20 and get kids out of high school by 16 or 17.
00:28:00.880I don't know why we have to—if they're capable, if they're smart, if they can get into—get some kind of a fellowship program or work program, getting them to adulthood faster will also make them have children faster.
00:28:13.740Going to school until you're mid to late 20s is just—I mean, that's the way you just forbid people to have kids because they have to go to school for so long.
00:28:48.660You can't put them all in the same place and say, good luck, because the smart kids are going to be like, why am I sitting here doing nothing?
00:28:53.860And the dumb kids are going to be saying, this is too fast.
00:29:09.880Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's—I mean, there'll always be some conservative kids who are going to become a liberal, but—and, like, there were some liberal kids who become conservative.
00:29:16.200But that is a big thing in those values if those populations grow and where they're growing naturally.
00:29:21.200You know, there's a town, like, called St. Mary's, Kansas.
00:29:23.960You wouldn't know this town, but it's a town of, like, Latin mass Catholics.
00:29:26.520They're very traditional, very religious, but it's not like a cult.
00:29:29.380You can buy a house there if you want to.
00:29:32.140Their average population in this town is, like, 25.
00:29:35.300All the surrounding rural areas are, like, 57, 58.
00:29:38.220It—by convening around like-minded people of equal values or conservative values, that tends to, like, promote the idea of having families around those things.
00:29:50.900And you've seen that in other parts of the country.
00:29:52.600That's a very, very big part of it because it's just in the middle of nowhere.
00:29:55.500But that's how you're seeing these other smaller areas of populations sit there and grow is by like-mindedness and by communal beliefs around ideas of religion, family, faith, freedom, all that other stuff.
00:30:20.720I know we have a long way from the midterms, but based on what we're seeing now, how's it going to play out?
00:30:25.660Because the Republicans have such a small majority, there's two things to consider.
00:30:30.480One, if Ohio redistricts, right, there's three House seats in Ohio that Republicans could redistrict and do mid-cycle redistricting to make them Republican.
00:30:38.120That would at least bolster some of the numbers.
00:30:40.560The last environment was a R plus two.
00:30:42.460If it goes to a D plus two, which is a four-point swing, the good thing for Republicans is that there's 13 Democrats in Trump one seats.
00:30:50.600Republicans can pick off a few of those.
00:30:52.800It's much harder for Democrats to pick up for Trump seats because there's only three Republicans in Kamala seats.
00:30:58.640And they're much closer towards the middle than the Trump seats, where there's a handful of Democrats who will be the last Democrat to ever represent the area.
00:31:07.780Henry Cular, for example, down in South Texas.
00:31:12.180These are dinosaurs who are the last ones to hold their seats.
00:31:14.840It's there's if the realignment continues, if Hispanics and young people show up and they still vote Republican, Republicans, even if they lose the House, it won't be by very much.
00:32:44.880There's a lot going on and also a little going on with the constant battle between Trump and the Democrats.
00:32:50.180Basically, anything he does being negative, you always have that story lingering, but I got to be honest.
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00:33:53.560So, of course, we're here, you know, we're doing production behind the scenes, and we're trying to find stories we care about that's—I'll put it this way.
00:34:01.440You know, I did a segment a little while ago about GTA 6.