A week until the midterms: What to expect

It feels like a week of election previews. We've been previewing the Israeli election. Now let's preview for next week, I suppose, but the campaign is hotting up for sure this week, the midterm elections in the United States. Emily Maitlis, co-host of Global's podcast, The News Agents, is here to discuss it with me. Can we do a bit of a layman and laywoman's trot through of a couple of things, first of all? Very much. We rely on you for this. There are two... A lot of seats up in two separate houses. Explain the two separate houses and why the amount of seats up in each is different. Yeah, so a week tomorrow it all kicks off. We will be live throughout the night on LBC doing our election results programme for you. And as you may know, in the US there is the House of Congress which breaks into the top house and the bottom house, the Senate and the House. And there are lots and lots of house races. And only four different, a number of four different between the Republicans and the Democrats. So it is increasingly seen as. Quite an easy pickup for the Democrats. If they're having a good night, they just need four new seats in the House of Representatives to be able to take that. Where it gets complicated is in the Senate, where there are about nine or ten absolute nail-biter races. And once again, the Democrats need four. Four pick-ups, four Senate seats, but out of only 100 altogether. And it is much harder to pick up a Senate seat because there are fewer of them. And the balance, just so people know at the moment there, I'm told, is 53 Republicans, 45 Democrats, two independents. Exactly. Yeah. It is very tight. So there is a scenario in which the Democrats could pick up the House, but not the Senate. There is a scenario in which they could pick up. And there is also a scenario where all the polling has been wrong, as it has been in the past, and they pick up neither. And all this talk of a blue wave, despite Trump's terrible polling numbers, is overestimated and they don't get the gains that they thought. But why it's important, and I think that's probably more relevant for our audience today, is that it essentially takes away Trump's power. It takes away a lot of his power if he cannot control. The laws, the bills going through Congress. In other words, the Democrats can control the House. If they can control the Senate, they get to decide the agenda for the next two years. And there is a question of whether it essentially makes Trump into a lame duck president. He has got his executive power, whatever happens. He can push through things. And we've seen him do that before. So he would probably start using his executive powers. He's got the Supreme Court still. And he's got the Supreme Court. And I guess the other thing that we should discuss is whether... If the Democrats do manage to take one or both houses, they then start a period of judicial investigation, like the impeachments we saw in the first... Will they inevitably, or is that up for discussion? I mean, I think the big question for the Democrats is how much effort they want to spend to put into going after Trump. Because it takes a lot of political time, that, doesn't it? And Americans might look at that and think, actually... Do we want that? Drowning here. You've got better things for my representatives to be doing. I mean, I think that's that's a very live issue for Democrats that they on the one hand, they're saying people actually need to see their bills come down. They need to see the war in Iran stop. They need to be able to afford the price of gas or the rest of it. Do they really want us going after like Trump's ballroom or Trump's swimming pool or Trump's, you know, corruption? And on the other hand, you get them saying, actually, this is really important. It's about corruption. You know, it is about... It's about illegitimacy. It's about abuse of power in office. And if we're not going to call that out when we have the power, then what happens next time? And if they decide to go for it, the Democrats, as if flying around this conversation, if they win the power to do this, if they choose to do this, is it likely to be specific examples of corruption that they would go after? Because he's done a bit of a sort of, sent out a lot of flack, hasn't he? Well, we know the old quote about flooding the zone with the thing that maybe we won't mention on air. But that was always, you know, flooding the zone was their way of saying if you do enough. Stuff, crazy stuff, crazy stuff that nobody will know where to start or where to start unpicking it. I mean, I think the Democrats, if they do win, will have their work cut out for them, put it that way. But right now, there are races that they're getting very excited about that I'm actually quietly thinking, I'm not sure these are in the bag. And if you look at the way Trump started to speak, he's been going to states which are on an average day, very red Republican states, which would suggest to you that. You know, he's feeling quite desperate. He doesn't think he's got those in the bag. Why would you have to go to Texas? You should have Texas. Why would you have to go to Kansas? You should have Kansas, Mississippi, all these kind of very Trumpy states, if you like. So they're nervous. They are nervous, but his language has got increasingly more erratic. I mean, we've heard about his, you know, he's definitely kind of out there talking about men's muscles on the election campaign. I don't know whether he thinks that that sort of reminds people of his entertainment. He gets people to listen and all the rest of it. He's also got much more racist, you know, so the filter is off. He was in Michigan over the weekend and he was talking about the Democratic candidate for the Senate there as being on a kind of wanted list. You know, he'd have to go through the body scanner because he's got a Muslim name. And that kind of language, which is, as I say, sort of unfiltered, pretty crude Trump racism at its most obvious, could still... Work, frankly, you know, it could still have the effect. I mean, from his perspective, it has before. So why not try it again? It has before. And what he's trying to do is, you know, win an absolutely critical seat in the Senate. He'll try anything. Have the Democrats themselves as a party, and I know that, you know, there are different wings to that party, but have they come back to life in a significant way? Because there was a terrible doldrum just after 24, wasn't there? I mean, I think the embarrassment of the Biden years really left a long legacy because they couldn't explain why they'd all defended this man who clearly, ultimately, wasn't up to the job, frankly. What you have to remember is that there is no... There's no leader of the opposition party in America. There is no Democrat leader. There is no, you know, there is no Kemi Badenock, right? There are leading figures, but that's not the same. There are big leading figures and they're sort of pulling in different directions. So you've got the California governor, Gavin Newsom, who has been very... Um, muscular in his criticism of Trump and very funny and has taken him on quite pugilistic and has said, you know, we're not going to tolerate that and I'm not going to stand for that. And he's not going to put ICE agents on my streets. And, you know, he's he's he's stocked it back to Trump in quite an impressive way. Then you've got some of this new brand of democratic socialist, like the guy in Michigan, Abdullah Saeed, who is very fluent on the campaign trail, who has a very strong message. But actually, he says, I'm speaking as a doctor. He's a medical doctor. He's a medical doctor. He wants to talk about affordability. Colleagues were showing me his nana and granddad's videos that he's put out, and they're just fantastic. Right. I mean, he's very impressive on the stump, but America has got to decide if it's made its peace with the idea of socialism, right? Because they come from the socialist wing of the Democrats. And then you've got these really interesting figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who might or might, I mean, she's not up for election this time around, You know, she may throw her hat into the ring to run for the presidency. Would the Democrats kind of go with? That, I don't know, it would be exciting. Very left-wing for America. Very left-wing, but she was the one who recently said, woke one is dead. In other words, forget all that stuff. Forget the stuff that you didn't like about us last time. We're grown-ups now. We're grown-ups now. We're playing a different game. There are a lot of interesting characters that are coming through for the Democrats, which I think are giving people... Real hope, particularly if they win their Senate races this time round. But there isn't a unified voice. You know, I'd say Bernie Sanders is probably still the strongest voice. And he's not even a Democrat. He's one of the senators that's independent. He caucuses with the Dems, but he's independent. And some seats up for elections, some not. Is that in a way that we have some council seats and others? Exactly. Yes, I think it's about a third of seats. So we'd have some councils. For elections, I'm not... Exactly, yeah, so you're not... So the races on the night that we're going to be looking at are basically some of the governor's races. There was a really... disgusting dirty governor's race in Ohio where Vivek Ramaswamy you might remember who was one of the presidential nominees in 2024 alongside Trump is fighting to be governor of Ohio and he in the last week put out a video of the mother of his opponent and the mother is disavowing her daughter and saying don't trust my daughter she's a liar The daughter, the candidate, was sexually abused by the mother's partner and was removed from her home when she was 12. So the fact that you were trying to use an estranged mother... Telling an electorate not to trust her daughter. Over that issue. Over that. It doesn't get lower really, does it? It doesn't really get lower than that. And so we're going to see whether that has damaged him. So there's some interesting governor's races. There's some absolutely fascinating Senate races. We'll be looking at Michigan, Iowa, Ohio, Texas, Maine, you know, a few of those. And then we're going to be trying to look at the overall shape of what happens to each house and what that could mean for the future of Yeah, of Trump and the government in America. You mentioned Texas. Yes. Yeah. Now, Now, James Tallarico is the Democrat candidate there. And he's making a lot of noise, isn't he? Or there is a lot of noise about him. He's such an interesting candidate because he's very different to the democratic socialists. He's a preacher, he's a teacher, he's a very quiet-spoken... Go on, Dusty. I know, I know. I can feel it bubbling up. You'd be great, Dusty. He is the son of a preacher man. No, he is the preacher man. And he's got a sort of short back and sides, very sort of neat hairstyle. He's very quietly spoken. And when he had flu... About a week ago, and he had to lie low because of his flu, his opponents in Texas put out this astonishing lie that he'd actually been sent off to a mental institute in Ohio because he'd had a nervous breakdown. And so, I mean, the lies and the catalyze are absolutely off the charts. And he had to come out and say, not only was I not in this place, but I've never been to Ohio. So, I mean... They could have checked that in a heartbeat. Of course they know that these things aren't true. But he is standing against somebody. But some people will buy it in this age of craziness. And, you know, his opponent is literally a crook. I mean, somebody who's been indicted by his own, who's been impeached by his own party, who has, I think, been done for corruption. I mean, I would say skeletons in the closet, but they're not in the closet. They're hanging up on a rail right now, Ken Paxton. And yet there will still be people who say, I prefer the Republican red meat of Ken Paxton to James Tallarico. They've tried to paint James Tallarico as a vegan. There is nothing dirtier in Texas than being a vegan. Than a vegan, of course. He's not. I mean, he does eat steak. Yeah, he's not a vegan and he didn't go to a mental institution. And because of the set-up there, the size of the state and the set-up of the state and who gets elected when or who's up for election when, if he wins Tallarico, he'd be alongside Ted Cruz. Yes. Because there are two senators in that state. So that would be, in a sense, just a perfect illustration of things. It is almost impossible to think of a Democrat winning in the Texas Senate. I almost cannot imagine that happening. But he is, as things stand, several points, about six or seven points ahead. Portillo moment. A hundred percent. Countering that is the fact that Elon Musk is putting zillions into Texas. Right. And because Texas is now not just the center of, you know, cows and oil, but it's also the center of. of tech and the tech bros. So this is really important. Musk territory that he wants to keep regulation away from Texas for, you know, Twitter X, all the rest of it. And so he is pumping money into that state. And meanwhile, you've got Tallarico on the stage saying, do you really want the richest man in the world to buy your Senate? And just on the, on the, the Dems choice as to whether they go for Trump, if they win here. Could that include impeachment, an impeachment attempt, not just investigations? Oh, God, I'd be quite surprised, wouldn't you, Sheila? I mean, it's very... The thing we've learned about impeachment is fundamentally it is political. You know, it's not criminal, it's political, and all you need is enough Republicans. And we've been there, done that with him. We've been there twice. You know, we thought it was quite extraordinary that he got impeached not once but twice. If it was a third time, I think you'd wonder... Ah, you'd wonder if the Dems were slightly wasting their time on that one. There must be better ways of bringing somebody to hear. That would be my instinct.