“The Pessimistic Ones Think They’re Going To Lose By a Landslide” Byron York on Republicans Chances In The Midterms

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Guy Benson: With that, let’s bring in Byron York, chief political correspondent at the Washington Examiner, where we are colleagues, and also a Fox News contributor. Byron, it’s always great to have you on the show.

Byron York: Hi, guys. Good to be here.

Guy Benson: So, you’ve written a piece asking, “Are GOP doomers overreacting about the upcoming elections?” At least right now, things aren’t looking very good. Is that a fair way of putting it? There are people pushing back, saying there’s way too much negativity. As you engage in analysis, I’m trying to weigh all of this as well. What’s your overall thought here?

Byron York: Well, I have gotten a good bit of feedback saying, yes, I’m being overly pessimistic. But, you know, the reason I wrote it was that, as you saw in the last few days, a lot of Republicans involved with the midterms seem to have just completely flipped out and said, “Oh, this is terrible. There’s no hope. We’re all going to die.”

And it’s not just that we’re going to lose. There’s going to be a blue wave. But wait a minute–it may not be a blue wave. It might be a blue tsunami.

When I hear that, that’s when I began thinking, you know, maybe people are getting a little overly excited here.

The facts are that the situation looks bad for Republicans. It looks bad for them to keep–let’s talk about the House–it looks very bad for them to keep the House. Because, as you know, if Democrats flip five seats, they win control of the House. The margins are that narrow.

So it looks pretty bad for Republicans in the House. As far as the Senate is concerned, I would call the whole thing a toss-up right now. There are a lot of races that one would think would not be competitive for Republicans that are.

And so I think it’s entirely possible that Democrats could pick up the net four Senate seats they need, but it’s also possible that Republicans could keep the Senate.

So my feeling is that, right now, as far as the House is concerned, there are two types of Republicans. The optimistic ones think the party is going to lose the House, but just by a little. And the pessimistic ones think they’re going to lose by a landslide. I think that’s where we are right now.

Guy Benson: Yeah. And look, if you look at history over the last 100 years, generally the party that’s in power, especially when they’ve got everything, doesn’t do well in a midterm election setting like this. That’s just how it almost always goes. So it would not be historically anomalous if that were to happen again. In fact, it would be the norm.

But the question is, and you put your finger on it, will this be bad, or will this be a cataclysm for the Republicans?

And look, there are some polling points that sort of make me take a deep breath and say, “Oh, man, this could be very ugly in November.” Then there’s others where it’s like, “Well, I mean, yeah, that’s not great. Probably not going to go well here, but this is kind of survivable.”

The Senate could definitely still be maintained as a Republican majority. There’s kind of scattershot polling out there where, if you want to see a storyline, you can probably find a story for it.

But, yeah, it’s sort of the off-the-record quotes that are coming out and various plugged-in people–the mood seems to be pretty dark at the moment.

Byron York: Yeah. One thing I think I should stress here is that we’ve all seen polls that were spectacularly wrong in various elections. Republicans are particularly sensitive because they say, “Well, they’re always wrong against us.”

Although, just in the recent Democratic primary season, we saw one that was really wrong in Michigan, in which Abdul El-Sayed was supposed to win by 10 points; he barely got by by one. And then, even worse, in Wisconsin, where Francesca Hong was supposed to be the Democratic nominee by 20 points, and she lost.

So we saw a lot of bad polls.

And I will say that, as far as the polling that I’m basing my overall prediction for the House on, it’s really just two things.

One, it’s President Trump’s job approval rating, which is a very, very good predictor of how a president’s going to do in a midterm.

And the other is what’s called a generic ballot, which has been asked for decades and decades. It’s the polling question: If the election were held today, would you vote for the Republican or the Democratic candidate to represent you?

Right now, if you look at the RealClearPolitics average of polls–so, an average of a bunch of polls–it has Democrats ahead by a little more than eight points on the generic ballot.

And then we all know that Trump’s approval rating–it’s 38.7 right now in the RealClearPolitics average of polls. If you wanted to look a little more closely, look at his approval rating for handling, say, the economy. It is even worse.

And these are really terrible numbers.

And we should point out, you did make the historical argument, which is absolutely correct: Presidents almost always lose seats in the House in their midterms. And in anybody’s lifetime, it’s only happened twice that it didn’t work that way.

Once was 1998, which was Bill Clinton, and it was during the Lewinsky scandal. Republicans wanted to impeach Clinton. The public was saying, “No, don’t impeach him. Just criticize him, but don’t impeach him.”

And it turns out Republicans lost seats. Democrats picked up seats in that midterm, although not enough to gain control of the House, which ended up impeaching Clinton.

And then the other time was 2002, when the war in Iraq was going on–no, actually, it was a buildup to the war in Iraq after 9/11, and people did not want to change presidents in that very difficult time.

Those are the only two times in anybody’s lifetime that the president’s party has actually picked up seats in the midterm. Every other time, including Donald Trump’s first time in office, in which Republicans lost 40 seats, everything else is–

Guy Benson: And then you look at some individual trends. You just mentioned RealClearPolitics and the polling averages. Those guys look at the polling averages and all the aggregated data, and they make decisions about how to categorize certain races.

And without going into a deep dive on either of these, just in the last 24 hours, RealClearPolitics has shifted the Nebraska Senate race, which was not really on many people’s radar, toward the Democrat. He’s calling himself an independent, but he’s definitely a Democrat. This guy, Dan Osborn, is playing, I think, a cynical game pretending to be independent-minded because the Democratic brand is so in tatters in a state like Nebraska.

In fact, the Democratic Party is still very unpopular most places. They’re not a popular party. But the alternative is the party in power. Their base is fired up, independents have moved in their direction begrudgingly, and Republicans seem dyspeptic.

So that’s kind of the landscape right now.

But in a place like Nebraska, where someone can’t really run as a Democrat for Senate and have any chance, this guy is running as an independent, quote-unquote, but he would be a lefty Democrat.

And RealClearPolitics has moved that race into the toss-up category.

They’ve also done the same in the governor’s race here in the state of Florida. This is a place where Ron DeSantis absolutely dominated in recent years, where the Republicans have a huge advantage, and yet supposedly, apparently, the atmosphere out there is bad enough that you’ve got a very red-state Senate race up for grabs–or another one. It would just add it to the list.

And then even a place like Florida, which seemed to be maybe off the board for a generation for Democrats, at least according to a couple of these prognosticators, is saying, “I know, actually, the Democrats might have a shot statewide in Florida.”

That, I think, is a preview of maybe the bad end of the spectrum of how ugly it could get if things break poorly.

Byron York: Yeah, I think you’re right, although Nebraska is one of those states where there’s just not a huge amount of polling. And there are a number of states in every election where you think, “I don’t really know what’s happening there. I haven’t spent any time there. They’ve got a few polls. I don’t know about them.”

Florida is completely different. Florida is a huge state, with a lot of polling, a lot of officeholders. And I think if there are warning signs in Florida, which had become reliably red, I think that’s a real problem.

Guy Benson: You have also written a piece at the Washington Examiner about likely the number one pickup opportunity for Democrats in the Senate this cycle. That’s in North Carolina. Tell us a bit about that race.

Byron York: You know, when you think about what seats are going to change in the Senate, you think, “Well, I don’t know, Texas will be really interesting, and Michigan will be really interesting.”

Well, the one that seems to be already kind of set in concrete is North Carolina, where Roy Cooper–first of all, Tom Tillis, the Republican senator, is retiring, kind of hounded out of office by Donald Trump, who is happy to see him go.

And Roy Cooper, who has been elected governor and was attorney general as well, has been elected six times statewide in North Carolina. He’s running, and his Republican opponent to replace Tillis is Michael Whatley, who is the former head of the Republican Party in North Carolina.

And the polls have just been extremely reliable. Go back to March. Cooper is leading in all of them, and his lead has never been smaller than six and a half points. It’s never been larger than eight and a half points–kind of a steady line going from left to right on the polling graph.

And Trump is very unpopular in North Carolina. But we should point out he won North Carolina three times–in 2016, 2020, and 2024. Each time, by the way, with a slightly higher percentage of the vote and a higher raw vote total as well.

But this last year, his job approval rating in North Carolina has just plummeted. It’s somewhere in the 30s. I’ve quoted one poll that said 38%. I quoted another poll that had a 31% approval rating.

And here again, I think that’s a really, really good indicator of what’s going on. And it appears also that Cooper, having been elected statewide six times, is somebody the voters appear to feel pretty comfortable with.

Guy Benson: Yeah. Chuck Schumer really wanted Cooper to run, got his man, and at least the polling suggests that he’s in a strong position to win and flip that seat.

I do want to ask you: Did you see the comment–I saw a headline about this–that Roy Cooper’s apparently defending the institution of the filibuster in the Senate?

That’s interesting, because a lot of the up-and-coming, rising Democratic stars–it’s becoming kind of like a litmus test to be very much in favor of abolishing the filibuster, although Democrats, of course, are using it themselves a lot now because they’re in the minority, which is what they always do. But if they get back into the majority, they want to blow up the filibuster and potentially do all sorts of things, you know, from passing legislation to potentially even adding states or D.C. statehood or packing the Supreme Court–all sorts of really crazy, radical stuff.

Here’s Roy Cooper, who’s ahead fairly comfortably, apparently speaking out in favor of the filibuster. Is that significant to you?

Byron York: Yeah, it is. It tells me he probably believes it. He’s not doing it to curry favor amongst the left wing of his party.

Of course, Donald Trump is pushing Republicans in the Senate to eliminate the filibuster. He wants to do it too, saying that, look, if Democrats get elected, that’s the first thing they’re going to do, so why don’t we just do it now and we can push through my legislation?

You know, I just think getting rid of the filibuster is a terrible, terrible, terrible idea. Democrats in the Senate would have done it a few years ago, had it not been for Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, the two “centrist” Democratic senators who didn’t go along.

I mean, if it weren’t for them, you know, this whole thing might have already been gone.

The filibuster used to apply to things like judicial nominations. They got rid of it for that, but it still applies to legislation, which has prevented many really, really bad bills from being passed.

And I think they need to keep the filibuster. But we have a situation now where one party is absolutely determined to do it. And if they get enough votes–

Guy Benson: But possibly with this exception, right? And if you’ve got Roy Cooper coming in against it, and I’m sure there are some other more old-school Democrats who recognize the utility of the filibuster that they’ve used to great effect in certain ways when they’ve been in the minority, I just wonder if there would be some sort of a firewall against all that radicalism.

And I raised before the break the interesting case, as always, really, of John Fetterman of Pennsylvania. He was just asked a question: If it’s a 50-50 Senate–or like 50 to 49, or there’s some ambiguity about who is in charge of the Senate after this next election, where you’ve got JD Vance potentially casting tie-breaking votes as the vice president–would John Fetterman be that 51st vote for Democrats if it came down to it?

And he was sort of noncommittal on that, saying he wasn’t really sure. What’s that about, Byron?

Byron York: Well, Democrats want him to say that he’ll always stick with the team, always. And he’s not going to say that, obviously. If only on issues involving Israel, he’s clearly not with the Democratic team in the Senate.

The other thing is, by not saying this, if that situation arises in which his is the deciding vote, John Fetterman becomes a really, really powerful guy.

So why come out and say, “I’m going to do A” or “I’m going to do B”? Why not come out and say, “I’m always going to make the best decision for the people of Pennsylvania,” leaving both sides just trying to curry your favor?

So that’s what he’s looking at.

By the way, you know, we had a split 50-50 Senate for two years after the incredibly close 2000 election. George Bush is elected president, and the Senate is tied for the first two years, and boy, is it hard to do anything.

So if the Senate is tied and the House is Democratic, you know, Trump will be very lucky to just get a few nominations through.

Guy Benson: Byron York is chief political correspondent at the Washington Examiner and a Fox News contributor. You can follow him on social media, as I do, at @ByronYork.

As we think about the upcoming November elections, I would say doomism on the right can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If people just convince themselves it’s terrible and morale goes down further and people are less excited to turn out, that could sort of almost manufacture worse outcomes.

And so I think conservatives and Republicans need to guard against that while also being clear-eyed about reality at the same time, which is what we’re trying to do here.

Byron, always appreciate your analysis. Thank you.

Byron York: Thanks, Guy. I enjoyed it.