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Jane Coaston: It’s Tuesday, August 26th, I’m Jane Coaston, and this is What a Day, the show that cannot wait to get checks from pharmaceutical companies. The obvious result of this very well thought out, deeply considered strategy from President Donald Trump. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] We have something coming up, favored nations, where I’m going to be reducing drug prices by 14, 1,500 percent. 

Jane Coaston: Don’t run to CVS all at once! [music break] On today’s show, Trump hosts South Korea’s president, Lee Jae Myung, at the White House, and Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, says an Israeli strike on a hospital in Gaza was a, quote, “tragic mishap.” But let’s start with polling, and let’s start with a big, unimpeachable fact. Trump is unpopular, not just with, you know, me, but with Americans more broadly. After just over six months in office, Gallup found that he has an approval rating of about 37%, lower than any other president at this time in their presidency, besides Trump’s first term in the White House. Congrats on everyone hating you twice? He has lost ground with pretty much everyone, from Gen Z to Latinos, many of whom voted for him in November. Which sounds like it’s great for Democrats. Except that Democrats are also underwater in polling. According to the Wall Street Journal, 63% of voters have a negative view of the Democratic Party. And yes, I am aware that this includes Democrats who are mad at the party but will still vote for Democrats in the midterms, but the point still stands. If you’ve been following politics for any amount of time, you know that the polls hold an almost mystical place in the minds of political strategists, politicians, and heck, even some political junkie voters. But if you’ve watched the news in the last, oh, year, you know that clearly just do what the polls say isn’t working very well. While Democrats keep talking about so-called kitchen table issues, the Trump administration is trying to militarize major cities. So what does polling tell us politics dorks? And can polling give us a complete picture of how Americans are feeling? To find out, I had to talk to Crooked’s resident polling expert, Dan Pfeiffer. He’s the co-host of Pod Save America and author of The Message Box on Substack. Dan Pfeiffer, welcome back to What a Day! 

Dan Pfeiffer: It’s been a while. It’s good to see you.

Jane Coaston: So let’s start with a roundup of how Donald Trump is polling. Where’s he at right now? 

Dan Pfeiffer: Donald Trump is polling right where about where he’s been since the beginning of the summer, which is an approval rating of about 42, 43, and a disapproval rating in the low 50s, which is puts him in a worse position at this point in his presidency than any other president other than Donald Trump at this point in 2017. 

Jane Coaston: What do polls tell us is turning off Trump’s 2024 voters or potential voters? Because we’ve seen plummeting numbers from Latino voters, from young voters, from pretty much everybody. 

Dan Pfeiffer: Yeah, it’s primarily inflation. He’s underwater on every issue, including immigration, but his numbers on inflation are actually right now worse than Biden’s were at this point in 2024. You know he came in with this promise that he was gonna lower costs and get inflation under control, instead– 

Jane Coaston: Our we were going to use this old-fashioned term, groceries, and they were going to–

Dan Pfeiffer: Yes. 

Jane Coaston: –be so much cheaper. 

Dan Pfeiffer: Yes, turns out they are more expensive in part because he said nothing to curb inflation, but instead, I mean, it’s truly an insane move to sit to run on a promise to lower costs and then make the centerpiece of your economic plan be something that raises costs and makes inflation worse, which is what he’s done with his tariffs. And polling constantly shows that the one thing that’s breaking through particularly to those voters who don’t like mainline politics is tariffs, right? It’s like when they do a word cloud, they ask you what have you heard most recently about Trump? It’s tariffs is always the number one thing. 

Jane Coaston: What is his strongest issue, according to polls? 

Dan Pfeiffer: It kind of depends on how you ask the question. Crime is probably his strongest issue, but it doesn’t get polled that often. And immigration has been his strongest issue, and how you ask that one matters a lot. If you ask, say, border security, he’s in the positive. If you say immigration, he’s negative. If you say deportations, he’s even more negative. Saying it’s his strongest issue is not the same thing as saying it’s a strong issue. 

Jane Coaston: Dan. Overarching, here’s my worry, concern, whatever you want to call it. Polls are basically snapshots in time of how some people feel at a given time. And one of the challenges we have as people who do mainline politics is that voters who are nice normal people who hold multiple opinions all at once change their minds all the time very quickly. You can see this with regard to immigration. People have a thermostatic opinion with regard to immigration in which you’re very concerned about immigration and then Trump comes in and then they’re like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Not like that. And then suddenly they’re like actually 71% of us support making immigration to the United States easier. So, are polls even useful in governing at this point? 

Dan Pfeiffer: They are one useful tool in understanding how people feel at any given moment and to set baselines to track and see what changes public opinion. So if you look at immigration polling, Trump started, if you’re just using the term, do you approve of him on immigration? He started quite positive and then he dropped and went negative right at the time that all of the news coverage was on the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case and sending people to the torture prison in El Salvador. Things got worse and he hit his actual nadir during all of the coverage earlier this summer around the masked agents deporting people and raiding schools and picnics in parks. And so the one thing he like it tells us is when people pay more attention to immigration, what Trump’s actually doing, his numbers go down. And I think that’s a helpful thing for Democrats to recognize because we’ve been in this battle and our party is like, should you know immigration is a strongest issue, shouldn’t we talk about tariffs? Shouldn’t we talk about affordability? And one thing I think the poll has showed us is that when we talk about immigration in a compelling way, we can actually take his strength and turn it into a weakness. 

Jane Coaston: Let’s talk about the accuracy of polling when it comes to Trump in particular, because some pollsters were surprised that he took the electoral college in 2016 and then in 2024, he won the popular vote. And there’s still that idea of the, I believe the term is like the quiet Trump voter or the–

Dan Pfeiffer: Yeah. 

Jane Coaston: –silent Trump voter that Trump supporters are so alienated by pollsters that his actual support is either unclear or underestimated. I have met a lot of Trump supporters. They are not very quiet. But why does this keep happening? Like what like how can we accurately understand how people feel about Donald Trump when it seems like the polls around him themselves are somehow rattled by the presence of Donald Trump? 

Dan Pfeiffer: Right, so if you look at like 2016 and 2020, the polls were way off. They were off nationally. They were off in the particularly off in the battleground states. And there are lots of reasons for that. But one thing that we’ve come to learn over time is the people who are less engaged in politics, who follow the news less closely, are less likely, they have lower institutional trust, and they’re less likely to talk to a pollster. Those voters are disproportionately Donald Trump voters. And so in 2024, the polls were actually quite accurate. If you were going on vibes, how we all felt in that last week when Trump’s–

Jane Coaston: Yeah. 

Dan Pfeiffer: –doing the garbage island thing and Kamala it seems like Kamala Harris is getting these great crowds. 

Jane Coaston: Yeah. 

Dan Pfeiffer: And you think she’s gonna win? If you were actually looking at the polling averages, he was definitely headed towards a popular vote victory and likely electoral college victory. And the battleground states tend to break all one way. They did in 2020 as well. Um. The pollsters did a, they did a statistical trick in 2024 that has worked out pretty well, which is what they did is they asked people who they voted for in 2020 and then they weighted the poll to make sure that the poll had an accurate number of 2020 Trump voters and what that does is it really is a statistical trick because it you’re not getting enough Trump actual Trump voters in your phone calls or your texts or your online panels you’re just statistically waiting to account for the fact that you’re not and a lot of pollsters use that trick and that made the polls historically accurate like they weren’t exactly right but it was close enough that it’s well within the a band of normalcy for polling. And so the question for pollsters is what happens next? Like can you use that same trick when assuming it’s not Donald Trump on the ballot, it’s someone like JD Vance or Marco Rubio. Will that same statistical gimmick work going forward? And no one really knows the answer to that question. 

Jane Coaston: So I think that that leads to a broader question. How poll dependent should Democrats be? 

Dan Pfeiffer: I think Democrats make a mistake in how we think about the polls. Polls are most useful, not to help you understand who’s gonna win the race, it’s to help you understand what voters are feeling. Are they worried about immigration? Are they worried about inflation? Are they concerned about military occupations in major American cities? Like let’s sort of understand where the voters are. And the mistake I think democrats make is we try to meet the voters where they are, as opposed to using polling to tell us about how we can move the voters to where we need them to go. The polls tell us everyone cares about inflation. So we should only talk about inflation, as opposed to looking at the polls and saying, Donald Trump is using the military to invade American cities. What do the polls tell us about how we can get American people to care about that? How can we get them to care more about immigration? How do we get to care them more about Trump’s corruption? We too often use the polls as a way to tell us about what to say and when instead we should use a map to figure out where we need to go. 

Jane Coaston: I think that that actually leads perfectly into my next question. 

Dan Pfeiffer: Great, this is working out great then. 

Jane Coaston: I know, it’s perfect. You’re you’re it’s like you’re a professional at this. Like–

Dan Pfeiffer: I hate to say I might be. 

Jane Coaston: Like speaking of polls and actually language, there are a lot of polls, and I talked about it yesterday on the show, about how Democrats need to change up their language, stop using terms like triggering or microaggressions. You talked about this in your newsletter this week, and but you wrote that these folks have a point that quote, “our rhetoric often validates the rights caricature of Democrats.” You also said this critique is a magic words fallacy. Can you explain what that means? 

Dan Pfeiffer: Yeah, for as long as I’ve been in politics, every time the Democrats lose an election, we try to solve the problem in the easiest way possible. So instead of asking huge questions about, do we have the right policies? Do we have the right leaders? Are we running the right sort of campaigns? We immediately pivot to branding. You may remember this from 2004 after Bush won, everyone in the Democratic Party became obsessed with George the linguist, George Lakoff. Like if we could just find the right way to message our policies. In the ’90s, we were convinced at the reason we kept losing, which is hard to imagine now, we kept losing on abortion and taxes, was because Republicans had better words like pro-life and death tax. And here’s the thing I sort of ask people, which is how many times did Joe Biden or Kamala Harris say the words on that memo? I’d venture almost no times. 

Jane Coaston: Right. 

Dan Pfeiffer: Right. So if voters really think that those words define us, how did that happen if the most prominent Democrats on the planet didn’t use the words? So it tells me two things, one, the right has built a very successful apparatus to take whatever some Democrats somewhere said and use it–

Jane Coaston: And even not even Democrats, like–

Dan Pfeiffer: Yeah. 

Jane Coaston: People who are like tankies forever. I hate Joe Biden. And yet–

Dan Pfeiffer: Yes. 

Jane Coaston: –Fox News will be like, they said intersectionality. Why doesn’t Elizabeth Warren have to answer for that? 

Dan Pfeiffer: Yes, that’s exactly right. So that goes to my point, which is you we’re never going to stop every person on the planet from using these words. So as long as the right has this messaging apparatus that can take any single person, the most extreme example they can possibly find anywhere in the universe and use it against us, we’re just playing whack-a-mole in a way that is absolutely going to work. Because just mainstream Democrats are not using these words, they just aren’t. So like should we have better words? Yes. Should we have better messages? Yes. But if we but I think it we’re missing the point, which is we’re just getting massively outworked in the messaging space. So how do we solve that problem? How do we either build back, build a robust enough progressive media ecosystem that can push back on that or get our message out? Because this was the problem with Joe Biden is because voters never heard him say anything because he wasn’t out there enough. He wasn’t communicating in a way that broke through to people. And we don’t have the sort of messaging apparatus that can take a thing that our Democratic president says and put it in front of every voter. The right is filling that vacuum. All voters are hearing is the caricature of us. And my second worry here is that we’re just gonna miss, if we obsess over these words, we are gonna miss the bigger questions we should be asking ourselves, right, about how to deal with the real problems the Democratic party has. And so I think it’s a, we’re looking for the easy way out. The easiest thing to do is to change our words. It’s not to change our policies, not to change our leaders, it’s not to change everything we do and how we think about campaigns and communicating. That’s hard work. I just want people to focus on that work instead of just changing the words, which are fine to change. I don’t think Democrats should use some of these words, like I don’t want to hear a democratic nominee constantly referring to microaggressions or holding space, um, or the, or all the longer lists of words in here, but I just don’t, I really just don’t think that’s the problem. 

Jane Coaston: Dan, as always, thank you so much for joining me. 

Dan Pfeiffer: Great to be here, Jane, thanks. 

Jane Coaston: That was my conversation with Dan Pfeiffer, co-host of Pod Save America and author of The Message Box on Substack, where you can find us now too. We’ll link to Dan’s newsletter in our show notes. We’ll get to more of the news in a moment, but if you like the show, make sure to subscribe, leave a five-star review on Apple podcasts, watch us on YouTube and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. [music break]

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Jane Coaston: Here’s what else we’re following today. 

[sung] Headlines.

[clip of South Korean President Lee Jae Myung’s interpreter] Mr. President, let me begin by thanking you on behalf of the Korean people. I would like to thank you for giving your time for today’s meeting. And I heard that you recently redecorated the Oval Office. And I would have liked to say that it looks very bright and beautiful, and it has the dignity of America, and it symbolizes the new future and prosperity of America. 

Jane Coaston: He gets it. Start with compliments. That’s South Korean president, Lee Jae Myung, is speaking through an interpreter during what was expected to be a trade meeting with President Trump at the White House Monday. Lee has clearly learned from other world leaders that you catch more Trumps with honey than with vinegar. And he really leaned into that strategy. Yes, he lauded the decor in the Oval Office, and he also besieged Trump to continue promoting South Korean peace efforts. He even floated the idea of building a Trump Tower in North Korea. Lee’s buttering up must have worked because there seemed to be no hostilities during the visit. Trump congratulated Lee on his election earlier this summer, and of course discussed North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] It’s an honor to be with you. I will say that Kim Jong Un and I had a very good relationship, as you remember, and still do. And when I came in, I didn’t know him. We had two summits, but uh we became very friendly. Respect, it was great respect. 

Jane Coaston: It wouldn’t be a Trump press conference if he didn’t brag about being friends with a dictator, but back to the matter at hand, trade came up during the meeting, probably no coincidence, because they’ve been working out details of a deal started this summer that among other things, raised some tariffs on South Korean goods and allowed some U.S. investments. Trump told reporters after the meeting, he thinks it’s a done deal. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] They had some problems with it, but we we stuck to our guns. We we are going to, they’re going to make the deal that they agreed to make. And he’s a very good guy, a very good representative for South Korea. 

Jane Coaston: Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man who was accidentally deported to an El Salvadoran super prison, spoke at a rally Monday morning, despite still being under the threat of deportation. [clip of Kilmar Abrego Garcia speaking in Spanish] Standing in front of a Baltimore Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office, Abrego Garcia said he was grateful to be a free man. When he entered the office for what was supposed to be an interview shortly after, Abrego Garcia was taken into custody by ICE. However, his lawyers quickly filed a legal action to prevent his deportation. Their filing automatically pauses the process for two days. A federal judge has since ruled that he cannot be deported. Before he was released from federal prison last week, the Department of Justice offered him a pretty insane deal. Plead guilty to human trafficking and be sent to Costa Rica, or don’t take the deal and get deported to Uganda where there is a violent dictatorship. He turned the plea deal down. At the time of this recording, Monday evening, Pacific time, Abrego Garcia is being held in a Virginia jail. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] I don’t want to see it. At the same time, we have to end that all, nightmare. 

Jane Coaston: That was Trump’s quick take on news that Israeli forces struck the Nasser hospital in Gaza overnight Monday. At least 20 people in total died in the attack. Five were journalists. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the civilian deaths a quote, “mishap.” A spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces said that the IDF does not target journalists or other civilians. He also blamed Hamas. 

[clip of unnamed spokesperson for the IDF] We are operating in an extremely complex reality. Hamas terrorists deliberately use civilian infrastructure, including hospitals, as shields. They have even operated from the Nasser hospital itself. 

Jane Coaston: Officials from around the world condemned the strike. The Foreign Press Association and the Committee to Protect Journalists called on global leaders to hold Israel accountable for its repeated attacks on journalists. According to the CPJ, nearly 200 journalists have been killed since the beginning of the war. The vast majority were Palestinians killed by Israel. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] If you burn a flag, you get one year in jail, no early exits, no nothing. 

Jane Coaston: Trump signed an executive order on Monday directing the investigation of anyone who burns the American flag. But the order doesn’t outlaw the burning of the flag despite what Trump seemed to think. Because it can’t. In 1989, the Supreme Court ruled that burning the American Flag is protected under the First Amendment. The order works around that pesky Supreme Court decision by targeting flag desecration that, quote, “is likely to incite imminent lawless action,” which according to Trump, is very, very common. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] When you burn a flag, is the area goes crazy. If you have hundreds of people, they go crazy. You can do other things. You can burn this piece of paper. You can and it’s but when you burn the American flag, it incites riots. 

Jane Coaston: But if you attack a police officer with an American flag, you get pardoned. Trump’s order directs Attorney General Pam Bondi to prosecute cases where the flag was desecrated and existing laws were violated in the process. Some of the laws cited in the executive order are violent crimes, hate crimes, crimes against property, and burning laws. For years, Trump has pushed to criminalize flag burning. In 2016, he posted about it on Twitter, and he brought it up again during a speech this past June at Fort Bragg. But the idea has been taken up by both political parties. In 2005, then New York Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton supported legislation that would have banned desecration of the flag with intent to incite violence. And that’s the news. [music break] Before we go, like I mentioned earlier in the show, Crooked subscription content is now available on Substack. If you’re already a subscriber, don’t worry, this won’t change anything for you. But if you love using Substack and prefer accessing things there, you can now find Crooked’s content on Substack. When you subscribe, you’ll unlock ad-free episodes of your favorite Crooked shows, plus exclusive content like Poller Coaster with Dan Pfeiffer for expert insights into the polls and media. There’s a lot of noise out there, and too much of it is driven by right-wing disinformation. Crooked is here to help you cut through the chaos and give you the tools to make a difference in our politics. Subscribing is the best way to support our vision. Visit crooked.com/friends to learn more. [music break] That’s all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, contemplate the golden age of Josh’s, and tell your friends to listen. And if you’re into reading, and not just about how NBC News wrote about how politics, sports, and culture are currently being determined by people named Josh, like me, What a Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at Crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Jane Coaston, and shout out to Democratic governors Josh Green of Hawaii, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, and Josh Stein of North Carolina, all of whom, according to Governor Greene, are on a group text for Josh’s only. What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It’s recorded and mixed by Desmond Taylor. Our associate producer is Emily Fohr. Our video editor is Joseph Dutra. Our video producer is Johanna Case. We had production help today from Greg Walters, Matt Berg, Shawna Lee, and Gina Pollock. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison, and our senior vice president of news and politics is Adriene Hill. We had help with our headlines from the Associated Press. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. [music break]

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