REUTERS PICTURES 40th ANNIVERSARY COLLECTION: Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump reacts during a rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, U.S. October 22, 2024. REUTERS/Carlos Barria SEARCH "REUTERS PICTURES 40th ANNIVERSARY COLLECTION" FOR THIS PACKAGE

With 2025's off-year elections a little over a month away, Democratic gubernatorial nominees — including former Rep. Abigail Spanberger in Virginia and Rep. Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey — are relentlessly hammering President Donald Trump on the economy. And The Lincoln Project's Rick Wilson, a Never Trump conservative and ex-GOP strategist, believes that Democrats should make the economy a high priority in 2025 and 2026 and remind voters that Trump's economic policies — from tariffs to defunding Obamacare subsidies — are hurting people who voted for him last year.

In a podcast episode posted by The New Republic on October 2, host Greg Sargent and his colleague Alex Shephard discuss the impact that Trump's economic positions are having on MAGA voters. Trump, according to Sargent and Shephard, accidently admitted that MAGA voters are among those he is hurting, including farmers.

Sargent, a former Washington Post columnist, told Shephard, "Alex, it seems like Trump is very poised to take the blame for a government shutdown, given all those underlying weaknesses. I mean, he's out there telling his own voters that he's going to have to hand them cash to make them whole after his policies killed them. I mean, I think this gives Democrats an opportunity to hold the line. What do you think?"

Shephard replied, "Yeah, I mean, the other thing too is that, you know, traditionally the way this works is that the party that withholds its consent to keep the government open gets blamed. But what you have here is a very different situation, right?"

Shephard continued, "I think the Democratic offer, right — which is essentially to keep the government open in exchange for extending Affordable Care Act subsidies, some rollback of the cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and an assurance that you’re not gonna not spend funds allocated from Congress in the future — that really just rolls back to…. saying: if you extend these ACA subsidies, we'll reopen the government. That's really pretty reasonable."

During the interview, Shephard took issue with the "absurd idea running through this government that whatever Trump wants is what his voters want."

Shephard told Sargent, "That may be true for more people than I'd like it to be true for. But if you're running a government that's dependent on the consent of the governed, there's just not enough people to do that. And I think that dam had already started to crack before this moment. The fact that all of this is compounding at the same time is really, really bad for Republicans."

Listen to the full New Republic podcast at this link or read the transcript here.