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Jesse I pay a lot of attention to public opinion data. The number of Americans who say that they're paying too much in taxes has gone up over the past year. Six in 10 Americans last year said that their taxes were too high. Seven in 10 Americans say that their taxes are too high now. In February before the war began 22% of Americans said that the cost of living was their most important issue. Now it's 34%. I mean that's really freaking bad for the president. Welcome to Reaching Moderates. I'm Jessica Tarlev and I'm joined today by Galen Druke, the host of the GD Politics Podcast, the Galen Druke Politics Podcast, the goddamn Politics Podcast gosh darn as well. If you're more religious I just learned that Galen's father recommended that as well. It's great to have you back. Thank you so much for having me. I think we're going to talk about the Christian reaction to Trump today. Maybe fitting, yeah, when I was coming up with a name for the podcast I was like, I don't know, is goddamn politics going to put some people off? I was like, well, for Christian folks you can call it gosh darn politics. That's what we settled on. I don't know if it's important to the president but it is important to me not to offend the Christian Americans among us. I would say it is unequivocally not important to the president and it's not important to the vice president either who took his crack at Poke Leo yesterday at the Turning Point event. And the big news, this is the second to last time that I'm going to tell you about this because the voting closes tomorrow. It's about the Webby Award situation, best news and politics podcast. If you could vote, we would really appreciate it. Go to vote.webbyawards.com. We also have the link in our bio. Tomorrow is the last day you can vote. Thursday, April 16th, please do it. But I want to start with the day because it is tax day. It was pretty like miserable filing for me. I don't know how you felt. I was doing estimates and my estimates were wrong. Well, I have to say this is my first time ever filing taxes as a corporation in part because I started GD Politics last year. And people are very familiar with some of the controversies surrounding corporations being people. There's less controversy around maybe people being corporations. But I think if it got a little more attention, those among us just filing regular W2s might get annoyed by the kinds of things that get categorized as tax write-offs. So just saying, don't come for me. Come for the bigger fish. Yes, come for everybody else. But I support you in the annoyance in this. It's linked to what we're going to talk about. Trump's whole thing is we got you these huge tax cuts. Federal refunds are up about 11% on average per household. But new data shows that the average household paid six times that because of the tariffs and the war in Iran and other increasing costs. So not sure it's really paying off for them. That didn't stop Trump from trying to sell it this week, tipping a DoorDash driver $100 while promoting his no tax on tips proposal. I want to watch a clip of her also note that he tried to goad her into taking a stance on trans athletes, which she smartly got out of. And she's from Arkansas. So they brought her in from Arkansas, the DoorDash granny. So let's look at her. Nice to meet you. I have your DoorDash order for you. Look at this. This doesn't look like a stage that does. I want to thank you for the no tax on tips. It has helped my family out immensely. And I definitely appreciate it. Thank you. Do we live in a simulation? You know, Jesse, I pay a lot of attention to public opinion data. And so, you know, it's important what happens on the ground when it comes to policy. It's most important for ideologues, people who pay attention to policy and have strong opinions on it when it comes to how they believe the world should look according to politicians in DC. When it comes to public opinion, actually, the number of Americans who say that they're paying too much in taxes has gone up over the past year, according to a new Fox News poll. So six in 10 Americans last year said that their taxes were too high. Seven in 10 Americans say that their taxes are too high now. And, you know, that gets us into a much broader debate over what's the relationship between policy changes and public opinion. Because I know basically every administration that has ever been in the White House has sort of complained amongst themselves, oh, we've done all of these things that we said we were going to do or we're trying to do these things. And there's no appreciation, you know, like, for example, you know, let's say the Biden administration was trying to reduce student debt, but was doing worse with young voters than, you know, any Democratic administration in recent memory. And so there's not a one to one relationship. Yes, tax rates are down. The one big beautiful bill act in large part was a tax cut. But Americans are not feeling better. And I think it's in large part because they don't look at their budget and say, well, I'm paying this much as an increase because of, you know, inflation on prices, but I'm paying, you know, less on tax, whatever. This is capturing something that's more like, how do you feel about your finances? And Americans don't feel very good about their finances right now, because they don't feel good about inflation. That's still the word of the day. It's become even more so over the past couple months. I was just looking at some UGF polling before we got on today. And in February before the war began, 22% of Americans said that the cost of living was their most important issue. Now it's 34%. I mean, that's really freaking bad for the president. Well, and also how quickly that's happened. It's only a six week differential. And I think when you're looking at gas prices, definitely over $4 in most places, but you're seeing $5 and $6, let alone if you're driving a diesel truck, what that business looks like, cost of fertilizer, we're going to have a big problem with planting season as a result of all this. And it does feel like the war in Iran, while the president is trying to continue to spin it and also potentially to wind it down. And I hope there is some sort of diplomatic solution that the war is causing one of the bigger fissures that we've seen in Maggilland. I want to look at Meg and Kelly who weighed in on this yesterday. The president's messaging has been all over the board on the street. They can have it. They don't okay, have it or and then what about we'll leave in it all open up naturally. What happened to that? How come that didn't happen? How come we're no longer there? Then it turned into, okay, they're going to charge a toll. It's going to be a joint venture. It can be a joint venture. Now it's, there can be no toll. And by the way, if you go through a toll and you pay a toll, we will track you down on the high seas and I don't know what we'll do to you, but he's threatening that our navy will find any ships to pay the toll and make them pay some sort of a price. What? The messaging is all over the board. It is so slapdash. Every day brings a new significant threat, policy change or reversal, especially when it comes to the Strait of Hormuz, which he was told, according to the New York Times by Israel, the Iranians would never be able to take hold of, that they'd be so weakened by our initial strike, we didn't have to worry about them taking control of the Strait. Well, guess what? That was wrong too. That was really wrong. And that New York Times article, it was like bombshell after bombshell after bombshell about this. But I'm curious as to how salient you think the criticism that Megyn Kelly is making for the broader MAGA base? This is a really important question because I think we've seen a lot of headlines about a MAGA civil war and I think we need to slow down and take it piece by piece. So first of all, when you ask somebody, are you MAGA or do you align yourself with the MAGA part of the Republican Party? Voters oftentimes take that to mean, do you support President Trump? And so in polling, when you get these polls that show you like 100% of MAGA voters support President Trump, it's like asking someone, okay, do you support the president or not? And then once they tell you that they support the president, you say, okay, and now do you approve of the president? So it's not a very useful way of measuring public opinion because of what MAGA has come to mean. Now, there are high profile conservative MAGA, quote, unquote, influencers who are breaking with the president on the Iran war. Meghan Kelly is one of them. Marjorie Taylor Greene is one of them. Tucker Carlson is one of them. And they're breaking with him on ideological grounds. They don't agree with this kind of foreign interventionism, which I think is going to be appealing to some people. But ideological arguments generally are most sort of influential for people who are highly partisan anyway, and probably are not going to all of a sudden start voting for Democrats. If you listen to Meghan Kelly herself over the past couple of weeks, she's described herself as a Fifth Avenue voter, right, which is to say she's going to be voting for Republicans no matter what. She simply sees Democrats as not an option. So when it comes to electoral politics, the people who are most engaged on this conflict are some of the most partisan people, most ideological people to begin with, who certainly do not see Democrats as a viable alternative. But let me be honest here, there is a real ideological debate here about the role that America should play abroad, and that will be a live debate in the 2028 Republican primary. It will be a live debate in Republican influencer spaces. And that can start to split the party in important ways and maybe create opportunities for Democrats to pull some voters away. But what I think is sort of more important here when it comes to thinking about the Republican coalition is, is the MAGA coalition cracking up? No. But is the Republican coalition breaking up in some ways? Yes. Because we all know that it's not MAGA voters alone that got President Trump elected or get Republicans majorities in the House or Senate. There's a broader coalition of people that in 2024 included more younger voters than in recent memory, more Hispanic voters than in recent memory. And so we're talking about less ideological people who are very swingy, who are also most reactive to what? Economic issues, changes in prices. And so the ideological battle over the war is one thing. But the reaction to the increase in cost of living as a result of it is, I think, the deeper political vulnerability for President Trump. And it is exacerbating trends that we've already seen. I mean, in polling in February before the war with Iran ever began, we already saw that Trump was losing the most with the groups that he made up the most ground. So young voters, Hispanic voters, and in some cases also rural voters, which is sort of a narrative twist here. But that's all to say that people engaged in this media ecosystem where people have strong opinions and blah, blah, blah, blah, that's one thing. But people reacting to the price at the pump, you know, we expect probably that the cost of food is going to go up. These, the inflation when it comes to fuel and food is likely, if this persists, to start to trickle out to other parts of the economy. That is the real vulnerability here. So, and it obviously is logical that economic conditions would be the main driver of President Trump's lower approval rating. So it's hovering like 40, 41. There are some quality polls that have it down in the 30s. But generally speaking, you go with about 40% approval. Is that? Yeah, negative 17 is Trump's overall approval looking at, you know, my friend Nate Silver's average approval rating. And just to put that in perspective, I was looking this morning, I believe it's the worst of any president at this point in their term. So worse than President Biden. And at this point in his term, he was nearing 9% annualized inflation, had already botched a withdrawal from Afghanistan, and like the Delta variant of COVID had shot down any hopes that we were going to get a quick return to normalcy. So he's doing worse than that. Wow. Thinking back to how bad it was, at least having to be someone that was defending the Biden administration on Fox and add in that there were hundreds of thousands and then it got over a million people that died of COVID. Like those are not peachy circumstances to be governing in versus what Donald Trump was handed and then the mess that he made of it. I'm curious before we get back to some of the cracks in the Niagara Coalition, I especially want to talk about what's going on with Pope Leo and Christians more generally. Where does immigration come in this? Because watching Donald Trump lose ground on immigration has been fascinating to me. So it was by far and away his best issue. There were a lot of voters who turned from voting for Joe Biden and came to Donald Trump because of immigration because they felt that the border was wide open the entire time during the Biden administration. And he still breaks about even to plus two or three on border security because no one's getting in. But now on immigration, you can find polls where he's minus 10, minus 13 on that. So how much of that is playing a role in his approval rating? You know, it's interesting immigration was his best issue. It's still one of his best issues, but that's just not saying all that much because he's averaging about net negative 10 on immigration. But compare that to inflation where he's net negative 35. And you can imagine why the president, the administration would rather talk about immigration than say the war or cost of living. And so there's two pieces to this conversation, which is, are Americans happy with what Trump is doing on enforcement? No. Are they happy with what he's doing on the border? Generally, yes, or at least pulling even. Now, the other side of this is, do they trust Democrats? Absolutely not. And so you'll see Americans showing, you know, net negative 10 overall on immigration for the president. But when you ask, who do you trust more on the issue of immigration, Republicans, or Democrats, they're still choosing Republicans. And of course, that's because they didn't get amnesia. So they still remember what the Biden administration was like. And they just don't think that Democrats take the issue particularly seriously. And this gets into a whole broader conversation about, you know, Trump is unpopular. What does that mean for the midterms? What does that mean for Democrats? And that's a broader conversation beyond just immigration. But at the moment, yeah, things aren't great for the president, but they're probably even worse for Democrats. Okay, let's take a quick break. Stay with us. 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I do want to talk to you about the gosh darn politics question, the Christianity question. This has been a crazy few days for the White House. Three cardinals on 60 Minutes, openly criticizing the president. Trump gets mad. He posts that Pope Leo is weak on crime, which is a very strange thing. Then we have him being depicted as Jesus slash a doctor. That post comes down. He's back up with something saying, actually, this is great today. You had JD Vance at a turning point event saying that Pope Leo was over his skis and shouldn't be opining on theology. I don't under. I mean, I know he's a convert from 2019, but that still seems ridiculous. Then folks like Mike Johnson, and I want you to take a look at a clip of him when he's asked about Trump posting something as Jesus Christ, which seems like blasphemy. I'm not particularly religious person, but people are mad. Let's look at Johnson. Can I ask you about the president's post, the putting himself as Jesus? Was it blasphemy? I talked to the president about it as soon as I saw it and told him that I don't think it was being received in the same way he intended it. He agreed and he pulled it down. That was the right thing to do. He explained how he saw that. I don't think he thought it was sacrilegious at all. Do you think he's a factor? I think he's a great respect to others about what we're doing. Do you think that he told Mike Johnson that he was just a doctor? I have no idea. There's a question of, does Trump believe that? We always get into difficult territory when we try to make sense or understand. Understand what's going on in there. By the way, this just is also emblematic of the moment that we're in. You've pulled Americans this week, whether they think the president is experiencing moderate or severe cognitive decline, and 48% of Americans said yes, which is significantly more than the number of Americans who said no. This is a really difficult question. It gets us back to comparisons with Biden, because how are we supposed to judge from the outside? Whatever erratic behavior we see with Biden versus Trump is very different. With Biden, we saw a real slowdown. You were hanging on every word, like, is he going to be able to finish the sentence? That's not Trump. Trump always finishes the sentence. It's just what sentence are you going to get? It's a very different energy involved in the kind of criticisms of their erratic behavior. Either way, we saw a pretty serious response from the Christian community to this kind of behavior, which is really not good for the president. We can get into some of the polling on Christians, but in the first Trump term, there was so much, we know he's not acting particularly presidential, but look at the economy. The stock market is doing well. Employment numbers are really good. We're seeing broad-based improvement for Americans of color when it comes to employment numbers. There was always this sense that he hasn't gotten us into any wars. You could forgive a lot, but I think in part because he's already in this vulnerable place, where folks like Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, the list goes on and on, people already feel very comfortable criticizing the president. There's an even larger opening for Christian influencers to come in and say, this is not what I'm about. This again worsens some trends that we've already seen for the president. Of course, Catholics are historically pretty evenly split when it comes to Democrats and Republicans. In 2024, that wasn't quite the case. Trump outperformed Harris by something like nine points amongst Catholics, but with white evangelicals. That's really his base. We already saw before any of this that his approval rating amongst white evangelicals had declined from 78% in February of 2025 to 69% in January of 2026. A decline of 10 percentage points, which is not enormous. It's not a total crackup of the Christian right, but it's not good. There was already softening there before any of this. When it comes to the Pope specifically, Donald Trump's comments getting into it with the Pope, I saw some really interesting polling actually. So when you ask Americans whether it's appropriate for the Catholic Church to try to influence the political affairs of the US, it's split roughly evenly about a third of Americans saying yes, a third of Americans saying no, and a third of Americans saying I don't know. When you look under the hood and look at some of the crosstabs, it's more Democrats than Republicans saying that it's appropriate for the Catholic Church to influence the political affairs of the US. You can take that to mean Democrats are just saying we like that the Pope seems to be criticizing Trump. Under a different Pope, under a different administration, I don't think Democrats would come up with that response. So this is not ideologically based. This is partisan. But it's pretty divided. When you ask Americans whether it's appropriate for the US president to try to influence the affairs of the Catholic Church, the response is overwhelming. 75% of Americans say that it's inappropriate. So there is agreement across Democrats, independents, and Republicans. Only 8% of Americans say that it is appropriate for the US president to try to influence the affairs of the Catholic Church. You know, I am not a church historian. I grew up both Catholic and Jewish, so I have some sort of insight into how Catholic... That's what my kids are. Yeah, there you go. They're going to be like Galen, okay. It's a great combination. There's a certain enjoyment of incense and gaudy spaces and jewelry and whatever. But not to stereotype. It's all good here. The way that Catholics view the current Pope is quite different from the way that they viewed Pope Francis, which Pope Francis was kind of viewed as a liberal. He got in there and was like, I'm not wearing the Prada shoes. I'm not wearing the expensive cloak. I'm not going to stay in the Vatican apartments. I'm going to stay in the part of the Vatican where, you know, it's like the holiday inn of the Vatican is kind of where I'm going to lay my head, kind of as a criticism of what the Vatican had come to mean. Pope Leo comes in and in terms of the manner in which he conducts himself, even the clothes that he wears, is significantly more conservative. And he's not sort of mouthing off on the people playing about same-sex marriage or abortion or whatever. The things that he's mouthing off on are like war and peace, which are not the kind of thing that like you can really look at the Bible and say, actually war is good. And so I think that this is going to be a harder opponent. Pope Leo is a harder opponent when it comes to conservative Catholics than Pope Francis would have been. I really got to take a moment for the idea that we are classifying levels of opponents from vis-a-vis popes. But that was interesting color on Pope Francis that I didn't have before. Okay, Christians, that's what's going on. I want to talk midterms, also paying a lot of attention to Gen Z voters and Latino voters who seem to be the massive swing categories, between 30 and 40 point swings from just the 2024 election. So where do things stand? Yeah, so overall on the generic ballot, which asks Americans, if the midterms were today, would you vote for Democrats or Republicans? Democrats have a six-point lead there, which has gone up from about a four-point lead at the beginning of the year. And just to put this in historical context, we genuinely expect that the party out of power is going to improve on their margin in generic ballot polling between now and November. So if you want to squint and apply some historical context, you might think that on the current trajectory, Democrats would get to a generic ballot of Democrats plus eight, plus nine, which is getting them close to 2018 territory. That's the electorate overall. And also polls are going to switch to likely voters probably after Labor Day. And when you switch to likely voters in this current environment, Democrats are likely to vote. They are now the part of the electorate with higher levels of bachelor's attainment, which is indicative of voting. In some ways, the Democratic Coalition has become a bit wider as voters of color have moved to Republicans to some extent, and white voters with a college degree have moved to Democrats. That's just a better midterm electorate than some of the more marginal voters that Democrats used to rely on. So now we are going to talk about those marginal voters, which is Latino voters and young voters. So in 2024, Trump lost Latino voters by just about 3 percentage points. There's some debate over exit polls and their reliability, and different folks will come up with different estimates. But that is according to Pew. So 48% of Hispanics voted for Trump in 2024. That's compared with a 25 percentage point loss for Trump in 2020. Where do Hispanic voters fall now? They prefer Democrats by about 16 percentage points. So that is a lot of improvement for Democrats since 2024, but it's not getting them quite all the way back to where they were in 2020. I think it's likely that those numbers worsen for Republicans in our current environment as opposed to get better. Those numbers are already old at this point, especially with our political, our news cycle moving so quickly. This maybe even gets us back to none of this polling is capturing how, for example, Catholics feel about the latest news cycle with President Trump because we need two weeks post an event to really see how the public is reacting. And folks will know that Latino voters are largely Catholic. And so I will be curious to see if this is something that shapes the Latino vote as well. When it comes to young voters, it's a similar picture. So Trump did better amongst young voters than any recent Republican presidential candidate. He lost them and we're talking about 18 to 29 year olds by 10 percentage points, which is quite good. When you go back to 2020, it was more like losing young voters by 25 points. And again, that is where young voters are about now. So Democrats have made up essentially all of their losses from 2020 to 2024 amongst young voters, young voters aged 18 to 29 preferred Democrats by about 22 23 points right now. That is not where young voters were in 2018. So in 2018, Democrats won young voters by 35 points. We will see again, if Democrats get back there, but at least for now, they've made up a lot of ground. And you know, a lot was made of the swing amongst Hispanic voters and amongst young voters to the right. It was real. It was important. It's part of the reason Trump dot elected. But it is also fickle, because young voters and Latino voters are some of the swingiest sort of least partisan voters in the electorate. So in some ways, it's last in first out as easily as you sort of swayed them over. You might just lose them. And I want to say a word also about young voters and how this all happened for people in that age cohort 18 to 29. They were coming of age during Trump's first term. And so the bombast or unpresidential behavior or whatever, that was in some ways normal to them. Right. On top of that, it was then Democrats who were saying you can't socialize, you can't go to school, you can't do any of the things that young people want to during COVID. Add to that a cost of living crisis, which is making it in some ways harder for the people and increase in interest rates is making it harder for the people who are most likely to be taking out loans for cars, for education, for housing rate, older Americans, they don't need debt as much as younger Americans. They have all their assets. They have their more their 2% mortgage rate, whatever. It's young people in some ways who are most impacted by that stuff. Then you get in President Biden, somebody who doesn't even seem like they're there. And after all of that, Republicans narrow the gap to 10% points. And those young voters also remember that, oh, at least the economy was good during Trump's first term. So after this quite bad chain of events for the relationship between Democrats and young voters, Republicans get within 10% points. Now, though, you have an unpopular war, you have another cost of living crisis, all this stuff. And for my generation, a lot of our political views were formed around the Iraq war, the financial crisis, the rise of Obama. And a lot of those more liberal views have stuck with millennials. It will be curious to see how much this moment ends up impacting young voters or undoing what that series of events that I described did to align young voters more with Republicans. Yeah, I'm also curious as to how many of them disengage, looping that back to the fact that it's not as if Democrats have really landed the plane. Right. It hasn't transferred over to, like, I actually like these people. I might go out and vote for them because I don't want to continue on with this, whatever the Republicans are doing. But I'm not thrilled about Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer. So still a steep hill to climb. Galen, this was awesome. Thank you so much for coming back on. It was cool to see you. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. All right, before we go, another reminder that Raging Moderates is five days a week, obviously, but also on substack. Subscribers get ad-free episodes, live streams, place to connect with all of us. Hope you've been enjoying it. We've been enjoying it. You'll also get access to the new Raging Moderates newsletter called the Monday Rage, which we've been having a lot of fun putting together. Find us at RagingModerates.ProfgMedia.com. That's all for this episode. Thanks so much for joining us today. You hear a lot of talk about AI replacing humans. Curiosity invites a better question. How will humans shape AI? That's something SAS has been working on for decades. 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