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I joined James Hohmann on Make It Make Sense, The Washington Post’s flagship podcast, to talk about whether Democrats are having their own tea party moment.
Is the Democratic Party having its tea party moment? James Hohmann talks with Liam Donovan about the rise of Democratic populism, its effects on the midterms and how it compares to the rise of Trumpism.
On this week’s Lobby Shop, we dug into 2026 midterm map and paths to a majority.
Co-hosts Josh Zive, Dylan Pasiuk, and Paul Nathanson welcome back Liam Donovan—fresh off his appearance on Ezra Klein’s podcast—to break down the 2026 midterm landscape. The discussion includes each party’s path to a majority with a spotlight on key races, the importance of candidate quality, President Trump’s approach to endorsements, and what it all could mean for the legislative agenda in the final stretch of the current Congress.
I joined Ezra Klein on The Ezra Klein Show to talk through whether Trump actually wants to lose the midterms, what the 2026 map looks like from inside the GOP, and the widening split between traditional conservatives and the right’s media wing.
Klein: Trump is now under 40 percent approval in a bunch of different polls — more unpopular at this point in his term than basically any modern second-term president. Let’s start with him. Why is he down there?
Donovan: If you think about the mood of the country that produced the comeback of Donald Trump, putting together the coalition that he did, that was predicated on a rejection of the status quo and the bet that Trump would be able to return us to the economy and maybe the vibes of pre-Covid 2020. Of course, that’s much harder to do than it is to talk about. I think this is fundamentally about frustrations of how difficult some of these problems are to tackle.
Donovan, on Tucker Carlson: What was good for Tucker is getting attention however he can, including right now picking fights with Donald Trump, because there is an appetite for that in a way that there wasn’t a couple years ago. But I don’t know that that’s his project. I don’t know that his is an electoral proposition. He’s trying to build his own platform. He’s trying to build his own audience.
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We had Jonathan Martin — JMart, POLITICO’s politics bureau chief and senior political columnist — on The Lobby Shop to unpack the first contests of the 2026 cycle.
POLITICO’s Jonathan Martin joins The Lobby Shop hosts Josh Zive and Liam Donovan to unpack the first contests of the 2026 election cycle. They break down key races in Texas, as well as North Carolina and Arkansas, and what the early results could mean for the fight for Congress.
On this week’s Lobby Shop, we dug into tariffs, midterm politics, congressional control, and legislative strategy.
Kicking off the first The Lobby Shop episode of 2026, hosts Josh Zive, Caitlin Sickles, Dylan Pasiuk, and Liam Donovan take stock of the political forces already shaping the year ahead. The conversation spans looming Supreme Court decisions on IEEPA tariffs, the communications challenges facing parties heading into a midterm year, and what recent elections signal for House and Senate control. The group also examines government funding deadlines, legislative strategy in an election year, and why expectation management may matter as much as policy outcomes in the months to come.