I spoke to Bloomberg‘s Josh Green for a piece on the political impact of the potential reinstatement of Donald Trump under new Twitter owner Elon Musk.

Back in January, I wrote about what it would take for Democrats to defy historical trends and hold onto the House. Typically, the party that controls the White House loses congressional seats — often dozens of them — in the first midterm after a new president is elected. Everyone agreed it would take something big. And although a Twitter takeover was not yet a gleam in Elon Musk’s eye, Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist, presciently identified Trump’s return to Twitter as being the sort of black swan event that could supercharge Democratic fortunes, since there could be “no bigger midterm wild card than letting the tiger out of its cage.”

It’s too late for a Trump resurrection to help Democrats on Nov. 8. But Donovan remains confident that the same dynamic still holds and could boost Joe Biden — or whoever is the Democratic nominee — two years from now. “What’s the best thing that’s happened for Republicans over the last 18 months?” Donovan asked, when I spoke to him on Friday. “It’s obviously the absence of Donald Trump from the main stage.”

…

If Musk carries through with what he’s hinted at and reinstates Trump, the right will celebrate the act as one of the greatest “owns” of liberals ever. It will add immeasurably to Democrats’ unhappiness if Republicans win back Congress. But it may ultimately have nothing like the political effect that Musk and his partisans appear to desire. “It’s going to feel bad, it’s going to touch a lot of nerves on the Democratic side if Trump comes back,” says Donovan. “But anybody taking a longer view should see that it’s beneficial for them to have Trump out there being himself.”

Read the full piece here.

I spoke to Politico‘s Josh Siegel about the impact of the price at the pump and inflation on the midterm outlook.

Meanwhile, the share of Americans who say inflation is their top voting issue has fallen from 37 percent in July to 30 percent, according to a NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll last month.

“The frog has been boiled slowly to the point where the relatively high inflation and high gas prices are just baked in for voters,” said Liam Donovan, a lobbyist with the firm Bracewell who previously worked for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “The bar was lowered to the floor and now it’s hard for Republicans to make hay of it in the same way as they would have before.”

Read the full piece here.

I spoke to Audrey Fahlberg of The Dispatch for a piece on the massive partisan cash gap on what it might mean for the midterms.

That said, a fair accounting of 2020 can’t leave out the fact that Republican super PACs were able to make up for Senate GOP incumbents’ lackluster fundraising hauls.

“The Republican incumbents who withstood the green wave had more than sufficient resources to get their message out,” said Liam Donovan—a lobbyist and former Republican National Committee [sic] staffer—of the 2020 Senate cycle. “The fear for Republican challengers here is that they won’t have that money.”

Donovan added that when money gets spent matters too: Locking in television ads earlier in the race helps introduce the candidate to the electorate long before voting is underway. “If you get the hang of this fundraising thing by mid-October, voters are already voting and the airtime you want in the markets you want is not necessarily left,” he said.

Read the full piece here.

I spoke to Ben Jacobs for his New York Magazine piece on Senator Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and his sudden hot streak after a year of frustration and futility.

To Schumer’s credit, he never wrote Manchin off as a lost cause, putting himself in a position to close the deal. “The fact that it took Schumer lacing up his pumps and hitting the last-second buzzer beater, you have to look at that in its own right,” said Liam Donovan, a veteran Republican lobbyist. “You can question the methods, but the execution in the end is really all that matters.”

Read the full piece here.