Jessica Tarlov threw cold water all over her fellow panel members Democrat bashing with a dose of reality on what could be coming in the midterms. During a segment where they were attacking Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and Democrats for how badly some of the poll numbers look for them right now, Tarlov reminded them that despite those poll numbers, Democrats are still leading Republicans by large numbers in the generic ballot, and took a shot at Trump and his administration for their gaslighting on inflation right as the July PPI came in at a 0.9 percentage gain.
HURT: So the part of the problem with Democrats with the poll numbers is not only do Republicans not like Democrats, but Democrat voters are really frustrated with Democrats right now because they they feel like they're completely ineffective.
TARLOV: Yeah, so are Democrats perfect absolutely not. But as all of this is going on (crosstalk) I'm, I'm getting to it. I just wanted to own something before I launch.
Our lead on the generic ballot keeps increasing, and it's going up and up and in some polls gets up to seven... eight points, which is a good thing.
And Donald Trump again wouldn't be asking Greg Abbott for five seats if he thought that they were going to do well in the midterms. (crosstalk) And you say Donald Trump tells it like it is.
Literally today he said "inflation cooling right where we want it," and we got the US wholesale inflation number, which is the highest that it's been in three years.
Fresh and dry veggies up 39 percent, beef up 80 percent, toys, appliances, shoes, things that we all need. 44 percent of people are saying now that they are going to have to go into debt to get their kids back to school.
GUTFELD: Is that worse than saying gender affirming care when you cut people's genitals off?
TARLOV: To actually if you talk to people on how they vote, I can tell you more people vote on whether they can afford food than whether there's gender affirming care in Illinois.
GUTFELD: I challenge you on that. You lost an election based on that.
TARLOV: No, we lost an election based on cost of living.
Trump and his enablers in the Congress and in his right-wing echo chamber can lie to people all they want, but they can't change the fact that people see for themselves that prices are soaring. And Tarlov is right, all the attacks on trans people are not going to affect how most people vote if you're doing real damage to their economic situations. And the economy is going to continue to get worse between the tariffs, the Nazi ICE raids, destroying our farms, and running all of the tourists out of the country.
