Affordability, Messaging in Focus as US Midterms Approach

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You're listening to Bloomberg Businessweek with Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec on Bloomberg Radio.

Carol Massar (0:15)

We are very, very curious to see what our next guest has to say about all of this. Great to have back with us Henrietta Treyz, Director of Economic Policy Research at Veda Partners. It's an investment advisory and consultancy firm at the intersection of financial markets and the quarters of the nation's capital. Who would be a better voice? No, none other than Henrietta.

She joins us from New Orleans, Louisiana. Henrietta, we did just get this news a short while ago. We want to talk about a lot of stuff, the midterms. It does feel a little messy. This is not what you want happening before the midterms, is it?

Henrietta Treyz (0:47)

It's not, especially when you want the message to be really clear. And I think it's a good example of a lot of messages that we've gotten basically for the last eight months, at least, you know, what's the point of the war with Iran? What is the strategy for reopening the strait? How are we bringing gas prices down? What are we doing about affordability? Those are questions that Republicans have been grappling with all year and that Democrats have just been hammering the Republican Party with. So now, if you don't have a spokesman to get those messages across, makes it even more difficult to convey to voters what you want to see in the last 18 days before the election.

Tim Stenovec (1:25)

Politico is reporting that there's quote, zero chance, the president said zero chance that Susie Wiles will take her place. But is there somebody in your view within the president's orbit right now, who could ahead of the midterms bring things together and try to clean some of this up in the next couple of weeks?

Henrietta Treyz (1:47)

I feel like the Republican Party has some excellent conduits and excellent message relayers that they could get across. I mean, we see them on live TV every night.

Without naming names, I'd say that's where I would go. You want somebody with a proven ability to take hard questions. The press secretary role is extraordinarily taxing. Whether you support the president of this term or the last term, you know that that job is going to get hammered with hard-hitting questions from all around the room for however many hours they're in there. It's a thankless job. I'd want somebody that I know already could do it and has experience. The president is going to be in the office for another two years. There's a long way to go. A lot of messaging to telegraph 18 days before the election, but two years before the 2028 presidential. That's a critical role for the party and the White House to have filled.

Carol Massar (2:40)

Well, great that you went there because I want to go there too. I mean, I'm curious, how important is this story with midterms just around the corner? Then we've got some great reporting by our Ted Mann and Joshua Green, about Congressional Democrats, Henrietta, expected to gain subpoena power after the midterm elections and are likely to investigate companies that cooperated with the Trump administration. So we're talking about companies like Palantir, Apple, Microsoft, hiring Democratic Party insiders and getting ready for potential subpoenas and public testimony. It sounds like a lot of certainly the people that we talk about, that we talk to, are getting ready for life after the midterms.

How do you see it? What's the reality of what you think the midterm outlook will be or the outcome will be?

Henrietta Treyz (3:27)

Well, I think they absolutely should be getting ready for that. What we see from the campaign donations and where they're pulling funding from the campaigns across New Jersey, Florida and Texas just this week makes me pretty comfortable saying that the Democrats are going to control the House next year. I don't think it's much of a question anymore. So right there, that's enough to make sure that investigations are exactly where the Democrats start. When I speak with leadership, they tell me that it's going to start with the Trump family. It's going to start with crypto predictive markets, the Trump family's exposure to or investment in those sectors. Then it'll expand out to areas in which the Trump family or any cabinet secretaries have taken a stake or even the White House has taken a stake in a critical minerals company, a defense contractor.

Not to mention IBM, Intel, all those, but the exposes that are coming out about the donors to the presidential ballroom.

It's just fodder across the board. You're going to need a clear message. One of the things that I find fascinating, I went to a campaign event last night just to see what the fuss was about and what Democrats were talking about. The corruption angle was very prominent, more than I would have expected. We know that affordability is the main narrative, but corruption is definitely seeping in. That's because the Democratic polling is showing that not just Democrats get galvanized by that, but independents are also galvanized. That's how you win an election.