There is a specific kind of credibility that comes with conceding your own side’s defeat before the votes are counted.
Ken Griffin, one of the largest Republican megadonors in the country, provided that concession on Tuesday at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, calling a Democratic House takeover in November almost a certainty.
“It’s almost a certainty the Democrats will take the House,” Griffin told CNBC’s Sara Eisen. “That’s the nature of almost every midterm election cycle, is the House seats swing in the favor of the opposing party.”
The driver, in his telling, is what Americans feel every time they fill a tank or check a grocery receipt.
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“If you look at the price of eggs, you look at the price of fast food, you look at the price of housing, you look at the price of almost anything in life, it’s materially higher than it was seven years ago. And so when gasoline prices go higher, I think it’s really triggering to the American people that the inflation genie is back out of the bottle again, and I think Trump has to deal with that reality that the American people have just had it when it comes to inflation.”
He attributed the underlying conditions to Biden-era pandemic spending, but made clear the current trajectory belongs to Trump.
Republicans currently hold a 217-212 edge in the House, a margin so thin that a handful of lost seats flips control. In four of the last five midterm elections, the House has moved toward the party out of the White House. Griffin’s assessment is not a partisan attack. It is a pattern recognition exercise, and the pattern is not friendly to the party in power.
The Senate, he argued, is a different calculation entirely. “The Senate will be the big battleground in this midterm. The Republicans will almost certainly keep the Senate, but that will be the political battleground in this election cycle.”
Democrats need to flip four of the 22 Republican-held Senate seats up for grabs in November. The Cook Political Report currently rates one as a Democratic lean, two as toss-ups and the rest as Republican-favored. The math is harder in the upper chamber, which is precisely why Griffin drew the line where he did.
What makes Griffin’s concession land harder than a standard Democratic talking point is the source.
At a Wall Street Journal conference in February, he said the administration had “definitely made missteps in choosing decisions or courses that have been very, very enriching to the families of those in the administration,” adding: “That calls into question: Is the public interest being served?”
Featured image via YouTube screengrab
