Last week, the news was dominated once again by the Epstein files. Hilary and Bill Clinton appeared before a Congressional committee to testify about their alleged connections to the convicted sex offender.
Arizona Democrat Yassamin Ansari was in the room as a member of the House Oversight Committee.
“We are sitting through an incredibly unserious clown show of a deposition where members of Congress and the Republican Party are more concerned about getting their photo op of Secretary Clinton than actually getting to the truth and holding anyone accountable,” Ansari said.
Then, over the weekend, news broke that the U.S. military and Israel attacked Iran. A new war broke out in the Middle East dominating headlines and drawing praise and criticism from the president’s political allies and foes.
Public opinion in these early days seems pretty down on a new war overseas most Democrats in Washington have denounced the unilateral move by the president and Republican lawmakers have largely praised it.
It’s a midterm year in which Democrats are already expecting to make significant gains. But do all of these major national headlines move the needle in Arizona?
For more on that, The Show caught up with Democratic political consultant Stacy Pearson of Lumen Strategies. She began with the Epstein files.
Full conversation
STACY PEARSON: The scandals always have a point of diminishing return where folks just start to tune out. What I find most fascinating about this Epstein story is the company that Epstein was keeping. And we’re seeing public opinion of billionaires at the lowest level I’ve seen since Reagan, when trickle-down economy was promised.
We see folks really turning away from billionaires and the messaging that they’ve been working on for decades about all the good they do for the community. Now folks are starting to say, “Follow the law, pay your taxes and we don’t care about your foundation anymore, Bill Gates.”
LAUREN GILGER: I mean, it kind of reminds me of a message we’ve seen specifically out of Sen. Ruben Gallego, who’s been, as many Democrats have been calling for the full release of the Epstein files.
He’s referred to, I’ve heard him say the “Epstein class,” right? Like this idea that if you’re of a certain class, you don’t have to answer to the same kind of authorities as the rest of us. You don’t have to play by the same rules.
Does that kind of message hit home, like play into a broader kind of political narrative we’re seeing right now of haves and have-nots, opinions of billionaires, and honestly just the kitchen table issues of affordability that Democrats are really trying to focus on?
PEARSON: Absolutely. And what we’re seeing is people’s increased understanding that that Epstein class does not care about them. Despite what they said in their election or reelection speech, they really don’t understand how normal people get to work every day and make ends meet.
GILGER: Does this cross over to the president himself, though, who is certainly in the Epstein files and a very wealthy man? I mean, he seems to have always been someone who’s maybe impervious to those kinds of things.
PEARSON: So everyone’s luck runs out, and it certainly applies to the president. And we’re starting to see some of his most reliable bases — the retired and former military and law enforcement community — start to split. And those of us like me who are obsessed with the daily polling see a direct connection between the veteran community and the law enforcement community and a slip in their confidence in President Trump.
And when you’re putting young men and women in harm’s way for a war that really hasn’t been defined yet, the purpose of which has not been defined yet, you have folks that are very worried about their kids and their grandkids.
GILGER: Yeah, so you’re bringing up another kind of major national, international story right there. This, I guess we can call it a war in Iran now, over the weekend just breaking Is this one of those big stories that does bleed over, that does not have diminishing returns?
PEARSON: Oh, absolutely. This story is going to be the story going into the 2026 election. And when local communities in rural America are starting to put flags at half-mast and mourn the loss of American soldiers, things get really real, really quickly.
GILGER: So when was the last time we saw something like this, and how did polling compare? Like, maybe we’re thinking about when we invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, or maybe the withdrawal from Afghanistan a few years ago under Biden, which was so disastrous.
PEARSON: This is very much the first time in America that this has happened with social media at the level that it exists. I mean, when we were looking at destroying, when the Bush administration wanted to destroy weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, folks weren’t tweeting about it live. They weren’t on TikTok or X or Facebook or Instagram reels. We didn’t have an army of live reporters on the ground.
This is the first time the U.S. has had such a large-scale military action that folks are live streaming and reconciling what people are seeing online — real or not real — with what the administration is reporting is very complicated, and Americans are confused.
They’re not sure who to trust. They’re not sure where to get their news from. They’re seeing one thing in their feeds, and they’re hearing something else from the president. It’s very, very, very confusing and complicated, and Americans are scared.
GILGER: There are lots of things, I think, on the international and national stage right now that would probably get that same reaction, where you’d say Americans are scared or are uncertain or confused.
And it might be because of social media, but it might just be because of the moment we’re living in, whether it’s AI or grocery prices or ICE in cities or all of these issues that keep hitting home.
As a political consultant on the Democratic side, they were already looking at a pretty promising midterm election. Does all of this just play into their hands?
PEARSON: It does. At least today it does. Who knows what the world has in store for us in the next 250-ish days? Who knows what’s on the horizon? For America writ large, I really hope that we succeed in whatever the point of this exercise was very, very quickly, and we have the minimum loss of life humanly possible.
I have very little faith that the president understands the cost of war and what that really means to the young men and women, a large part of whom were low-income to begin with. That’s who’s enlisting. I really don’t think that that’s a primary concern for him. And that’s very, very concerning.
GILGER: So let me ask you lastly, then, Stacy, when we watch these national stories hit home, how much do they override the kind of kitchen table issues that we always talk about heading into elections? We always say really it’s about the economy in the end; it’s not about immigration. Really it’s about the economy in the end; it’s not about overseas wars. Are these things so entwined at this point that it’s really about all of them?
PEARSON: Absolutely. And the economy, the folks that were dictating the outcome or the status of the American economy are involved in both of these major national stories.
So if gas prices go up because we’re at war with a region that is a major oil producer for the world, folks are going to make that connection. They’re going to know that because we’re not getting supplied from the Middle East, and my gas price has gone through the roof, they’re going to blame the incumbent president and the incumbent administration.
So they’re going to see these things as connected. And I think it’s going to be the Democrats’ job to explain how connected they really are.
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