For a while now, I’ve been predicting that undecided voters would start to break against Republicans. It looks like it’s happening in earnest.
There are many who are skeptical of the polling world, and we should all be a bit skeptical here, but there is not much good news for Republicans. Donald Trump’s approval rating is collapsing, and independent voters are swinging towards the Democrats. The president hit an all-time low in his approval rating at a net -22 points in Nate Silver’s polling average. This is lower than his approval just after January 6.
Meanwhile, Republicans are trailing Democrats by about nine points on the generic ballot. Among independents, it is far worse. Republicans trail with these unaffiliated voters by a whopping 25 points. This is a shift of 37 points since 2022, when Republicans led by 12.
Both Larry Sabato and Cook Political are moving races in the direction of the Democrats. I couldn’t tell you how long it has been since I saw a race shift to favor a Republican.
If you doubt the polling, consider that Republicans seem to believe it. Republican insider Steve Deace reported that Iowa State House Republicans were told, “If you are in a +15 district you’re within the margin for error, if you’re in a +10 district, you’re underwater, and that this might end being an even worse midterm environment than 2006,” when Democrats gained 5 Senate seats and 31 House seats with an eight-point popular vote advantage. There are rumors that Republicans will cut funding from their Senate candidates in Georgia and North Carolina, writing off those seats.
There are a multitude of reasons why the sky is falling for the GOP, but a big one is the alienation of Hispanic voters with aggressive and oppressive (and racist) immigration enforcement policies. Polling shows Hispanics abandoning the Republicans by double-digit margins, even in the red firewall states of Florida and Texas.
Byron Donalds evidently believes the polling. The Republican candidate for Florida governor just saw his race shifted to tossup status. Donalds’ response was to scrub all mentions of the other Donald from his campaign websites. Donalds isn’t the only Republican running away from Trump, but it will be hard to undo years of MAGA cheerleading in the less-than-six-weeks before the election, even less in states with early voting.
The midterm is shaping up to be a perfect storm of the Republicans own making. Call it Hurricane Donald. The current polling is a culmination of a long list of abuses of authority, incompetence, corruption, and downright insanity.
The only thing that’s surprising about the massive shifts in polling is that it took this long to register. Then again, maybe it didn’t.
There were signs of growing discontent all along. The cracks started showing with the economic chaos of the “Liberation Day” tariffs just a few months into Trump’s second term and grew into the massive No Kings demonstrations in which almost three percent of the US population took part.
So, it wasn’t really just high gas prices that sunk Trump Part II. It was the chaos, the shameless grifting, the unnecessary wars, and not least of all, the total unwillingness of Republicans to tell Donald Trump no.
There’s a lesson here about hubris that Democrats would do well to learn. Even personality cults won’t follow blindly forever, and even if 73 percent of Republicans still favor Trump, precious few other Americans do. Not nearly enough swing voters to stave off disaster.
Rhetoric and attacking the other side will only get you so far. Sooner or later, you have to perform. This was a problem for Trump in his first term, but he got a break when COVID-19 overshadowed his economic mistakes. This time around, not only have Trump’s mistakes been larger and more impactful, but they’ve taken center stage.
The idiocracy is on full display, and if the partisan base isn’t happy, the rest of the country is livid. And they’re about to show it.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
-Yeats
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