GOP Worries About Midterms "Wipeout"

I think we're all a little worried.

GOP lawmakers are growing increasingly concerned over signs the 2026 midterm elections could be a wipeout for Republicans that could cost them control of the House and shave down their Senate majority by two or three seats.

Republican senators say the off-year elections in New Jersey, Virginia and other parts of the country on Nov. 4 served as a wake-up call and warn that President Trump and Republican leaders in Congress need to address voters' concerns about the slowing economy and persistently high prices.

Republicans acknowledge that rising health insurance premiums, the issue Democrats want to put front-and-center in the election year, along with health care costs, more generally, are a major problem for their party.

There's growing anxiety in the Senate and House GOP conferences that Trump's sinking approval rating will create a headwind in swing states and districts.

But GOP lawmakers say they still have time to improve their party's image before next November.

They argue Democrats' failure to come up with effective solutions to rein in health care costs and the rising power of far-left Democratic candidates gives them a chance to cling onto power in Washington.

"If we are where we are today in the beginning of the second quarter [of 2026], then I think we're in for a really rough time in November," warned retiring Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who represents a Senate battleground state Democrats are targeting next year.

"We have plenty of time to address it. There's a lot of positive things that we're doing here, that the administration is doing. But if you mess with health care ... if we don't get health care policy right, if we don't get some of the cost policies right, we're going to have major headwinds next year," he said.

Most concerning for GOP lawmakers is Trump's approval rating, which has sunk to 41.9 percent in the most recent polling average compiled by Decision Desk HQ (DDHQ). The president's disapproval rating has climbed to 55.7 percent.

Another disquieting sign is that Democrats now have their biggest lead of the election cycle on the generic ballot for Congress. The latest DDHQ average shows Democrats beating Republicans 46.8 percent to 41.4 percent on the generic ballot.

That's a 5.4% lead. The Democrats had an 8% lead when they won the midterms in 2018.

We're not there yet but we are getting there.

One Republican senator who attended a recent GOP conference meeting at the National Republican Senatorial Committee headquarters said concerns about the approaching election year are "high."

"The numbers are terrible," the lawmaker said. "Not necessarily for any individual incumbent senator, although some of them aren't very good. But you saw what happened a couple weeks ago [on Nov. 4]: Republicans didn't win anything anywhere."

And the problem continues to be that Trump attracted a lot of blue collar voters who, unfortunately, are not likely voters and who also do not show up to vote for other Republicans. They like Trump, seeing him as a different kind of Republican who appeals to union hall Democrats, but they do not like other Republicans, and Trump has never been able to convince them to vote for other Republicans.

I don't think he tries hard enough. I think he has to make the case, in a major national campaign, that it is absolutely necessary for Trump's personal political fortunes that he doesn't have a Congress controlled by "lunatic left-wing Democrats" impeaching him every five minutes like he did from 2019-2020.

Below, Harry Enten discusses Trump's very high level of support in the GOP itself, but he's slipping with independents.

I hear more and more complaints, including from actual Republicans, that inflation is still high. The assumption people have continues to be that prices should fall back to what they had been. As I keep saying, we can't have prices fall without actual deflation, which the Fed would never allow to happen, because the downsides of deflation are too high. (People stop investing because their money is already appreciating in value if they just hoard it under the bed.)

Maybe Trump has to give a national address -- he really should give some of these from time to time -- to readjust public's expectations about prices actually falling. They won't fall. It will never happen. Inflation will be beaten when the rate of inflation slows to 2% per year. People waiting for prices to fall will be waiting forever.

Kurt Schlicter noticed the blue mood of conservatives, and wrote a column to cheer us up.

Welcome to the doldrums, the period of problems, the phase of foul-ups, the time of the sucking. And it does suck. Everything seems to be going wrong for Republicans right now. We were flying high a few weeks ago, when Donald Trump negotiated the end of the Gaza War, and then it was all downhill. Lost elections, economic uncertainty, Epstein file stupidity, fear that the conservative movement will tear itself apart over people who aren't even conservative, and Marjorie Taylor Greene's face all over our social media feeds. Yeah, it's bad. You're at the top one day, then the next day you're at the bottom.

But we've been around the block before. We've done this a few times. Most of us reading this and watching what's going on have seen this story arc play out in the past. You start out strong, you go hard for a while, and then the problems pop up. That's the way of every human endeavor. Nothing is perfect, and the inevitable imperfections build up until they threaten to stop your progress and must be dealt with. It's particularly exaggerated in the case of Trump 2.0. Why? Because Trump 2.0 has been so massively successful. Go back just six months. It was win after win after win. We shut down the border. We took out Iran's nuclear program. DOGE was purging timeservers and non-hackers. We were kicking over the feed troughs at USAID and elsewhere. Freaking PBS was dead. Sure, there were obstacles, but the pinkos were not going to just give up their power politely merely because the voters rejected them. It was awesome.

Yet, it is the comparison with those dizzying heights that makes the current depths look so much more bottomless. They're not. The conservative movement/MAGA/America First/Whatever You Call It is unlikely to crack up because Tucker Carlson has cracked up. The affordability crisis is unlikely to persist all the way to the next elections. And those elections are not necessarily going to be a massive defeat. But it sometimes seems like those things are inevitable because it's so miserable right now.

...

The economy may remain stubbornly bad, or stubbornly perceived as bad, but we've been to this rodeo before. Ronald Reagan took a couple of years to turn things around, but when he did, there was an enormous boom. Donald Trump took a couple of years to turn things around during 1.0, but when he did, there was an enormous boom. Are you seeing a pattern of what happens when conservative policies are put in place? Sure, we have the tariffs wildcard, but we haven't seen tariffs driving up inflation the way we were promised by the critics. The inflation rate is down. That's undeniable, and it's beginning to manifest in certain products.

For you Youngs, the analogue I'm looking at is also Reagan. Paul Volcker raised interest rates sky-high in the beginning of Reagan's term to end the very high inflation rate. The economy sunk into a very deep depression. Those who remember Reagan as presiding over a booming economy didn't live through 1981-82, when the economy was the worst it had been in decades -- and even worse than it was under Jimmy Carter.

The feeling of depression resulted in a bunch of movies about the economy. Mr. Mom, for example, is about an auto worker laid off from the then-collapsing US auto industry.

Anyway, Reagan got his bad news out of the way early, setting up one of the greatest economic expansions beginning in 1983.

So I've been watching the economy looking for signs of a big turn. Trump had one in his first term. It was like magic -- Obama out, Trump in, and the economy started growing.

But that's not happening now. Or, rather, yes, there is some improvement, but it's a subtle improvement that voters can ignore, and based on Trump's slipping approval, they seem to be ignoring it now. Reagan I and Trump I had big enough economic expansions that voters couldn't ignore it, and even when Reagan's 1984 opponent Walter Mondale tried to deny it, they rejected that denial as delusional.

(Mondale ran ads asking rhetorically, "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" His suggested answer was "No," but the country answered "Hell to the yeah we're better off" and delivered Reagan every single state in 1984. Supposedly Mondale won his home state of Minnesota but there have been credible allegations that that state was stolen and Reagan just didn't challenge it because he won the other 49 and could afford to be generous.)

So I keep waiting for the Trump II turn. I keep hoping it will come in time for the midterms, but that seems like increasingly unlikely.

It doesn't help, of course, that Fed Chair Powell is determined to tank the economy, because he's mad that Trump is putting tariffs on the foreign imports so beloved of the Capital Class and wants to prove to the country that tariffs are bad. So he's doing what he can to harm the economy so that people think the problem was the tariffs.

posted by Ace at 01:23 PM

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