I have a long list of big stories that have happened in the past few months that I want to get caught up on, but what jumped immediately to the top of the list is the run-up to the midterm congressional election. That’s partly because it is so close upon us—about six weeks out, just on the other side of October—but mostly because in the past few weeks the bottom has dropped out for the Republican Party.
We are at what Daniel Drezner calls the “cartoon physics” stage of the election, a reference to what happens when Wile E. Coyote goes over the edge of a cliff, but because of the rules of cartoon physics, he still stays up in the air for a few moments, not dropping to the canyon floor until he realizes he is no longer supported by anything.
Similarly, the Republican Party seems to have charged over the edge of an electoral cliff, and only now is the reality setting in about how far and how hard they’re going to fall.
I’ll go over some of the evidence for this today, then look in more depth at the causes of it tomorrow. But the first thing to note is that this was all completely predictable, and the main question is why Republicans didn’t see it coming a lot sooner.
Those Who Vote Decide Nothing
Part of the answer is that some of them really did think they had achieved a cultural and political breakthrough, a permanent “vibe shift” in which their policies are so popular they would avoid any kind of electoral backlash—this, after an election in which Donald Trump got just under 50% of the vote. Yet he wasn’t expected to get even that much, and for good reason, so they took it as a major breakthrough.
But most of the evidence indicates that they knew a backlash would be coming, and their plan was to prevent it by rigging the whole system: controlling the press, suppressing funding and donations for the opposition, threatening civil society organizations, launching politically motivated prosecutions of political enemies, and above all, asserting control over the election process itself.
There’s an old adage attributed to Stalin: Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything. Trump wanted to make sure his people were the ones counting the votes.
I’ve written extensively about how the Trump administration spent last year on a crash program to concentrate all power in one person. The plan or hope was that if they moved quickly enough, if they overwhelmed the whole system before anyone could mount effective resistance, they wouldn’t have to face the backlash. They would be so entrenched they could not be dislodged.
This is the fantasy of power that lured the Trump administration and its conservative supporters, inspired by models overseas, particularly in Hungary. Of course, Viktor Orbán just got voted out—but he had sixteen years of doing what Trump’s people hoped they could do here. I can tell you from my experience among conservatives that a lot of them really have bought into the idea that liberal democracy is weak and dispirited, and they only have to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.
I think they were wrong about this all along, and it looks like we’re about to see a large-scale demonstration of that. To begin with, the Trump administration’s most ominous plans to interfere with the election are failing.
The Washington Post reports that state-level election officials fear active intervention from the federal government to bolster false election claims, including sending armed ICE agents to polling places. Then there’s this:
Most worrisome to local leaders is the possibility that federal officials could seize ballots or voting equipment.
They don’t consider the prospect theoretical. In January, Trump told the New York Timeshe regretted not having troops take possession of voting machines after he lost the 2020 election. The FBI later took 2020 ballots in Georgia and obtained electronic images of 2020 ballots in Arizona. And the MAGA-aligned sheriff of Riverside County, California, confiscated ballots from a 2025 redistricting referendum.
Plus, there was a plan to have the US Postal Service decide which mail-in ballots are valid and refuse to deliver the ones it regards as invalid, directly usurping the role of the state governments. Moreover, the system the USPS would use to make these decisions is so flawed it cannot function properly. But that seems to be a selling point, since it would allow them to block a larger number of ballots.
Under the Postal Service plans, election officials would upload lists of voters through an online portal. They would then submit their mail ballots to the post office, sometimes in batches of thousands at a time. If postal clerks found any mismatches—including for voters who moved or got married and changed their names—they would reject the entire batch, according to the whistleblower.
Fortunately, the courts have blocked this particular scheme.
But the Supreme Court has allowed the Trump administration to proceed with compiling a supposed national list of eligible voters, which has been shown to be systematically flawed and would exclude tens of thousands of legitimate voters, possibly more. What the federal government cannot do is force the states to use this list to purge their voters rolls, but the administration is pulling out other coercive tools to do that, including a Department of Justice investigation of Utah’s top election official “for refusing to hand over the state’s entire, unredacted voter database…, an action Henderson argues has no federal legal basis and violates Utah data privacy laws.”
Then there is a campaign of smaller election campaign harassment efforts, such as the FCC pressuring ABC to drop the broadcast of Jimmy Kimmel’s interview with Democratic Texas Senate candidate James Talarico.
Kimmel did not specify what that pressure was but said the Federal Communications Commission had “threatened” him, “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” the ABC network, and ABC’s affiliate and local stations “based on simple traditional editorial decisions, guest bookings it would seem they don’t like.”
The interview was posted on YouTube, instead.
All of this is far beyond the constitutional authority of the president or the federal executive branch. Article I, Section 4, Clause 1 of the US Constitution states: “The times, places, and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations, except as to the places of choosing senators.” The state governments have the primary role in administering elections. The Congress has oversight, but only by passing general, universal rules, not in the actual administration of the vote. The courts have a role in adjudicating cases where those rules have been violated. But there is one branch of government that has no constitutional role in administering or managing elections: The executive branch and the president. This is precisely to prevent what Donald Trump is attempting.
As I said, most of these attempts have been blocked. But there is one thing left. The executive branch has maintained several offices devoted to election integrity, providing support and guidance at the states’ request, and Trump has thoroughly corrupted them. Pro Publica published a long report early this year about Trump staffing these offices with conspiracy theorists and election deniers, while dismantling intelligence operations intended to prevent foreign influence on our elections by countries like Russia and Iran.
The main upshot is that all the people in the government who refuted Trump’s “stolen election” claims in 2020 have been replaced by people who will amplify such claims this November, regardless of their merits, giving Trump’s conspiracy theories the imprimatur of federal law enforcement.
And yet, the swing in public opinion against Republicans might simply be so big that, as in Hungary, no attempt to rig the result will be enough.
The Big Blue Wave
All of the polls are indicating a “blue wave” in November, in which Democrats expect to gain dozens of House seats and almost certainly regain control of the Senate, possibly by a big margin. And the polls for Trump and for Republicans in Congress continue to hit new lows.
Here’s G. Elliot Morris from Strength In Numbers:
Forty-two days before Election Day, and as tens of thousands of early voters have already cast their ballots, our new Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll finds President Donald Trump and the Republican Party at their lowest point in the last 18 months.
In our new poll, 33% of Americans approve of the job Donald Trump is doing as president and 63% disapprove, a net rating of −30 (using unrounded approval figures) and the worst reading in the 16 waves of this poll since May 2025. The previous floor was −26 in April.
While our past surveys documented that the president has lost significant ground with non-college-educated white voters, independents, non-voters, Hispanics, and young people, this month’s survey reveals Trump slipping significantly with his own party. The president’s net approval rating among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents fell from +54 in August to +43 this month, with 71% approval to 27% disapproval. That’s an 11-point drop and the lowest we have recorded.
And here’s a Reuters poll.
In the Reuters/Ipsos poll, Trump’s approval rating was sitting at 32 percent, the lowest of his second term and, according to Reuters, a record low for his entire political life. The fresh approval rating marks a 15-point slide from the 47 percent approval rating he had at the beginning of his second term in the same poll.
A recent New York Times/Siena University poll also found Republicans trailing Democrats on the issues of immigration, healthcare, and the economy.
Add to that strong turnout in most Democratic primaries, which indicates a much higher level of enthusiasm among Democratic voters than among Republicans, which magnifies their lead in the polls.
The main findings are that Trump has reversed the advances he made with key groups of voters who helped him eke out a victory in 2024.
The New York Times provides an overview of his completely predictable collapse among Hispanic voters.
In an average of high-quality national polls over the last month, Democrats led Republicans among Hispanic likely voters by 35 percentage points, 64-29, on the generic congressional ballot, which asks voters which party they will support for Congress.
That would mark an extraordinary reversal since 2024, when the same pollsters found Kamala Harris leading Mr. Trump by an average of only seven points among Hispanic voters in their final surveys….
If one applied the demographic trends from recent Times/Siena national polls to districts across the country, Democratic gains among Hispanic voters would imperil Republicans in more than a dozen districts that Mr. Trump won by double digits but where Republicans depend on support from Hispanic voters. Texas and Florida would become ground zero for a possible Democratic tsunami, with the party’s chance at a large congressional majority potentially hinging on whether it could break through Republican gerrymanders in those states.
This was predictable because Trump’s immigration agenda was always driven by a racial and ethnic animus against Hispanic people. Trump gained Hispanic voters because they believed he would be good for the economy, and because they were credulous enough to think he would only deport criminals and gang members. Yet it was clear that the core members of Trump’s coalition want to deport virtually all Hispanic people in a mass ethnic purge of nearly a third of the US population. As Trump’s actual policies have made this clear, Hispanic voters began to realize the truth that should have been obvious before.
For similar reasons, Trump is losing young men.
President Donald Trump narrowly carried young men in 2024, according to exit polls, a big swing toward the GOP from past elections. But Democrats’ generic ballot lead among men ages 18-30 who say they are the most determined to vote now sits at 57%-40%, according to the poll….
The young men sampled are overwhelmingly concerned about cost-of-living issues—the same reason that many swung toward the GOP two years ago.
Trump also has a history of mobilizing low-turnout voters, bringing people to the polls who don’t normally show up. But now they have turned against him harder than high-turnout voters.
But wait, it gets worse. The Mormon church just officially came out against “Christian nationalism.” See a piece by Jonathan Rauch sketching out the history and significance of this.
Consider it official: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has exited the culture war, repudiated Christian nationalism, and embraced a wiser alternative: Christian constitutionalism.
In a speech on Sept. 16, Dallin H. Oaks, the president of the church, placed the church squarely at odds with the trend among other conservative Christians toward partisanship and cultural confrontation. Instead, he said, Christians, and Americans, should pursue conciliation.
At least one analyst argues that “The Blue Wave Is Poised to Crest in the Bible Belt.” I’m not sure I’m convinced by his explanation for why this is happening, that Democrats are “de-emphasizing culture war issues in favor of an economic pitch,” because I don’t think Trump is all that popular on the culture war issues, either. But I do think it’s true we will see a bigger swing toward Democrats in the rural South than elsewhere, simply because this is where Democrats have more gains to make, where there are more swing voters who can swing their way.
We’re definitely seeing reports of Republican politicians desperately trying to disentangle themselves from Donald Trump. Here’s just one telling example.
Republicans close to Iowa Rep. Ashley Hinson, granted anonymity to speak candidly, told POLITICO she would need to start distancing herself from Trump in subtle ways to win her critical Senate race. They’re worried that the president’s tariff agenda and the ongoing Iran war are undercutting her chances.
Hinson herself was caught admitting the Iran war would become a “political liability” if it extended much longer back in June….
“These candidates know how to read a poll,” said a GOP strategist working for Republicans in races around the country who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. Referring to Trump, they added: “They know he is kryptonite.”…
“He’s putting Iowa in play,” one House Republican who’d spoken to Hinson said of Trump.
That’s the biggest sign that the blue wave is going to be big: the fact that Republicans are worried about losing in places like Iowa and Texas, which have long been conservative strongholds. That’s the real significance of the FCC forcing ABC to drop an interview with James Talarico. Yes, this is an abuse of power for political purposes—but in a race where Republicans should not feel they remotely need to resort to such tactics. It is at once an assertion of illegitimate power and a confession of weakness.
The Death Spiral
If Republican members of Congress want to separate their political fate from that of Donald Trump—well, it’s about ten years too late. Some of them tried back in 2016 and failed, and the only Republicans left are those who passed the test of total loyalty. So when Trump goes down in the polls, he drags all of them with him. This is the cost of having a political party that is loyal to a man and not to ideas, principles, or an agenda.
For about a year now, I’ve been watching this turn into a death spiral: a party that is more and more loyal to a man who is less and less popular.
The reason for Trump’s declining public support is somewhat obvious: a war in Iran that has both failed to achieve its objectives and hit the public directly in the wallet. Tomorrow, I’ll look at that cause in more detail and draw a deeper and more interesting lesson from it—and then look at what comes next.