With only 99 days to go until the midterms, you might be the kind of person who wakes up every morning looking for new polls and surveys. We certainly are!
You know who’s checking even more often than we are? Republican members of Congress.
They had to sift through a whole lot of bad news last week: down seven points on the generic ballot in one poll, six in another, and multiple surveys showing President Trump down by up to forty points on the economy and Iran. Not great.
You can tell they’ve seen the polls, because they’re making it clearer that they’re not happy with the direction of this administration. On Iran, on elections, and on a growing number of issues, Republicans are almost starting to horseshoe their way toward arguments Democrats have been making for years.
On Iran, we saw multiple GOP senators publicly doubt War Secretary Hegseth and his Iran strategy, plus four House Republicans voted against Trump on war powers.
On elections, we’ve seen pushback from the Republican Senate Leader on the “SAVE” Act, and even a few comments from GOP election officials around the country about how ridiculous Trump’s election conspiracies really are.
We’ve all been unhappy with Trump since the beginning. Looks like Republican leadership is starting to feel the same way.
It was a bad polling week for Republicans
By now, you might’ve seen the disastrous numbers for the GOP in this week’s Fox News Poll. Republicans are down seven points on the generic ballot, with 53% of voters backing a Democratic candidate in their House district versus Republicans’ 46%.
As Fox noted on Wednesday, 53% is “the highest percentage either party has received on the generic House ballot in Fox News polling since 1996.”
There were other results in that poll that don’t just speak to the midterms, but how toxic the GOP brand is altogether:
When asked which party would do a better job on top issues, Republicans were underwater by double digits on inflation (-10), healthcare (-21) and income inequality (-22).
Seven-in-ten voters said they felt the Republican Party was “closely tied to elite interests.”
And 41% of Republicans said they had been betrayed by their own political party, mainly for being “too corrupt” and “selling out.”
This poll wasn’t an outlier, either. The venerable Pew Research Center had Democrats up six points in their generic ballot poll, or 43%-37%.
It’s only July. An unhelpful Senate map and Republicans’ redistricting wins will make flipping either chamber a tough task. But whatever happens in November, the GOP brand looks really weak right now.
The GOP caucus knows the Trump brand is toxic
Nobody pores over polling data more than the people who are directly impacted by it. Judging by the way they’ve been acting this week, Republican leaders have spent a lot of time digging into those new surveys.
Senators are making their doubts on Hegseth public
First, Iran. Pete Hegseth arrived at the Capitol this week as he prepared to ask for another (gulp) $95 billion to fund the military, along with other White House priorities.
Susan Collins, the senator from Maine, started on a different tack. She opened by mentioning a story in the New York Times that revealed more than half of senior officers who had been fired or removed by the Department of War were female or Black, and that no active duty female Naval officers were likely to be promoted to admiral this year.
Collins said she found it “deeply troubling,” but not a word from Hegseth, who according to the Times, blocked those promotions.
You can say that’s nothing new from Collins, but what about Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA), one of Trump’s most loyal defenders? He twice asked for “straight answers” when asking Hegseth if Iran would try to start developing a nuclear warhead again, or if the U.S. has the ability to destroy what’s under Pickaxe Mountain.
(He didn’t get straight answers: Hegseth praised Trump’s courage to answer the first question, and said U.S. capabilities were “classified” to the second.)
Not exactly a vote of confidence in Hegseth’s strategy, as we near the five-month mark of a war of our own choosing.
The most revealing exchange was with Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota, another Trump loyalist who had this question about Hegseth’s funding request:
Is this enough money to get the job done? Or is this going to just get us far enough until we’ve got to come back in here, and in the meantime, we may very well not have these young men and women out of harm’s way yet? That’s my question.
Republicans see the polling, the lack of direction in this war, and right through Hegseth’s bluster.
Four House Republicans voted to restrict Trump’s war powers
In the House, four Republicans continue to vote with Democrats on restricting Trump’s war. Reps. Tom Barrett (R-MI), Warren Davidson (R-OH), Thomas Massie (R-KY), and Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) all supported a motion this week that would stop the conflict without congressional approval.
(Two of those four dissenting Republicans – Barrett and Fitzpatrick – are vulnerable against Democratic opponents this November. Massie lost his seat to a pro-Trump opponent in a primary earlier this year.)
Barrett said he remains “ready to work with anyone to eliminate hostile threats to our nation without getting us into another endless war.” That’s about as sharp a rebuke as you’ll ever find from a House Republican, and he’s using Trump’s own words to do it.
Thune pushed back on the “SAVE America” Act
Senator Majority Leader Thune is starting to get tired of Trump’s pressure campaign on the “SAVE” Act. While talking with reporters at the Capitol last week, Thune said it was time for the White House to stop “pointing the finger” at Republicans and figure out how to get the votes.
Now, to be clear, Thune is no moderate on this extreme piece of legislation. He supports the SAVE Act, and has mischaracterized it as a common sense bill, when in reality, it would require roughly half the country to either buy a passport or present a birth certificate with a matching name on it just to register to vote.
At the same time, it’s telling that Thune isn’t letting himself get bullied by the White House over finding the votes. We’ve read time and time again that Trump surrounds himself with sycophants; Thune is smart enough to realize that strategy is a loser.
Instead, he’s trying to be blunt, knowing full well that it will put him on a collision course with the president. You probably wouldn’t do that if you thought your president was on track to deliver an expanded majority in November.
Some Republican officials are going on the record about Trump’s election conspiracies
Finally, we talked about Trump’s election conspiracies last week. Well, even here, some surprising pushback from Republicans.
CNN obtained on-the-record comments from several GOP election officials this week who were willing to call out the lies.
Take Matt Crane, a Republican who runs the Colorado County Clerks Association: he said a group chat with colleagues was filled with comments like “you got to be kidding me” and laughing emojis.
Another GOP official told the network that Trump’s new documents were old news, while a third said “We all know elections aren’t rigged.”
Trump might not read any polls where his approval rating is anything less than 100%, but the rest of his party does, and they’re looking at a destructive and directionless administration. No wonder they’re starting to squirm.
just not uneasy enough to abandon the bigotry
Please refrain from the use of "War Secretary" in reference to Mr. Hegseth. It's still and hopefully always The Department of Defense.