A GOP lawmaker fears his party could be on track for a midterm drubbing of biblical proportions.
Sen. Thom Tillis is sounding the alarm after Senate Republican Conference Committee Chair Tom Cotton showed GOP senators polling data at a meeting that laid bare the uphill battle they face with independent voters.
Several told The Hill afterward that despite Trump’s grip on Republican voters—shown by his successful endorsements of winning primary candidates—polling revealed Democrats’ superior popularity with independents has now reached double-digit margins.
Among them was Tillis. The North Carolina Republican is retiring at the end of his term and has become a Trump antagonist, and his seat is expected to be a key battleground.
Tillis told The Hill that the GOP could be on track for an even worse drubbing than the Democrats’ catastrophe in 2010, when they lost 62 House seats in the midterm elections of President Barack Obama’s first term. They also lost six Senate seats.
If midterms are seen as a referendum on a president, Tuesday’s Economist/YouGov poll gave Trump a 61 percent disapproval rating.
Tillis told The Hill that the president’s actions since returning to the Oval Office may have contributed to the trouble his party is now facing, including his huge ballroom project and his $1.8 billion “weaponization” slush fund.
Under the scheme, which Trump has now dropped, the president ditched a lawsuit against the IRS in exchange for a DOJ-arranged fund that could have ended up in the pockets of Jan. 6ers.
“That is why I’m so angry with people around the president not really being forceful about political consequences,” Tillis said. “Who’s to say that if it was a reasonable tight vote, who’s to say the backlash to the payout fund” isn’t what tips bad results over the edge.
He added, “We have headwinds we need to recognize, we got to be tight on execution.
“I actually think right now the fundamentals are closer to the inverse of 2010. I think that’s the kind of headwinds we’re confronting.”
One unnamed senator added, “the president is definitely a headwind in some areas. He’s a tailwind in a primary and a headwind in a general.”
Other unnamed senators raised concerns about losses in farm states, which have struggled since the start of Trump’s war in Iran, with fertilizer prices soaring by 20 percent. They have also not enjoyed some of the legislative gains they hoped to see under Trump.
Cotton told The Hill that independent voters are concerned with “their pocketbook, their wages, inflation, and a lot of those people think that’s not the top priorities of what Republicans are doing right now.”
Senators also warned that Iowa, which appears staunchly Republican, is not as safe a bet as some in D.C. might think.
“People will look at Iowa and see a red state because we have an all-red federal delegation. Iowa is a purple state. You scratch the surface of red Iowa, it is purple underneath,” one told The Hill, adding that the state has an independent voter rate of 30 percent.
“It shows the independence, whether somebody endorses or doesn’t. Whatever is speaking to the Iowa people at that moment is exactly how they’ll vote,” added Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst, who described the state as filled with “very independent voters.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
