POLL POSITION

Trump’s Everything Crisis Has Republicans in Full Panic Mode

With record-low approval, rising costs, and war, Republican voters are turning their backs on MAGA.

Opinion

With just three weeks to go until voters head to the polls for the 2026 midterms, Republican candidates across the nation are racing to distance themselves from an unpopular president whose political shadow seems to grow longer by the day. Even MAGA loyalists are losing faith: a survey conducted by Pew Research Center and published last week found a record-high 31 percent of voters who supported Donald Trump in 2024 now disapprove of his job performance.

Republicans’ month-out meltdown is driven by what should be called their “everything crisis,” an all-consuming perfect storm of bad news and a broader malaise of Trump’s own creation: Mortgage and car loan rates are skyrocketing, gas prices are settling near record highs, Big Tech’s sprawling data centers are driving up energy costs for families and job creation is drying up.

Any one of those misfortunes could be enough to jeopardize Republicans’ control of Congress. What’s so catastrophic is that all of those crises are worsening at the exact same time, while Trump flip-flops between dismissing voters’ affordability concerns as a media-created “hoax” and scolding them for complaining.

“You have a little higher [gas prices]. It’s a very inexpensive price to pay for what we’ve done,” Trump told voters at a rally in Texas last month in an attempt to reframe his 2024 campaign pledge of “no foreign wars” in light of his escalating war in Iran. “Remember that. It’s a little more. Frankly, even if it was a lot more.”

Trump’s lecturing might go over better if most voters didn’t see him as disconnected from struggles and distracted by vanity projects like his East Wing ballroom and a newfound fixation on artificial intelligence. As Republicans stare down a historic electoral wipeout, the one man who promised to fix the economy (and everything else) “on day one” is busy sharing AI slop on Truth Social and gilding triumphal arches.

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As I spoke to voters and advised candidates during the 2024 campaign, I saw firsthand the disconnect between regular people hurt by inflation and Democratic politicians who tried in vain to convince them that their concerns were overblown. President Biden’s bungled attempts to downplay the pain Americans were feeling by emphasizing other positives left the impression that Democrats simply didn’t understand what millions of voters were feeling. Republicans now find themselves caught in the same trap.

Indeed, Republicans have managed to botch their response even worse than Democrats did. They’ve spent most of Trump’s second term showing Silicon Valley’s AI billionaires—the “superintelligentsia”—with media attention and lavish White House parties while hoping the economy would fix itself. In the process, they’ve built an America that pampers its tech titans with taxpayer money while leaving regular people to fend for themselves.

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Biden’s approach offended voters because he seemed out-of-touch. By comparison, Trump’s blatant refusal to acknowledge Americans’ suffering strikes most voters as downright malicious.

It’s tough to overstate how badly Trump’s mismanaged economy is kneecapping Republicans with the voters who were critical to their success in 2024. Burned by high inflation in the aftermath of the pandemic and wooed by Trump’s promises of “prosperity” and “stability,” young voters—especially young, white men—swung 21 points to the right during the last presidential election. That shift marked the first time since 2000 that Democrats failed to post a double-digit margin of victory among young people.

Republicans’ triumph was short-lived. Trump’s disastrous trade wars (and, again, the very real war in Iran) have sent the job market into a tailspin at the same time as inflation has rendered everything more expensive. Things are so bad, in fact, that this past summer ranked as the worst job market for teens in nearly 80 years. Things aren’t any better for college graduates, either; young people with degrees are facing the worst job market in five years.

Faced with these betrayals, young voters have shifted their allegiances again. Democrats now boast a 30-point advantage with this cohort—the largest gap ever recorded. Even Barack Obama only managed to win them by 26 points in 2008.

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Meanwhile, rising prices on everything from farm equipment to fertilizer and animal feed are hammering the rural voters who make up a core part of Republicans’ base. After promising farmers a “Golden Age” on the campaign trail, Trump and the GOP delivered a 46% increase in small farm bankruptcies last year while projecting worsening losses next year for those who managed to survive. (And that’s in every sense of the word, considering the now record-high suicide rate among small farmers in Trump’s second term.)

Trump’s approval rating among rural voters fell 22 points over the summer, the steepest drop of any Republican president in more than a generation. I’ve spent years reading polls and cautioning politicians against taking their most valuable voting blocs for granted, but I’ve never seen a political party treat a core constituency with as much disregard as Republicans are showing rural communities this year. No wonder Democrats are suddenly poised to flip statewide offices in heartland GOP strongholds like Kansas and Iowa.

Republicans who banked on replicating their surprising overperformance with Latino voters in 2024 are also set to be disappointed. Thanks in large part to Trump’s radicalization of ICE and his mass deportation policies, Latinos have fled the GOP in droves. Democrats now boast a 35 point advantage among Latino voters, while even those who backed Trump in 2024 now say they would now prefer if Democrats controlled Congress.

Ignoring the compounding crises he’s created may be easier for Trump’s ego than acknowledging and fixing his missteps, but as the GOP once said, facts don’t care about your feelings. Out of ideas and desperate to protect his grift, Trump has fallen back to the age-old tactic of promising bribes to voters in the form of a $5,000 “rebate check.” But just like the five other times Trump promised checks to Americans this term, it’s unlikely anyone will ever see a dime.

Millions of voters who gave Trump a second chance in 2024 have realized just how badly they were conned by a politician who can’t even pretend to care about their struggles, and every poll suggests they are ready to take out that frustration at the ballot box. Now the only solution to the GOP’s everything crisis is getting rid of the Republicans who caused it.

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Max Burns

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