Democrats are already slated to take the House in fall, but their path to winning the Senate would be much more daunting if a political hurricane wasn’t trying to blow them over the finish line, reports the New York Times. The party needs to flip at least two seats that President Donald Trump won by 11 percentage points or more, and the Times says no party has managed this since 2008.
But this is no normal year thanks to a slew of flubs, bad turns and a hugely unpopular megalomaniac decimating the nation with high diesel prices.
“It’s hard to be surprised by bad poll results for Mr. Trump. Still, these results from such Republican-leaning states — which gave Mr. Trump an average of 56 percent of the vote in 2024 — are striking,” reports the Times. “Across the five states [deciding the Senate], the president’s approval rating was just 40 percent, while 57 percent had an unfavorable view. That’s not much better than Mr. Trump’s ratings in recent national polls. The results also represent a significant decline in his support since our last polls in four of these states in June. Since then, his ratings have fallen by five points.”
Trump’s popularity isn’t just tanking in pivotal states that are deciding the Senate. Trump’s numbers are sliding everywhere since the last Times/Siena poll, which the Times said is “not hard to explain with gas prices and mortgage rates rising.”
And this is not a question of evolving demographics, assured the Times. Trump has personally devastated his MAGA bastion inside the farm belt with his voluntary war with Iran driving up the diesel prices that determine the fate of farmers and blue-collar workers throughout the Trumpy Midwest and rural areas.
But it also comes down to the quality of Republican candidates fighting for their lives against more seasoned — and less morally compromised — Democratic candidates. Even reliably Republican states are delivering up more favorable numbers to the Democratic candidate.
“In all five states, voters say that the phrase ‘has good character’ describes the Democratic candidate better than the Republican. In four of the five states (in the fifth, Ohio, it’s essentially even), a greater share of voters say the Republican is ‘too far to the right’ than say the Democrat is ‘too far to the left.’”
The “perfect storm in Texas” sums up the situation, said the Times, with Democrat James Talarico leading Republican Ken Paxton by six points thanks to Talarico’s clean-scrubbed boyish looks and unblemished resume compared to Paxton’s list of grievances, marriage infidelity, corruption allegations and attempted impeachments.
Meanwhile, Democrats are feeling an unbelievable seven-point lead in comfortably red Alaska, a state that holds a top-four primary, with all candidates from every party competing on the same ballot. In Alaska, all the top four candidates advance, but in this year’s primary, Democrat Mary Peltola bounced away eight points ahead of the Republican incumbent, Dan Sullivan.
And if the “perfect storm” winds weren’t already blowing hard enough in the Last Frontier State, Sullivan is facing a second “Dan Sullivan” running for Senate in Alaska — “and the other Dan Sullivan will indeed appear on the ballot in November,” said the Times.
Combined with Trump’s determination to tie the Republican Party to the political quicksand that is AI in Ohio and a Kansas Democrat with the highest net favorability of any candidate tested in a Times/Siena poll, Republicans are looking to be blown out to sea.