From his waging of the unpopular Iran war to his enthusiastic support for data centers to ongoing rising prices that he has failed to lower, President Donald Trump keeps staking out positions on issues in ways that alienate him from his own supporters.
Now a focus group demonstrates the impact of all these controversies on Trump’s staunchest supporters: They’re depressed.
“The overwhelming vibe among Trump voters in our focus groups is depression,” posted The Bulwark’s Sarah Longwell on Monday. “Trump isn’t doing what he said he would! And depressed voters = depressed turnout. It’s not that so many Republicans are going to vote for Democrats, it’s that so many Republicans aren’t going to vote.”
Longwell has previously discussed how Trump’s deeply unpopular presidency is hurting not only himself, but the Republican Party. Earlier in September, she described how Trump is rapidly approaching the “Bush line,” or the moment statistically when he is so unpopular that it hollows out the Republican Party and destroys his political brand. The term “Bush line” exists to refer to Bush’s low approval ratings (stuck in the 30s) and the GOP’s subsequent losses in midterm elections and presidential elections as a result of the poor economy and heatedly disputed war in Iraq.
“And so for me, I think there’s a bunch of things that Trump being well below the Bush line would do,” Longwell said at the time. “One, it would say that this was a failure, the MAGA experiment was a failure. Two, it would hang around. We want Trump’s presidency to hang around future Republicans like J.D. Vance, like Marco Rubio, like an albatross. We don’t want it to be a thing that bolsters him. But also the lower he is going into the midterms, like right now, Gallup’s got him at 33 percent.”
She continued, “Like we are approaching the Bush line. Some polls have him at the Bush line or below. And that bodes well for the out-of-power party in the midterms. And so I want to drive Trump’s approval as far down as possible because I want it to be a failed experiment that never happens again.”
Speaking to AlterNet earlier in September, Sabato’s Crystal Ball editor and polling expert Kyle Kondik provided broader historical and political context to Trump’s midterms plight.
“It’s primarily the president’s weak approval rating combined with the usual difficulty that the presidential party has in a midterm,” Kondik told AlterNet. “I also think there may be even more for voters to react to in 2026 compared to even 2018, because Trump has acted as more of an imperial president and there is more dissatisfaction both with the economy as well as the president’s foreign policy choices.”
He added, “Generally speaking, a president who is this unpopular should see his party lose a lot of ground in Congress. That said, Joe Biden also had poor approval in 2022, but Republicans didn’t do all that well—they flipped the House but not the Senate. However, the Republican lead in the generic ballot was not as large as the Democratic lead is now.”