President Donald Trump is convinced he’s the only chance Republicans have of weathering an increasingly turbulent midterm election. “Pretend I’m on the ballot just one more time,” he told North Carolina voters Wednesday evening — a message he has repeated throughout the year.
His misguided instinct to place himself front and center in nearly 500 races nationwide is proving increasingly delusional. A new Fox News poll, taken in the aftermath of last week’s midterm convention, is the latest evidence that his sales pitch has failed to win over voters worn down by his economic mismanagement. Instead, his decisions have left a large majority of them viewing Democrats as the better stewards of the American economy, foreshadowing a major reckoning at the ballot box.
His misguided instinct to place himself front and center in nearly 500 races nationwide is proving increasingly delusional.
The survey released Wednesday evening found Trump tied for his second term’s lowest approval rating in Fox News’ surveys, with 39% of Americans liking his performance but 61% disapproving. This would be bad on its own given the GOP’s (at times reluctantly) Trump-centric midterms messaging. But the more worrying problem for candidates is how much of that disdain stems from their growing frustration with the country’s economic conditions:
Costs of everyday items are a hardship for voters: 61% say gas prices are a major problem, up from 48% two years ago, while 52% say the same for healthcare costs, up from 44%. Majorities also view housing costs (54%, down from 60%) and grocery prices (62%, down from 66%) as major problems.
Views on tariffs have grown more negative since last summer, with a high of 64% saying tariffs hurt the U.S. economy, up from 57%. Most Democrats and independents say tariffs hurt, while views among Republicans are mixed (41% help, 36% hurt, 21% no difference).
Overall, nearly two-thirds of voters (63%) say the Trump administration has made the economy worse, including a quarter of Republicans.
Those are not the numbers the GOP wants to see a month and a half from Election Day, especially given how easy it is to draw a straight line between Trump’s policies and voters’ current dismay. The Iran war, unpopular from the start, has driven up oil prices and made everything more expensive. Meanwhile, Trump has continued to promote tariffs despite them being a tax on American consumers. Together, the two have spurred inflation enough that the Federal Reserve raised a key interest rate for the first time in years.
Interestingly, Fox News’ polling also found that so-called “double haters” in their survey — those who have a negative opinion of both parties and helped propel Trump’s 2016 victory — “favor the Democratic candidate in their district by a 26-point margin.” A recent Economist/YouGov survey similarly found that independents favor the Democrat running in their district over the Republican by double digits. It’s only recently that this nebulous demographic began to move back toward leaning Democratic, with Gallup tracking a sizable shift over the last year and a half.
It would seem like a bad time then for the president to draw the focus to himself — and ask other Republicans to do the same.
It would seem like a bad time then for the president to draw the focus to himself — and ask other Republicans to do the same. A savvier political operation would allow candidates in tough races to place some distance between themselves and a president who’s become such an obvious weight to their chances. Instead, we got the spectacle on display in Texas, complete with videos declaring Trump a gift from God to America and the president asking voters for “the biggest favor you’ve ever done me” by pretending “I’m on the ticket.”
It’s only now that we’re starting to see more GOP politicians attempting to place some daylight between themselves and their standard-bearer. But with the House out of session and the president largely disengaged beyond his preferred pet projects, it’s too late for any concrete moves to offer up economic relief that doesn’t simply spur inflation higher. There’s also little else for Republicans to pivot their message to beyond deifying Trump. The best Vice President JD Vance could do in a recent interview was plead with voters to “give us another chance.”
Accordingly, the only solution that Trump can see is barreling forward with no regard for how tone-deaf it sounds for him to insist that he’s overseeing “the greatest economy in history.” He repeats this lie ad nauseum in the hopes that enough people will overlook their reality in favor of his truth. That strategy has worked before — fortunately for him, unfortunately for the country. But it’s a much easier prospect when he’s railing against something less tangible, like supposed voter fraud, than when a one-time supporter is staring at the numbers in a dwindling bank account.
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