New polling sparks panic as clown show GOP faces major wipeout

It could be "the end days" for the Republican Party. That's how Jake Sherman put it when the co-founder of Punchbowl News shared the latest by the Emerson College Polling Center. The pollster found that the Democrats were up by 11 points in its generic ballot. At this point in 2018, they were plus 7-8 points. The Democrats won more than 40 House seats that year.

Emerson seems to be an outlier. (The generic ballot average by Real Clear Politics is plus-5.2.) But mixed with new plus-7 generic ballot results by Fox, it's hard to ignore the portents of doom. As Commentary's John Podhoretz told Sherman, it's "whoa Katy bar the door."

Of course, the most serious difference between this year's congressional elections and 2018's is the Supreme Court's recent decision to legalize cheating. All discussion of generic ballot polling must be seen through the lens of white-power gerrymandering. But it's also possible to overstate its significance, especially in light of mounting evidence to suggest something big is coming. As one Bluesky follower put it to me this morning: "Fox News at D+7, Emerson at D+11, YouGov at D+5, Verasight at D+7. Once again, generic ballot polls show Republicans stuck in the 41-43 range, and you have to ask, 'what happens if they can't escape that?'"

With D+11, what happens is 242 Democratic House seats and 53 Democratic Senate seats.

In other words, "the end days" for the Republican Party.

The immediate question is why and the immediate answer is Donald Trump's moronic war against Iran. It's becoming symbolic for everything that's wrong with America. It's destructive. It's cruel. It's criminal and corrupt. A gallon of gas has once again reached an average of $4. A barrel of oil has once again reached $100. Inflation keeps going up. Housing is out of reach. Hiring has stalled. Peace can't be achieved militarily. It can only be reached diplomatically. But that would require Trump to concede defeat, which he will never do, the result being endless war and endless lying about it, while Republicans profit from insider trading, drain taxpayers dry with $1.15 trillion in additional war funding, snatch food out of the mouths of children and pregnant women, and imprison literal toddlers for 505 days.

But perhaps the worst thing is that the war is just a clown show. No one really knows what's going on, for how long it's going to last, how much it's going to cost or how much sacrifice is going to be needed just to keep the clown show going. Trump says Iran can never be allowed to make a nuclear bomb even as he announced a deal yesterday in which Iran's regional enemy, Saudi Arabia, will be allowed to make a nuclear bomb, which gives Iran even more incentive to make one. And then today, Trump said Saudi Arabia will be allowed to make a nuclear bomb but only if it makes nice with Israel, which is something only a moron would expect from a monarchy that does not recognize the legitimacy of the state of Israel. Meanwhile, the White House keeps threatening war crimes if Iran doesn't take a knee. Iran has responded by broadening the war to include US bases as far away as Jordan, where drone attacks killed three troops over the weekend. As Jennifer Van Goethem put it, the whole world is grinding "between a narcissist rock [Trump] and a tactically leveraged hard place [Iran]. The merry-go-round is just gonna keep spinning until the horses fall off."

That said, is the Iran War truly driving what appears to be a coming blue wave? After all, the clown show is being run by a clown.

Perhaps what we are seeing instead is the consequence of accumulated fears and anxieties that began building slowly, then quickly, and that came into view almost immediately after the current administration started. It's the impression of a people that's almost convulsing in reaction to the biggest mistake they ever made. Indeed, recognition of that mistake seems to have settled in early. Donald Trump's approval rating stood at 52 percent on Inauguration Day, according to the Times. It reached parity on March 11, 2025, in the thick of debate over across-the-board tariffs. By April 1, aka "Liberation Day," Trump was at 50 percent disapproval. Every day since then, he has been underwater.

The midterms will be a reaction. The question is what they will be a reaction to. Many say it's the Iran War and its consequences. Indeed, they compare it to the Iraq War. But the Iraq War was popular before it became a quagmire. The Iran War has always been unpopular. It has always been a quagmire. And while the 2006 midterms were a backlash against George W Bush's mishandling of the war, the coming 2026 midterms are shaping up to be a backlash against Trump's mishandling of the entire presidency. The war isn't the only clown show. Everything is a clown show and has been since the start. Bush's "end days" began the day the US invaded Iraq. Trump's "end days" began virtually from the day he was reelected.