'Betting my life it's worse than 2018': GOP Insiders hit the panic button

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during the annual Thanksgiving turkey pardoning ceremony in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., November 25, 2025.

President Donald Trump has shown many signs of being worried that Democrats will take one or both houses of Congress during the midterms. From his son-in-law Jared Kushner meeting with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to his various efforts at meddling in the elections, Trump has made it clear that he is worried Republicans will lose power in the legislature.

“David Wasserman, elections analyst for The Cook Political Report With Amy Walter, noted that the groups in which the decline in support for Trump has been most pronounced are independents, Hispanic voters, and white voters without a college degree,” wrote The Dispatch's John McCormack on Monday. “‘We’ve seen bigger declines in Trump support and Republican support among those groups because they’re where he made the biggest strides and therefore had the most ground to fall,’ Wasserman told The Dispatch. ‘These are voters who rehired Trump to the White House because they were nostalgic for what things cost during his first term, but are inclined to either sit out the election or vote for a Democrat.’”

McCormack then quoted a GOP campaign strategist saying, “I would be betting my life it’s going to be worse than 2018,” adding that the turn against Trump is “almost entirely economically driven. Basically these are women to whom Trump offered an alternative economic vision that was appealing to them, and none of that stuff has, from their perspective, panned out.”

Michael Strain, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, echoed that criticism.

“People really, really don’t like inflation. That resolves a lot of the mysteries of trying to interpret what’s happening with people’s perceptions of the economy," Strain told McCormack.

McCormack quoted another political analyst saying that Trump’s coalition is truly in trouble.

“People underestimate just how red Texas, Ohio, Iowa, Alaska are,” Sean Trende, elections analyst at RealClear Politics, explained to McCormack. “These are states that are redder than New Jersey and Virginia are blue.” McCormack added that “in 2024, Trump lost those two blue states by about 6 points while carrying the four red states by 11 to 14 points.) But even with that tough map, Trende still thinks Democrats have roughly a 2-in-5 chance of taking control of the Senate, while Silver’s model gives Senate Democrats closer to a 3-in-5 chance.”

“We both agree that it could easily happen,” Trende told McCormack regarding Silver’s model. “He thinks it’s a little easier than I do.”

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