Although independents and hardcore MAGA voters both played a role in Donald Trump's narrow victory in 2024, the former were much more conditional in their support. Independents and swing voters, many of them frustrated over the economy and inflation, were willing to give Trump another chance but lacked the intense devotion of Trump's MAGA base. Now, 16 and one-half months into his second presidency, countless polls are showing that Trump has a major problem with independents — and GOP senators, according to The Hill's Alexander Bolton, are sounding the alarm.
Republican senators, Bolton reports, fear that "the GOP may be headed for a political wipeout" thanks, in part, to Trump's "weak polling numbers with independent voters."
"Several Republican senators told The Hill that polling data shared at a Tuesday conference meeting by Senate Republican Conference Committee Chair Tom Cotton (Ark.) indicated Democrats have a significant polling lead among independents five months before the general election," Bolton explains in The Hill. "One Republican senator described the national polling numbers shared by Cotton as 'terrible' and 'very bad.' The data circulated among Republican senators showed Democrats with a double-digit lead among independents."
Bolton adds, "Republican senators say the alarming polling numbers reflect the president's and GOP's weakening political standing in their home states. The GOP senator said independent voters, including those who supported Trump in the 2024 election, are most concerned about 'their pocketbook, their wages, inflation, and a lot of those people think that's not the top priorities of what Republicans are doing right now.'"
One conservative Republican senator who candidly spoke to The Hill on the record was North Carolina's outgoing Thom Tillis.
According to Tillis — who decided not to seek reelection in the midterms — unpopular Trump policies, from a proposed White House ballroom to the $1.7 billion "anti-weaponization fund," could doom Republican candidates in tight races in November.
Tillis told The Hill, "We have headwinds we need to recognize; we got to be tight on execution. I actually think right now, the fundamentals are closer to the inverse of 2010. I think that's the kind of headwinds we're confronting."
In the 2010 midterms, Democrats suffered what then-President Barack Obama famously described as a "shellacking." Republicans flipped the U.S. House of Representatives by a landslide, and Tillis fears that the GOP will suffer a similar fate in 2026.
A Republican senator, interviewed on condition of anonymity, told The Hill, "The farm economy is really tough right now. The fact that we don't have a farm bill done, that we don't have E15 done, I think there are a lot of farmers that are feeling the pressure and they would like to see more done to get these things over the finish line."
Another GOP senator, also quoted anonymously, told The Hill, "The president is definitely a headwind in some areas. He's a tailwind in a primary and a headwind in a general."