President Donald Trump on Capitol Hill, the U.S. Capitol, in Washington, D.C., June 24, 2026. REUTERS/Annabelle Gordon
The Republican Party is stuck with "ridiculous" messaging plans and faulty strategies with a month left till the midterms, according to conservative pundit Bill Kristol, who told MS NOW that a 2006-style wipeout is looking likely.
On Friday, Kristol, a vocal anti-Trump conservative and editor-at-large for The Bulwark, appeared as a guest on MS NOW's On the Line, discussing the political prospects for both parties with roughly a month left until Election Day. Guest host Ali Vitali highlighted recent remarks from Montana Sen. and former chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee Steve Daines, who said at a recent event that the GOP might be in for a repeat of the 2006 midterms, when factors surrounding and including George W. Bush's toxic unpopularity cost them dearly.
"There arguably could be some similarities between the '06 cycle and the 2026 cycle," Daines said. "Think about the condition of the country back in '06: an unpopular war, 6 in 10 Americans opposed the Iraq War. At that point, gas prices had doubled. Does this sound familiar? And we ended up losing six seats [in the Senate]."
Kristol, who was working for the GOP back in 2006, said that he has suspected that the 2026 midterm would end up being a similar anti-Republican wave for a long time now.
"If a president's party controls Congress, a midterm election becomes a referendum on, 'do you want the president's party to continue controlling Congress and enabling what he's doing, approving what he's doing? Or do you want to put a check on the president, maybe rebuke the president a little bit?'" Kristol explained. "Midterm elections are about that. And so we focus a lot on individual candidates, and they matter at the margin. Precisely the definition of a wave is [that] it's about something bigger. It's a national phenomenon. And that's why you see all these states moving in the same direction. And we get a little too obsessed sometimes with this individual race."
He continued: "So I think it's a wave. Trump's the biggest picture. Trump's approval has gone from 49, 50 percent two years ago on Election Day, when he was running as a candidate, to what, 34, 35, 37 percent? That's a huge drop, and it's going to take his party down with him. And the only question is how deep it goes. And I now think it can go pretty deep."
Later on in the segment, reacting to a clip of former Bush adviser Karl Rove encouraging Republicans to engage in "positive" messaging around Trump's agenda, Kristol called the idea "ridiculous," and added that their current strategy of demonizing Democrats is also faulty, given the nature of midterm elections.
"This is the problem with the demonizing of the Democrat side of it," Kristol said. "That works in a presidential race: you don't want this person as president. It doesn't work very well in a mid-year election where Trump's going to be president for the next few years. As for the positive agenda, it's a little ridiculous. He's been president with a Republican Congress — a totally compliant one, I might add — for two years... What's he going to do in the next two years that is different from what he's been doing in the last two years?"
