For all the money they have been able to raise and spend over their Democratic opponents, Republicans appear to have been lighting their money on fire for all the good it has done them, with two political experts highlighting the clear evidence in recent data that proves this point.
On Sunday, Pod Save America co-host and polling analyst Dan Pfeiffer interviewed Amy Walter, the publisher and editor-in-chief of the Cook Political Report, one of the foremost election tracking and predicting firms in the U.S. Walter wrote earlier this month that the political environment for the GOP is as bad as it has been in the last 20 years, suggesting to Pfeiffer that they might both be getting flashbacks to 2006.
"We're all coming back. This feels very 2006 deja vu," Walter said. "Because you have a president with an approval rating under 40 percent, which is where George W. Bush was at this point in 2006, an unpopular war and corruption being sort of the center of the conversation in Washington. Back then it was Jack Abramoff; now, it is all of the things."
Walter also noted that, for all the hundreds of millions of dollars that Republicans have raised and spent heading towards the midterms, they remain underwater in terms of approval from voters, and in some cases are worse off, all while Democrats have managed to keep their numbers above water. All of this, she suggested, is a sign that Republicans are not getting any meaningful electoral returns from burning through all of that money.
"How much money has been spent in the last three weeks in these races, right? More than millions of dollars," she said. "And if you're in Alaska or Texas or Ohio or Iowa, your goal isn't to try to win persuadable independents. You're sending signals to your base about why it's important for [them] to turn out. And thus far, I mean, to me, what's the most telling in some of the polling we've seen recently is that opinions of the Democrats remain above water, and opinions of the Republican candidates are below water, which says, boy, you've spent a lot of money, and I don't know that you're getting what you thought you were going to get from all of it."
Elsewhere in the conversation, Walter also noted that the flagging enthusiasm among Republican voters compared to others is another sign that the blue wave wipeout could be even worse than in years like 2006 and 2018, where polls suggested that the GOP base was solidly engaged enough to fend off the worst-case scenario. In 2026, with Trump's leadership having broken the spirit of many Republican voters, it is not clear that many will even bother to turn out to the polls next month.
