GOP faces 'severe blowback' as Trump threatens control of the Senate: pollster

As President Donald Trump and the Republicans in Congress face plummeting approval and major headwinds going into the midterms, leading pollster G. Elliott Morris forecasts an electoral shakeup so major it could cost the GOP its majority in the Senate.

According to Morris, “Trump’s job approval rating is underwater in 135 GOP-controlled House and Senate seats. The Republican Party is similarly underwater on the midterm generic ballot in dozens of congressional districts and key states, and by a 6-point margin fewer Americans identify with the GOP than Democrats.”

For Morris, this raises key questions: “If things are so dire for Trump and the Republicans, why are GOP members of Congress still voting with Trump the vast majority of the time? Wouldn’t we expect them to be more responsive to public opinion in the face of very probable electoral defeat in November? Why are they passing $1 billion funding bills for his White House ballroom, giving Immigration and Customs Enforcement more money, and letting him make war against Iran without authorization?”

He concludes that Republicans are more concerned with losing their individual seats than they are with losing power overall, and that they fear Trump’s ire more than that of voters, as most of those who have opposed the president’s demand for congressional map redistricting have ended up losing primaries when challenged by Trump-endorsed candidates.

For example, “Last December, 21 Republican state senators in Indiana voted against a mid-decade redistricting plan requested by President Trump that would have redrawn the state’s congressional map to create two additional GOP House seats ahead of the 2026 midterms. The vote was one of the first significant intra-party defeats of Trump’s second term — and in such a red state, the loss came as quite a shock. Then on Tuesday night in Indiana… six out of eight of those Republican state senators who voted against the gerrymandered maps lost their primaries — five of them to challengers the president had endorsed.”

Legislative incumbents typically retain their seats more than 95 percent of the time, so this speaks to how much influence Trump still has over the Republican base. As a result, state legislative Republicans are likely to pass Trump-backed redistricting efforts regardless of how the electorate feels about the matter, and as the president’s policies continue to prove unpopular, this increases the likelihood of backlash during the midterms.

In other words, “Trump's intrusion into GOP primary elections forces elected Republicans to take his side, often endorsing dramatically unpopular stances — which generates severe blowback for the midterms. E.g., this probably cost the GOP control of the Senate in 2022.”