Behind closed doors: The grim data that has campaigns freaking out

In the elections when President Donald Trump has been on the ballot, he and his fellow Republicans have often exceeded expectations in the polls. Yet according to a pollster Sarah Longwell from The Bulwark, Democrats and other Trump opponents who fear that he will again outperform the polls — which for the upcoming midterm elections place his party at a major disadvantage — should not succumb to their "PTSD."

"Most of us should have enough polling PTSD to be cautious in how bullish we are about Dems destroying GOP candidates next month," Longwell posted on X. 'The biggest indicators for me are candidate behavior and where money is being spent. And Republicans are clearly freaking out at their internals and are having to spend money in all kinds of places that should be safe for them."

This is not Longwell's first analysis which has offered a dire prognosis for Republicans.

"The overwhelming vibe among Trump voters in our focus groups is depression," Longwell wrote in September. "Trump isn’t doing what he said he would! And depressed voters = depressed turnout. It’s not that so many Republicans are going to vote for Democrats, it’s that so many Republicans aren’t going to vote."

She also described how Trump compares to the "Bush line," or the moment when Bush was in the low 30s and 20s near the end of his presidency that is considered as unpopular as a president can be — that is, unpopular with everyone except his own party's hardcore base.

"And so for me, I think there's a bunch of things that Trump being well below the Bush line would do," Longwell explained. "One, it would say that this was a failure, the MAGA experiment was a failure. Two, it would hang around. We want Trump's presidency to hang around future Republicans like J.D. Vance, like Marco Rubio, like an albatross. We don't want it to be a thing that bolsters him. But also the lower he is going into the midterms, like right now, Gallup's got him at 33 percent."

When she interviewed Republican voters on another occasion in September, Longwell admitted that they seemed "depressed" with the state of their party under Trump.

"At first, Trump voters—even ones who’d supported him twice—were genuinely shaken," Longwell said. "I did a couple of focus groups six days after January 6, 2021, in the aftermath of Trump supporters violently storming the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, which Trump told them had been rigged."

"One group was with women who voted for Trump in both 2016 and 2020, and another was with women who’d voted for Trump in 2016 and then switched to Biden. In the two-time-Trump-voter group, Jamie from Pennsylvania said she was 'appalled' and 'shocked' by what she saw," Longwell added. “I realized, but yet I didn’t, if that makes any sense, that there are people out there that could do that.”

Longwell then broke down one person she interviewed.

"Audra from Arizona said, 'I think the reason he should be impeached is really just so that he can’t run ever again.' Trump was impeached the next day," Longwell wrote. "The Trump-to-Biden group was similarly harsh. Like Tina from Pennsylvania: 'The windows were being cracked, people were being killed, I don’t understand how this happened like this. And if he’s behind it, they really should impeach him, get rid of it and that’s it.' For a brief moment, reality was undeniable, and people’s opinions of Trump became soft and changeable."