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Almost every psephologist and pollster believes the midterm election in 26 days will deliver Donald Trump a stinging rebuke.
Midterms are typically bad for the incumbent president’s party: In six of the past eight midterm cycles, the presidential party lost congressional majorities in one or both chambers. A seventh midterm, 1998, is moot because Bill Clinton had already lost both chambers in 1994; George W. Bush’s post-September 11 midterm of 2002 is the lone exception.
But recent developments suggest that Trump’s losses may extend beyond mere surrender of Congress.
Trump is bleeding political capital across the board: among independents, non-MAGA Republicans, even among some of his most devout, red hat-wearing followers. A small but growing contingent of Republican politicians have also begun to openly criticize and even vote against Trump before the midterm results.
Should November 3 be the disaster for Republicans that analysts are predicting, Trump will morph overnight into something less than a lame duck president with a ticking, two-year expiration clock: he will become politically bankrupt in ways all-too-familiar to him as a businessman.
Political bankruptcy
The media routinely bandies around the term “political capital,” but three decades ago presidential scholar Paul Light defined its four components: party support, public support, electoral margin, and reputation.
Across each measure, Trump is hemorrhaging capital.
Party support. Although they are selfishly abandoning him to save their own political hides, a growing list of Republicans running for election or reelection, from Maine to Miami, are like rats abandoning the Trumpian ship.
Seven House Republicans recently voted to curb Trump’s Iran war powers. South Florida Rep. María Elvira Salazar openly fumed about Trump’s reckless and dehumanizing deportation polices, which are turning constituents in her Cuban-majority House district against her. A “concerned” Susan Collins criticized Trump’s trade war with Canada because, along with spiking diesel-based home heating oil prices, Trump’s policies and unpopularity are jeopardizing her reelection bid.
And in ruby-red Texas — a state, like Florida, where Trump in 2024 enjoyed record-setting Latino support and where no Democrat has won statewide in three decades — departing Sen. John Cornyn and former Bush adviser Karl Rove refused to back Ken Paxton, Trump’s troubled nominee for Senate. Heck, even Paxton privately complained that Trump’s midterm party convention in Dallas was a “drag” on his campaign.
Public support. Pick a pollster — seriously, any respected survey outfit — and regardless of sampling method or weighting, whether statewide or national, they show Trump’s public support nosediving.
In the past two weeks, The Wall Street Journal, AP-NORC, Quinnipiac, Reuters/Ipsos, and NBC/Telemundo all pegged Trump’s national approval rating in the mid- to low-30s.
Trump’s support is cratering with key subgroups, too, including independents, non-MAGA Republicans, Latinos, even 2024 Trump voters. State polls too numerous to list confirm that Trump’s low approval numbers are damaging Republican candidates for governor and Congress.
A variety of anecdotal developments confirm Trump’s polling collapse, especially among his longstanding supporters and allies:
At an arena in Alabama, a state he carried two years ago by 30 points, there were near-empty upper deck sections for a recent Trump rally.
Voters and listeners are tuning out Trump’s MAGA media allies, many of whom are suffering steep traffic declines on YouTube, X, and Rumble.
Gullible red-hatters fleeced by Trump’s cryptocurrency are miffed; several Trump merchandise “superstores” recently shuttered from declining sales; and Trump signs and flags are disappearing from even the reddest corners of ‘Murica.
The lopsidedly white, male, rural, truck-driving farmers of “flyover” America are furious about the doubling of diesel gas prices since Trump took office.
The “Front Row Joes” — avid groupies who travel across the country to attend Trump’s rallies — are starting to bail on him, too.
Even longtime supporter and donor Pat Boone no longer wants to write “Love Letters in the Sand” to Trump.
Electoral margin. Trump won the popular vote in 2024, the only time he did in three attempts. Whatever reserves of political capital Trump retains derive from his popular vote victory over Kamala Harris two years ago.
But Trump’s 49.8 percent share and 1.5 percent victory margin were far from resounding. Hold aside Bush’s and Trump’s negative popular vote margins in their respective 2000 and 2016 Electoral College wins, and Trump’s 2024 victory margin is the smallest of any presidential winner since 1968. And the tailwinds so critical to his 2024 victory — inflation, high prices — are now electoral headwinds thanks to Trump’s ruinous and inflationary trade, tariff, and Iran war polices.
Reputation. Presidential reputation is the most subjective form of political capital. To detractors, Trump’s bluster, vanity, reckless behavior, and incessant name-calling are damning personal traits that simultaneously delight his followers.
But two factors in Trump’s second term are destroying his reputation: fatigue and corruption.
Presidential fatigue typically sets in after a two-term president’s second midterm, the pivotal juncture Trump reaches next month. But because his two terms were non-consecutive and he remained in the political spotlight throughout Joe Biden’s four intervening years, Trump has polluted the national discourse for more than 11 years dating back to his June 2015 campaign announcement.
Public fatigue with Trump should therefore be more profound than for a regular, two-term president. His act is getting old and, given how often Trump dozes off at public events, he becomes more “low-energy” with each passing week.
Then there’s the growing stain of Trumpian corruption. A recent Economist/YouGov poll reported that Americans are growing wise to Trump’s self-dealing. In addition to 71 percent of Democrats, 47 percent of independents and even a surprising 18 percent of Republicans said Trump uses the presidency “to enrich family and friends.”
A beleaguered Trump, openly criticized by some Republicans for using government money to pay for his self-congratulatory TV ads, recently reversed course and said he would pay for them with campaign funds (though Politico reported yesterday that he will not reimburse the government for ads that have already run). Likewise, Donald Trump Jr. promised to reimburse the wealthy Russian who paid for his wedding reception. The Trumps seem to be realizing that lining their pockets is politically costly.
Capital punishment
Donald Trump likes brag that “nobody knows more” than he does about, well, almost everything. Ironically, this boast is true for bankruptcies and cash squeezes, which defined his business career.
Unlike actual capital, however, a president can’t sign an executive order or organize a kickback through a slimy son-in-law to acquire political capital. Political capital must be earned. Yet Trump has done almost nothing since his second inaugural to acquire it and plenty to squander his reserves. His political burn rate rivals the dot-com era collapse of Pets.com and Kozmo.com.
Rather than build party support by helping and funding fellow partisans, Trump hoards campaign money he’s raised. Rather than nurture public support by listening to citizens and translating their wishes and worries into beneficial public policies, Trump builds monuments to himself. Because he’s term-limited, he has no incentive to think about building a 2028 electoral margin mandate. As for his reputation, the nation is increasingly sick of his vulgarity, recklessness, policy failures, and incessant blame-shifting for problems he created.
Some observers worry that, given his volcanic temperament and fragile ego, during his final two years in office a politically broke and broken Trump could become especially dangerous. He will certainly lash out in ways both predictable and not. But the American system only abides the rantings and ravings of those with political capital to burn, and in less than four weeks Trump’s red-hat movement will sink further and irrevocably into the political red.
That’s it for now
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Thanks for reading.
Gee, couldn’t happen to a nicer guy …