Trump Hit With a Dire Warning From Republican Pollsters

Republican pollsters and strategists are sounding the alarm that a Democratic wave is building ahead of the midterms as voters sour on Donald Trump’s handling of the economy.

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Trump promised a “golden age” for America. So far, voters feel he has fallen well short of that promise, particularly on the economy, where there has been a huge swing to the Democrats in the latest polls.

Meanwhile, the United States lost 23,000 jobs last month, Labor Department figures showed.

The bombshell jobs decline came despite economists predicting an 83,000-job gain in July.

Wages are also not keeping up with inflation, with consumer prices up 3.5 percent in June from a year earlier, outpacing wage growth of the same 3.5 percent.

That is largely due to Trump’s historically unpopular war with Iran, which he began without congressional authorization and has seen gas prices climb from around $3 a gallon before the conflict to more than $4, squeezing household budgets.

The White House has insisted that the price rises are temporary, but Republican strategists have warned for months that price rises will seriously hurt Trump and his party in November’s midterms.

“If Democrats could sustain leads on the economy and win double digit margins among independents as some polls show, a Blue Wave is possible,” GOP strategist David Winston said.

Meanwhile, Alex Conant, a Republican political strategist, told Reuters last month: “The White House officials have been saying since January that they need to win economic arguments. It’s hard to win the economic arguments when you’re clearly focused on foreign policy.”

Mitchell Brown, a Republican pollster, told the Wall Street Journal that things could be especially bad for the Republicans in the battleground states.

He said consumers in these states closely track everyday costs, from electricity bills to medical care and groceries. “They know exactly, to the dollar, the amount of their power bill,” he said. The same, he says, happens with health costs, or the price of beef.

“The toughest thing, too, is that we made gas prices the Achilles’ heel for (former President Joe) Biden and now it’s our own,” an unnamed adviser told Reuters in May.

And while voters turn against Trump, polls show that Democrats are also gaining ground on economic credibility.

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Fox News polling shows them leading Republicans on the issue for the first time since 2010, by 9 points in July. That marks a sharp reversal from 2022 and 2023, when Republicans held an advantage of as much as 15 points on the economy.

A Reuters poll from last month also showed independent registered voters, 67 percent of whom disapprove of the war in Iran, breaking toward Democrats.

Independents said they favor a Democratic congressional candidate by 36 percent to 20 percent. Independent voters also said they trusted Democrats more than Republicans to handle the economy.

Surveys also show that economic anxiety is putting some Republican-leaning voters at risk of staying home or switching sides.

Americans for Prosperity Action says economic concerns have put roughly 20 percent of Republican-leaning voters in swing states at risk of either sitting out the election or backing another candidate.

John Sides, a Vanderbilt political scientist, said Republicans face a steep uphill battle, adding that the party would have to see a major shift in their fortunes for things to go well in November.

“The set of events that would need to happen to produce a real change in the Republican Party’s fortune is pretty big, Sides told the Wall Street Journal.

“The specific economic circumstances we’re dealing with are not really necessarily an inheritance from a previous administration. They are due to very specific decisions that this administration has made,” he added.

The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.

In several surveys, only about one-quarter of respondents rate the economy as excellent or good, while about three-quarters say it is in fair or poor shape.

In many polls, more voters see the Democratic Party asa better economic stewardthan the Republican Party—a rare finding in recent years.

For the first time since 2010, Fox News polls find voters citing Democrats as better on the economy than Republicans. Democrats led by 4 points on the question in April and by 9 points in July, whereas the GOP was viewed as the better economic manager by as much as 15 points in 2022 and 2023.

In its polling and door-knocking to engage swing-state voters, Americans for Prosperity Action, a limited-government super PAC, has found that about one in five Republican-leaning voters is at risk of staying home or defecting, due in large part to economic worries, the group has said. Drawing a contrast with Democratic policy, however, brings 60% of those voters back to the GOP, the group says.