President Trump has had more political lives than a cat. But it’s tempting to wonder now, as economic and geopolitical events threaten his party and his positioning for his final two years in office, if his supply is running low.
Unpopular wars—one of the kinetic variety against Iran, the other a series of trade and tariff wars against many of our longest and closest allies—have taken a terrible toll on Trump and his party. The Iran war has cost the U.S. government over $38 billion as of August and is continuing at a pace of $2-3 billion a month, but voters care much more about the skyrocketing increases in the cost of gasoline. Farmers in rural Trump country, already hit hard by tariffs, now must deal with diesel and fertilizer prices going through the roof.
You don’t have to visit farm country to see warning signs, however. They’re plenty obvious on Capitol Hill. The House canceled all remaining pre-election votes, partly to dodge a vote on impeaching Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Even some of the Supreme Court justices Trump appointed are straying from the fold, most recently handing him a defeat in an attempt to have the Postal Service take steps that could severely limit voting by mail.
The midterm elections look grisly for the GOP; holding onto their House majority is all but hopeless, and their Senate majority, once secure, is increasingly precarious. The New York Times/Siena University national poll released earlier this week confirmed all the worst fears of clear-eyed Republicans. A Fox News survey showed equally bad news.
The American electorate is both angry and anxious. We now have had five consecutive presidents, starting with Bill Clinton in 1993, who took office with their party also holding Senate and House majorities; in each case, when that president left office, their party had nothing. Voters have exhibited a strong inclination to lash out at the party holding the White House, the Senate, and the House as Republicans now do, along with a majority of governorships and almost 60 percent of the 98 state legislative chambers. In many of the states where the GOP has hegemony, there is only one direction for the blame to flow, particularly in red states that haven’t voted for Democrats much since Moby Dick was a guppy.
Thus, Republican Senate seats are now in danger in Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Ohio, and Texas; a year ago, only Maine and Ohio looked like plausible targets for Democrats.
The latest dose of bad news for Republicans came from a survey of 800 likely voters in Alaska, released Thursday by a bipartisan team of pollsters, showing former Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola leading Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan by 5 points, 46 to 41 percent. When the race is tabulated using the state’s ranked-choice voting method, Peltola hits 53 percent to Sullivan’s 47 percent. The poll, commissioned by AARP and conducted jointly by the Democratic firm of Impact Research and the Republican firm of Fabrizio Ward, found that 49 percent of likely voters have a favorable opinion of Peltola (43 percent unfavorable), with 40 percent viewing Sullivan favorably (44 percent unfavorably). Thirty-three percent of the sample identified as Republicans, 18 percent as Democrats, and 49 percent as independents.
The Democratic nominee for governor, Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins, led the field with 40 percent of the vote, while Republican Bernadette Wilson had only 20 percent, Republican Dave Bronson was at 14 percent, and another Republican, Treg Taylor, at 7 percent, leaving 18 percent undecided. In the ranked-choice tabulation, Kreiss-Tomkins led Wilson 55 percent to 45 percent. Democrats last won a Senate seat in Alaska in 2008; their last gubernatorial victory was in 1998. As in other surveys conducted this year, affordability and the rising cost of living is the dominant issue for most voters, though among older voters, concerns about Social Security, the cost of health care, and the future of Medicare also top the list.
This Alaska survey is the sixth in a series of battleground-state surveys released by AARP, with several more expected before the midterm election.
A case can be made that two or three Senate races the GOP may lose might well not have been lost if either a generic Republican or Democrat were in the Oval Office instead of the pugilistic Donald Trump. Would Sen. Thom Tillis have run for reelection in North Carolina were it not for Trump, with whom he has a testy relationship? Would popular Georgia GOP Gov. Brian Kemp have challenged freshman Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff if not for his own bad relationship with Trump, dating back to when Kemp refused to help Trump “find” more votes in his state in the 2020 election? Had Trump not encouraged, and eventually supported, the successful primary challenge by scandal-plagued Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, would Sen. John Cornyn be cruising to an easy general-election win? Food for thought.
Obviously, we don’t yet know what will happen in the Nov. 3 midterms or what will be going on in the minds of Republicans in Congress, but if this election is as bad for Republicans as it might be, one wonders what Trump’s standing in the party will be when it is over.