A conservative pollster who personally warned President Donald Trump about the coming midterm disaster, only to watch him change the subject to golf, says this week’s Republican wipeout was avoidable.
“If only they had listened,” Mark Mitchell, head pollster at The Honest Polling Company, wrote on X late on Saturday. “Susie heard my advice a year ago, as did Trump. Didn’t have to be this way.”
Mitchell was referring to Susie Wiles, Trump’s outgoing chief of staff, who left the White House on Friday after Republicans lost both chambers of Congress.
He has the receipts. Last December, The Washington Post reported that Vice President JD Vance arranged a White House lunch with Mitchell so he could warn Trump about the looming midterm losses. According to the Post, Trump engaged briefly with the data on his declining support, then lost interest and shifted the conversation to golf and fundraising.
Mitchell had been sounding the alarm publicly even before that. In August 2025, when he was lead pollster at the pro-MAGA outfit Rasmussen Reports, he told Steve Bannon’s “War Room” that Trump’s approval had “tanked” and that “the Republicans are in a really bad spot.”
“The bad news is that every single major pollster right now has the Democrat Party picking up seats in the House and most likely winning the majority,” Mitchell said at the time. He blamed the drop mostly on Trump’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, which he called “kind of a canary in the coal mine.”
He kept warning right up to the election. In October, he questioned to the Post whether Trump’s monthlong midterm rally blitz made sense at all.
“A 30-day blitz of the country to do these rallies again when he’s the most unpopular president — it just doesn’t really make sense,” Mitchell said.
Two days before the election, after the final New York Times/Siena polls showed Democrats leading Senate races in states including Texas, Ohio, Kansas and Iowa, Mitchell wrote: “Wow. The Republicans are in trouble. But this much trouble? Hard to say.”
It turned out to be that much trouble. Democrats are on track for roughly 256 House seats and at least 54 in the Senate. Trump has acknowledged that the Iran war and the gas prices that came with it hurt his party.