President Donald Trump is not in good shape for the midterm elections next year, warned Mark Mitchell, lead pollster of the heavily pro-MAGA outfit Rasmussen Reports, in a Thursday interview on "War Room."
Despite Trump "racking up wins" for his base, Mitchell said, "the Republicans are in a really bad spot."
"Now, you've probably heard a lot of really good headlines about the future of the Democrat Party, about how their brand is in the tank, about how over the long term they're going to hemorrhage electoral votes as the 2030 Census catches up with all of the movements that happened post-COVID, how we might fix the 2020 Census and that might give another 15 seats back to the Republicans. And also all this redistricting stuff."
Despite all of that, though, he continued, "Trump still has to have the Republicans win November of 2026. And, you know, 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."
"And that brings us to a very inconvenient and uncomfortable public opinion fact, which is that Donald Trump might get all of these wins, but he can't pick and choose what he gets credit for," said Mitchell. "And so this summer he got his signature legislation signed, the 'One Big Beautiful Bill.' He took out Iran's nuclear program, and he got all of these trade deals. But his numbers between the middle of June and the middle of July tanked, from approval rating of net +8 down to net -4, and he's at net -2 today. So he hasn't really recovered."
The root cause of this, Mitchell said, is Trump's mishandling of the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking case files, a major promise his supporters were hanging on.
"Maybe people didn't like the One Big Beautiful Bill because the messaging kind of stunk, or maybe people were upset about the fact that we were getting involved with stuff with Israel. But probably the biggest one is the Epstein thing," he said. "And I've lost a ton of followers calling Trump out for the way he handled that because it was kind of a canary in the coal mine that maybe we aren't getting the massive redress of voters grievances that we thought we were going to get with Trump. And so maybe, again he won't get credit for all these wins."
Worse still are the numbers for the GOP as a whole, he continued.
"Objectively, if you look at the 119th Congress, Republicans are giving us absolutely nothing," said Mitchell. "They made a lot of really major promises back in November. The stuff that Mike Johnson was saying on the steps of Congress on November 12th about how he was going to hang an America First banner over Congress. And our list of legislation is essentially the One Big Beautiful Bill and that's about it. They have 50 legislative days left in this year."
In addition to pressing Republicans to rig congressional maps in their favor, Mitchell noted, Trump will be hand-picking candidates he thinks can best win and plans to hold a convention ahead of the 2026 election. "But I don't know if that's going to be enough, because only 38 percent of Trump 2024 voters give Republicans in Congress a very favorable rating. That's horrible. And so Trump got all these crossover Democrats, he got all these independents and Republicans have not converted those votes."
Watch the video below or at the link here.