With a month to go, Republicans’ midterm prospects are ‘catastrophically bad’

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This week Donald Trump summoned reporters to the Oval Office to announce that a $US15 billion ($22 billion) steel plant would be built in the midwestern state of Iowa.

Among those standing around him was Ashley Hinson, the Republican Senate candidate for Iowa, who is locked in a toss-up race for the seat occupied by a retiring Republican.

It is a seat Republicans must hold if they are to cling on to control of the US Senate at the midterm elections in four weeks, which are increasingly shaping as a bloodbath for the GOP.

“Iowans are frustrated”: Republican congresswoman Ashley Hinson, who is locked in a tight race for the US Senate.AP Photo/Alex BrandonDays earlier Hinson had called for “an immediate and successful end to the war in Iran” and urgent relief for families, farmers, seniors and small businesses struggling with the cost of petrol, diesel and everyday goods.

“I know Iowans are frustrated and I am frustrated,” she said. They were sick of people in Washington playing games, she added.

But the people in charge of Washington are Republicans. They have spent two years flattering a president whose approval rating fell to a record low of 32 per cent last week, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll, and who has taken the country into an expensive, unending conflict with Iran after promising “no new foreign wars”.

The poll showed how Americans have soured on Trump on every key issue since he took office for a second term in January 2025. On immigration his net approval fell from +7 to -19. On foreign policy it dropped from +2 to -32. And on the issue Americans say will most determine how they vote on November 3 – the cost of living – it slumped from -6 to -57.

That is a scary backdrop for Republicans, says Amy Walter, election analyst and publisher of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.

“If you’re the party in the White House there are really three options for you on election day,” Walter said at an event with the International Institute of Finance [IIF] in Washington on Thursday. “The election day is going to be bad; it’s going to be really bad; or it’s going to be catastrophically bad. You know that going in. Now we’re into catastrophically bad territory.”

Nonetheless, the Cook Political Report is not predicting a landslide where 50 or 60 seats change hands. That is not realistic given the sharply divided nature of modern US politics, the GOP stranglehold on rural areas, and a highly gerrymandered electoral map. “There are just so few competitive seats out there,” Walter said.

President Donald Trump at a rally at Peterbilt Motors Company in Denton, Texas, on Thursday.BloombergThat is why, despite conditions ripe for a rout, the Cook Political Report predicts Democrats will end up with a majority between five and 13 seats. “Could it go higher? Yes,” said Walter. “But there is a limit.”

It is more difficult for the Democrats to win the Senate, although pollster Nate Silver this week gave the party a 72 per cent change of flipping that chamber. The result will come down to a handful of races, particularly Texas, Alaska, Maine, Michigan, Ohio and Iowa. All have their own quirks and caveats.

In Maine, Democrats handicapped themselves by choosing populist progressive Graham Platner, who was forced to withdraw after a series of controversies including a rape allegation that he denies. His successor Troy Jackson is now taking on incumbent Republican Susan Collins, who has distanced herself from Trump on key issues.

In Alaska, former Democratic congresswoman Mary Peltola is challenging incumbent Republican Dan Sullivan, and could benefit from another Republican candidate running whose name, coincidentally, is also Dan Sullivan.

Abdul El-Sayed’s Senate bid is picking up speed.BloombergDemocrat Abdul El-Sayed appears to have gained ground in Michigan, after the left-wing health administrator bested an establishment Democrat in the most expensive Senate primary ever.

And Silver now has Texas leaning towards the Democrats’ James Talarico. If he wins it would represent a harsh indictment on Republican candidate Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney-general, who defeated incumbent senator John Cornyn in the Republican primary thanks to Trump’s endorsement.

This week The New York Times obtained leaked audio of Paxton admitting that the Trump-heavy Republican convention in Dallas four weeks ago actually hurt the party. “It dropped our numbers,” he said in the recording. “Everybody’s numbers dropped.” The picture was “not good” at the moment, he added.

There are signs Trump is nervous about areas that are supposed to be Republican strongholds. On Thursday (US time) he travelled to Denton, Texas, and Durant, Oklahoma, for campaign events, and on Friday he was due to hold a rally in Mobile, Alabama. He is planning to spend much of October on the road campaigning.

As this masthead reported at the Dallas convention, the Republican strategy is explicit: get loyal Trump voters to feel as though his name is on the ballot. They want to motivate the low-information, low-propensity voters who turned out for Trump in 2024 to show up again on November 3.

It is a risky approach; Trump is still beloved by MAGA diehards but he is broadly unpopular. Mobilising Trump loyalists to the polls could result in Republicans who have switched off Trump staying home. California-based Republican strategist Mike Madrid calls it a “big mistake”.

“That strategy is designed to mitigate further losses,” Madrid said. “They’re not trying to even hold the line with independents – they know they’ve lost them. The only reason you do that is if there’s a complete bloodletting about to happen.”

Hence Trump’s trip to deep red Oklahoma on Thursday. “It’s not just because the old man wants to see himself in front of a rally,” said Madrid. “It’s because they’ve got to lock down some semblance of a base. It’s that bad.”

Trump boasts of his success with Hispanic voters, who were a key plank in his winning 2024 coalition. But the polling is dire with that cohort of voters, too. An ActiVote poll released Thursday had Trump’s approval rating among Hispanics at 15 per cent.

Madrid, who specialises in Hispanic voting patterns, is not sure things are quite that bad but he says Latinos’ shift to Trump in 2024 was a rejection of the Democrats, not an embrace of Trumpism.

“They were never in love with Trump or Republicans, ever. They were just really disgusted and pissed off at the Democrats,” he said. “It’s the exact same scenario in reverse now, for the exact same reason. It’s the economy, overwhelmingly. People have just had it.”

The Latino Trump vote is softening.APA survey of 2140 American adults last week by the Associated Press and the National Opinion Research Centre delivered a bracing result for Republicans. Few metrics are better predictors of election swings than whether people feel the country is heading in the right direction.

The poll found 61 per cent thought the national economy was worse off since Trump took office, while 60 per cent said the country as a whole was worse off. Seven in 10 respondents said Trump’s handling of the cost of living was worse than they expected, while just 7 per cent said he outperformed their expectations.

But should the bad polls be believed? Trump certainly doesn’t think so – he calls them all “fake” – and neither does Republican strategist Matt Terrill, who was chief of staff on Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign.

“People thought it was dire in 2016 when polls showed Trump was going to lose,” he said. “You can’t trust these polls. We see time and again the polling being off.”

Terrill argues the party’s strategy from 2024 of rallying the base and Trump supporters is a winner. “This is not the Republican Party, it’s the Trump party. He is able to get out the GOP base in a way no other elected official can … The goal right now is to find those voters.”

But Amy Walter says it’s these people – Americans who voted for Trump last time, don’t like Democrats and are “really angry” about the way things are heading – who could sink the Republicans in November.

“What attracted them to Trump was three things: he was an outsider, he was a businessman and he wasn’t a typical politician who would tell you one thing and then do another,” she said at the IIF event on Thursday.

“He was not going to get us into forever wars, like all those other warmongering Republicans, and he was going to stick it to the man, stick it to the system.”

But the Iran war, though simmering rather than boiling, has now stretched on for seven months with no lasting resolution in sight. The national average price of unleaded is just under $US4.50 a gallon – expensive for the US – and diesel is about the dearest it has ever been. The cost of groceries has remained high or worsened.

US consumers are grappling with soaring fuel prices.BloombergThese factors have combined to turn off many Trump voters. “It’s not just that it had a direct impact on their lives,” Walter said. “It also put [Trump] into the category of being the one thing they never thought he’d be, which is a typical politician.”

Trump argues the Iran war was necessary to prevent the regime developing a nuclear weapon, and that petrol prices will fall once the conflict is over. At the same time, he insists the high cost of living is the fault of the Democrats and Joe Biden, and that “prices are coming down, RAPIDLY” under his leadership.

“I would give us an A+ on the government, on economics, on everything,” Trump told reporters on Thursday. “Look at inflation. I inherited the worst inflation in history under Biden and now it’s great, it’s really good.”

However, inflation is still running at 3.4 per cent. The Federal Reserve just lifted interest rates for the first time in three years, pumping up the cost of a mortgage. And polls suggest that, despite what Trump says, most voters do not believe he is prioritising the cost of living.

“He’s focused on a lot of things,” said Walter, “but this isn’t it.”

Matt Terrill acknowledges these are issues for voters but says Americans understand that inflation was worse under Biden. And he says Republicans have a good story to tell – jobs are strong, the border is secure, median household income is up. Gas prices are not the be-all and end-all.

“Sometimes in politics it’s not always about being better than your opponent but having your opponent be worse than you – or, in this case, crazy,” Terrill said.

He predicts most Americans will baulk at the left-wing candidates who have won many Democratic primaries – El-Sayed in Michigan, for example – and stick with the devil they know. “I actually think Republicans are going to do far better than people are predicting.”

It is clear that Trump does not regard himself as a vote loser. In the Oval Office on Monday the president told Hinson – the Senate candidate in an unexpectedly tight race in Iowa – that he intended to visit the state for a rally. He noted, correctly, that he won Iowa each time he ran. “I think I’m more popular now than I was then,” he added.

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