NPR’s Leila Fadel asked political commentator Jonah Goldberg what Republicans should do about their party’s poor poll numbers. Goldberg, the editor-in-chief and co-founder of the conservative website The Dispatch, said the poll offers little good news for the GOP. He highlighted one number that stood out: of people who disapprove of the president, 53% strongly disapprove, and only 6% just disapprove.
“That kind of partisan disapproval intensification is unprecedented for Trump and almost unprecedented for any president,” Goldberg said. He said attitudes toward the president are polarizing “sort of like in a centrifuge.”
Fadel noted that the president has said, “Act like I’m on the ballot.” She asked whether that now becomes a liability for these candidates. Goldberg said it definitely does. “It’s as if the electorate heard him say that and says, we accept your terms,” he said. The gamble at the midterm convention was that there were a lot of people who wanted to vote against Trump, and it was the people who like Trump that they felt they needed to turn out and excite. But, Goldberg said, “the people who really want to vote based on Donald Trump are the ones who want to vote against Republicans rather than for them.”
Fadel said immigration has long been an issue where voters favored Republicans, especially President Trump, and they’ve now lost that edge. Goldberg said there are a lot of different things going on. He said many people liked the idea that Trump was going to send back the worst of the worst, but what they’re seeing is something beyond that. He described it as a strategy of the Trump administration, of Stephen Miller and several other people, to make the chaos and fear they were creating for not just illegal immigrants, but legal immigrants and even U.S. citizens who just happened to be going around looking like immigrants. The downside, he said, is that’s not what a lot of Americans really wanted or expected.
Goldberg also called it a fundamental mistake that both parties have been making for 25 years, but with Trump doing it on steroids. He said they assume that every single voter they get is voting for the most expansive, extreme version of their agenda. Trump came into office thinking that every single voter in every single swing state was voting for full-spectrum MAGA and wanted this administration to behave “like a biker gang with diplomatic immunity on every front.” But a huge number of voters, particularly the voters that won him the election, were voting because they were nostalgic for the pre-COVID economy of Trump’s first term, Goldberg said. Instead, he said, “what we get is a president who spends most of his time, it seems, talking about ballrooms, about – and delivering $6 and whatever it is – 50 cent – diesel gas.” He said there are an enormous number of people who say, “this isn’t what I voted for, and on all of these issues, I thought I was getting X, and I got a hell of a lot of Y.”
Fadel asked whether, if the economy was doing better, this wouldn’t be as dismal, even with the mass deportation and events where American citizens have been killed. She asked whether this is mostly driven by people’s pocketbook. Goldberg said he doesn’t want to say mostly. “I don’t want to go all vulgar Marxist on anybody,” he said. But economy matters. It always matters. If the economy were roaring at three or 4% growth, or if he had the economy that he had at the beginning of his first term, his problems would obviously be less.
Goldberg said it works the other way around, too. The people who have most strongly supported Trump are disproportionately concentrated in red states, agricultural states, rural states, manufacturing states, the Farm Belt of the South through the Midwest. The problems with the economy are concentrated precisely in those demographics. Expensive diesel affects the entire agricultural economy. The tariffs affect the manufacturing economy and are felt by people who work in it much more directly. A big chunk of the core MAGA people were the people who really believed they were voting for a guy who didn’t want any more endless wars. He said the issue climate from economics on down is aimed at discouraging Trump’s core supporters. In another poll this week, for the first time, Trump dipped into the high 20s, to 29% in approval, which Goldberg called “crazy town.”
Fadel asked how a swing district Republican or the GOP candidate in a close Senate race should react to this poll. Goldberg joked, “I would sacrifice 50 oxen to Baal.” He said part of the problem is that Republicans who have their own independent identity are doing better. It’s the ones who are just basically generic Republican and don’t have any independent identity who are getting dragged down by Trump. “It’s just awfully late to try and say, hey, I’m my own person. I’m not a rubber stamp for this guy,” Goldberg said. Voting is basically starting, and it’s a real dilemma.
