The scale of disaster facing Trump in the midterms, according to pollsters

Donald Trump’s historic unpopularity is a dead weight dragging Republican candidates towards a disastrous defeat in the US midterm elections on Tuesday, polling experts believe. Recent surveys show a shift towards the Democrats that would give them a strong chance of claiming both the House and the Senate with a sweep of key battleground races. That would leave Trump facing an awkward end to his presidency, with a hostile Congress able to thwart parts of his agenda and launch investigations into his conduct. Shorts The data modelling site Race to the White House (RWH) gives Democrats a 94 per cent chance of taking the House of Representatives and a 76 per cent chance of winning the Senate. Other forecasters are even more pessimistic about Republican prospects. The picture is bleak at ground level too. RWH projects Democrats to win at least six Senate seats currently held by Republicans, with four required to take control of the upper chamber of Congress. Midterm elections are often difficult for the party that holds the US presidency, but Republicans face an even tougher battle due to Trump and his catastrophic ratings, according to Tim Malloy, a polling analyst at the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. “We have a very unpopular president – in our polling he’s at 32 per cent approval, which is really abysmal,” he said, reeling off a list of Trump’s areas of weakness in public opinion. “[Fuel] prices, what it costs to feed your family, the tariffs, the war [with Iran], [Jeffrey] Epstein, you name it. There are any number of things that people are troubled by.” Republican candidates up and down the ballot will pay the price, Malloy believes. “Generally, the midterms at this point in a second term are not good for any president. But I think this could go down as the worst midterms for any president ever,” he said. “There is a trickle-down effect…you are on the coat-tails of the president – that has been proven over many election cycles. “When the president is not popular, that hurts everybody [in the party] from local judges to Congress to senators.” Malloy cautions that while the House could be a “blowout” for the Democrats, many of the party’s leads in key Senate races are small enough to be within the margin of error for polls. But the numbers are becoming more concerning for Republicans as election day nears, expanding the map of potential target seats for the Democrats. Dr Louis Bromfield, a political researcher at Swansea University and founder of the Horse Race Politics forecasting website, points to states such as South Carolina, where a solid Republican polling lead for a seat the party has held since the 1950s has evaporated. “With each passing day, it seems increasingly likely that seats previously not considered to be in play, suddenly are,” he said, noting that some predictions of “blue wave” for the Democrats are being revised upwards to a “blue tsunami”. Bromfields points to the war in Iran and its effect on prices in the US as the Republicans’ greatest weakness heading into the midterms – made worse by Trump’s U-turn after campaigning on a promise to end involvement in Middle East wars. This is even eroding the President’s previously rock-solid support among Republicans. “The war in Iran is horrifically unpopular among not just Democrats and independents, but it is actually starting to eat away at Trump’s own base numbers as well, which is really troubling for him,” said Bromfield. Some Republican candidates in close races have sought to distance themselves from their leader. Susan Collins, running for the Senate in Maine, has noted her opposition to tariffs on neighbouring Canada. Analysts suggest this is unlikely to spare them from the wrath of voters, but acknowledge that some races have unique local characteristics. An election for governor of Ohio has become dominated by Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s controversial ad that features his opponent’s estranged mother. A bitter Senate race in Michigan has increasingly revolved around Democrat Abdul el-Sayed’s views on Israel and unfounded allegations of sympathy for Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood – with Trump himself launching Islamophobic attacks on Sayed. The Democrat has completely rejected those claims. Republican messaging has sought to portray left-wing Democrats as dangerous subversives and terrorist sympathisers, says Bromfield, but he sees little sign that this line of attack is “cutting through” to voters. Malloy compares this Republican strategy to “throwing spaghetti at the wall” Only about 4 per cent of voters are still undecided at this point, he adds. . Pollsters are wary of understating Trump and Republican support after the President overperformed his numbers in two election victories. There remain doubts that Republican strongholds such as Texas could be about to turn blue. “It would be foolish to write them off,” said Bromfield. “The main story of Trump’s electoral success has been everyone writing him off. But in none of those previous [campaigns] has he had the track record of this administration.” Both of Trump’s victories came from running as an insurgent against Democrat establishment figures, he suggests, while this time he will be judged on a chequered record in office. “When it comes to making people’s lives economically harder, voters are very good at pointing the finger at the right person,” said Bromfield. “And if you are in the same party as the guy who’s making people’s lives worse, you will get punished as well.”