Donald Trump may be celebrating victories within his base, but things are not looking good for him or Republicans heading into the 2026 midterms, according to Mark Mitchell, chief pollster for Rasmussen Reports. Speaking on Steve Bannon’s War Room on Thursday, Mitchell delivered a stark assessment that Trump and the GOP could be in serious trouble.
“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,” Mitchell explained.
Despite that, he said, the reality is grim. “Trump still has to have the Republicans win in 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.”
Mitchell pointed to Trump’s slipping approval ratings as evidence of the problem. “Donald Trump might get all of these wins, but he can’t pick and choose what he gets credit for,” he said. “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.”
A big part of the slump, Mitchell argued, comes down to Trump’s handling of a sensitive issue that many of his supporters were watching closely. “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, referring to Trump’s handling of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking case files.
“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.”
Mitchell also blasted Republicans in Congress for failing to deliver. “Objectively, if you look at the 119th Congress, Republicans are giving us absolutely nothing,” he said. “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.”
He added that Trump is planning to hand-pick candidates and hold a convention before 2026, but the outlook remains bleak. “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.”
