It’s no secret that Republicans including President Donald Trump himself are facing abysmal poll numbers. Trump is currently losing by big margins in polls on the national level and in swing states that he won in 2016, like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, which were crucial to his win in the electoral college. Now, according to a new report from Vice News, many Republican insiders are worrying big time. Apparently, their private poll results aren’t much if at all better for the GOP than those that have been reported and widely circulated publicly. One GOP strategist insisted that “if the election were held today, we’d be talking about a wipeout. We’d be in landslide territory.”
That’s not great news for Trump and the Republicans around him who want to hold onto power. Currently, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden leads by an average of a whopping 8.8 percent in national polling. On June 19, 2016 — a comparable point in the previous election cycle — Hillary Clinton’s lead over Trump was at about half the level of Biden’s (at 4.7 percent), suggesting that the current Democratic candidate is faring better than Clinton did in 2016.
In one recent Fox News poll on the national level, Biden led Trump by a staggering 12 percent — which Trump promptly responded to on Twitter by insisting the polling was “phony.”
As Trump put it:
‘@FoxNews is out with another of their phony polls, done by the same group of haters that got it even more wrong in 2016. Watch what happens in November. Fox is terrible!’
.@FoxNews is out with another of their phony polls, done by the same group of haters that got it even more wrong in 2016. Watch what happens in November. Fox is terrible!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 19, 2020
But he’s not the only one whose poor fortunes he’s ignoring. The new Vice report explains:
‘The president badly trails Biden in states and districts that went red in 2016 that he needs to win again in 2020. Trump is in alarmingly poor shape in a number of states that appeared well outside Democrats’ reach at the beginning of the election cycle. And his terrible numbers aren’t just hurting him: Republicans are increasingly concerned that he could cost them the Senate as well, handing Democrats unified control of Washington after the next election.’
Democrats seem well-suited to winning the number of seats that they need to secure a majority in the Senate. If Trump wins a second term, they need four seats in order to become the majority party in the Senate. (If Biden wins, the Democratic vice president will be able to break ties so the Democrats can top out at adding 3 seats, for a total of 50, and still gain control.)
One Republican strategist commented:
‘It looks pretty ominous right now in the Senate. They just have so many opportunities and the polling right now is so bad.’
Another strategist added the question:
‘Are we at the bottom or has the bottom not even dropped out yet? I don’t know what gets us out of this. People are probably just fucking sick of it.’
Currently, according to FiveThirtyEight, only 41.4 percent of Americans approve of Trump — and 55.2 percent of Americans actively disapprove. Currently GOP-held Senate seats that could be vulnerable this November include seats in Arizona, Colorado, Montana, North Carolina, and Maine. The Democrats have just one majorly vulnerable seat — the one Doug Jones holds in Alabama.
