Mark Halperin is a well-respected political operative who exists in that tiny pinhead-sized territory of someone with great sources on both sides of the aisle. He’s spent the better part of the past decade arguing that Donald Trump is the best political athlete since Bill Clinton, which is a good example of his increasingly rare centrist point of view.
On Thursday, he stirred up a bit of a maelstrom in the political media world after publishing a column in The Daily Mail with a headline that read “My Trump sources say his worst nightmare imaginable has arrived.”
“Worst nightmare imaginable.”
The piece is built on personal texts and emails he’s received from Republican campaign operatives, and what they’re telling him is that the private polling is worse than the already horrific public polling.
After some initial pushback from some predictable pro-Trump precincts, he posted the column on X with a dare that challenged any Republican consultant who thinks his sources are wrong: get in touch.
Seventeen more strategists did, by his count, and every one of them told him he had it right. Seventeen consultants who picked themselves is not a statistically pure sample size, and those who volunteered their observations were at once self-selecting and arguably had some self-interest in agreeing with the influential political insider. That’s how the game works. Still. I can’t recall seeing a reporter so brazenly test direct sourcing in public and get a louder answer back.
By Friday, Halperin turned his hedging into alarmism, at least for this Republican audience. He shared specifics of what he’d received from GOP operatives.
A “Blue tsunami as big as Connecticut,” he reported someone said to him. The recent taxpayer-funded Trump ad that played locally in DC was mocked “as obviously illegal as it is appalling,” and that’s coming from Republicans he talks to. He was told that Trump’s media ban was “stupid, ill-advised, doomed, and counterproductive,” per his pro-Trump sources. He shared rumors that MAGA Inc. won’t spend its pile on candidates. And on the candidates running from Trump, he said that the White House is mostly fine with it: “they gotta do what they gotta do to win,” and “no one thinks the president will actually be fine with it.”
Republicans aren’t just worried about the midterms; they’re acting like a party expecting a disaster. And more and more of their own candidates have decided Trump is largely to blame.
A recent report in The New York Times describes a party in what Carlos Curbelo called “survival mode.” Mike Rogers in Michigan and Ashley Hinson in Iowa want the Iran war over, fast. Byron Donalds scrubbed Trump from his website. María Elvira Salazar cut an ad telling the president his immigration policy had gone too far. Roger Marshall, in Kansas, told ICE to start coordinating with local police. Marc Short, who ran Mike Pence’s office, told the Times the late distancing “does feel somewhat like desperation.” The White House answered by handing the paper statements and photos from more than sixty candidates standing with Trump.
Politico went through House ad spending since August and found nearly two-thirds of it flowing into races with Republican incumbents, including districts Trump won easily. “We need to stop the contagion,” a GOP official told them. A national Republican pollster called the map “hilariously big.” On Thursday Axios got an NRSC memo asking donors for another $8.9 million to hold Alaska, Iowa and Ohio, three states Trump carried by double digits. The memo calls the environment “tough,” a word fundraising memos use to gloss over something much worse.
Money is not the problem, as Republican groups have already spent more than $450 million this cycle, twice what Democrats have spent so far. Trump’s political operations withheld a massive $416 million campaign budget until Labor Day. When the money is that lopsided, and the map keeps getting worse for the GOP, money doesn’t seem to be the problem if it’s just amplifying the same dated and ineffective pro-Trump campaign ads that are turning people off.
Worse for Republican candidates, Trump seems oddly committed to making their reelection efforts much harder by leading with ineffective and dated messaging.
Trump is still blaming Biden for an inflation rate he promised to fix on day one of his administration, which started nearly two years ago. He defends the Iran war exactly the same way he did in late February, despite it going horribly wrong and becoming increasingly unpopular. Republican candidates are desperate to run against their “socialists and communists” Democratic rivals, but their president is promising $5,000 checks to every American adult and toasting Communist dictator Xi Jinping at a White House state dinner.
Trump told the midterm convention crowd in Dallas to “pretend that I’m on the ballot,” but since then his candidates have scrubbed him from their websites, broken with him on the war and on ICE, and, per Axios, a lot of them would rather he stay far away from his districts.
Trump knows his base doesn’t show up to vote when he isn’t on the ballot, so he’s telling them to vote as if he is. But his own candidates are running away from that very idea. They’re telling those same voters that voting for them isn’t a vote for Trump.