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Another day, another discharge petition short-circuiting the power of House Speaker Mike Johnson. Yesterday, the House passed a bill overturning a Trump executive order stripping union protections from some federal workers, a bill that began as a petition circulated by Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine).
It came as some surprise to everyone that Johnson, thrust unexpectedly into the speaker’s job in 2023 at a moment of maximum intra-conference chaos, managed to keep things ticking along as smoothly as he did for a while. Now, however, he seems to be landing pretty much where many people expected him to be from the jump: a weak speaker whose fractious conference increasingly ignores his playbook to do what they want. Happy Friday.
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Republicans Are Bracing for Midterm Disaster
by Andrew Egger
“It’s not a secret. There’s no sugarcoating it. It’s a pending, looming disaster heading our way.”
“We are facing almost certain defeat.”
“The chances are Republicans will go down and will go down hard.”
“You hit the nail on the head. This is an absolute disaster. No matter what party is in power, they usually get crushed in the midterms.”
These pessimistic assessments of Republicans’ chances in next year’s midterms are the sort of thing you’d expect to hear from disgruntled GOP operatives outside the MAGA camp. This week, however, they’ve been coming from someone way crazier: Joe Gruters, the Trump-diehard chair of the Republican National Committee, who has been barnstorming conservative radio this week.¹
Gruters isn’t throwing Trump under the bus. Quite the opposite: As Democrats overperform in special election after special election and Republican confidence in the midterms craters, he’s trying to set expectations low—way low. After all, he says, the guys in power nearly always lose the midterms. And as once-unimaginable cracks have begun spiderwebbing across the MAGA coalition, he’s making a specific case to his party: “The only person that could bring the nose up and help us win is the president of the United States, Donald J. Trump.”
Still, it’s remarkably abnormal to see the chair of the institutional Republican party—the head of the party’s campaign apparatus!—openly predict doom for his candidates. It risks further depressing GOP voters and encouraging lawmakers to retire early. And, beyond that, it’s far from clear that the Republicans who actually need to get elected next year share Gruters’s assessment of how to fix their electoral predicament.
This week, I spoke to a number of swing-state GOP operatives about Trump and the midterm environment. And they were pretty blunt. To them, the biggest reason Republicans seem bound for disaster isn’t historical midterm trends. It’s the world the president has built for them to run in—particularly when it comes to affordability. (To encourage them to speak openly, including in ways that contradict top-down GOP messaging, we agreed not to disclose their names.)
“His message sucks. It’s absolute trash. ‘Affordability is a Democrat hoax’??? Give me a break,” said one strategist, a veteran of presidential and congressional campaigns. “It’s the non-college-educated version of the Biden message, and we saw how well that worked. . . . Nobody believes the economy and particularly affordability is getting better.”
Asked about Trump’s affordability message, a Georgia-based Republican wrote simply: “It’s landing like doo doo,” before sending a screenshot of the results of this week’s shock Democratic victory in a special election in a normally red Georgia state House district.
According to a third GOP strategist, Republicans are likely to find themselves in particularly bad shape next year precisely because Trump demands that they stay loyal to him. “There have been past White Houses where it was okay to have some distance between yourself and the president,” he said. “A candidate who says, ‘Yeah, maybe tariffs aren’t a great idea because of what they’re doing to prices,’ or whatever the case may be . . . That is clearly not the case with this administration.”
Past presidents might have put up with disrespect—or allowed for some strategic distance—from candidates in close races, reasoning that they’d rather have congressional majorities than enforce personal purity tests. Donald Trump is about as far the opposite of that as possible.
As you can imagine, all this low-grade midterms panic has Republicans everywhere trying to figure out how to get Trump to change—if not in policy, then at least in messaging. They’re making some baby steps in this department. With everyone from Laura Ingraham to Suzie Wiles all but begging the president to start treating affordability as a real concern, Trump is grudgingly going along for the moment. Earlier this week, he headed to Pennsylvania for a speech billed as focusing on affordability, where he said he’d been advised that “I can’t call it a hoax, because they’ll misconstrue that.”
Even when he can be talked into talking about affordability, though, Trump can’t help falling back into meta-narratives about how unfair it is for him to have to talk about it at all. “I inherited the worst inflation in history,” he groused in Pennsylvania. “There was no affordability. Nobody could afford anything.” And he remains as committed as ever to the policy choices that are creating these headaches in the first place: “Tariff,” he said, is still one of his favorite words.
Given that reality, many Republicans feel they can’t do much but grit their teeth, cross their fingers, and hope against hope that the economy will improve before next year.
“This isn’t going to get better unless he either, one, shuts off the tariffs and starts a real economic turnaround, or two—well, I don’t know what two is,” the first strategist said. “I think the GOP is looking at a very rough midterm.”