2026 is looking terrible for Republicans
They are losing the voters who powered Trump’s victory
Welcome back to The Argument’s monthly poll series, where we survey Americans on the issues everyone’s fighting about. This month’s survey is about the Make America Healthy Again movement and will be released tomorrow morning — Subscribe to make sure you get it in your inbox. Our last surveys have asked about immigration, AI, and free speech. Our full crosstabs are available for paid subscribers and our full methodology can be read here.
If the election were held today, Republicans may be facing a blue wave larger than the 2018 midterms, which resulted in a commanding Democratic House majority. Put simply, they are in really bad shape.
How bad? Consider this: In our survey fielded right after the election, Nov. 10-17, Republicans trailed by four percentage points among registered voters. When we pushed undecided voters to pick a side, that deficit expanded to six percentage points. And after that was filtered to just those who said they were likely to vote, it grew even further, to 7.6 points.
Those are the worst numbers we’ve ever seen for Republicans in any of our four released surveys, and they raise the obvious question: What’s happening here?
Republicans are hemorrhaging support with the young, nonwhite, and disengaged voters who powered Trump’s victory in 2024. Here are a few tidbits to show just what I’m talking about:1
Democrats are winning 25% of nonwhite Trump 2024 voters. Among white voters, this number is just 4%.
Among registered voters who didn’t vote for either Harris or Trump in 2024, Democrats receive 62% of the vote — a 25-percentage-point lead. Among the white voters of this group, Democrats lead by two points; among nonwhite nonvoters, they lead by 48 points.
Democrats win 64% of young voters in our survey, for a lead of 28 points. (For context, in 2024, they won this group by just 10 points.)
As with any survey, there are margins of error associated with these results. But when the findings are this lopsided, and when they line up with the election results we just saw, I feel more comfortable concluding that there is a clear and consistent story being told here.
In New Jersey, for instance, exit polls suggest that Mikie Sherrill won 18% of nonwhite Trump 2024 voters, while winning just 5% of white Trump 2024 voters. Among those who didn’t back either Harris or Trump in 2024, she received 64% of the vote. And she won young voters by 38 percentage points which placed them 24 points more Democratic than the 2024 electorate at large. All of these figures are quite similar to the findings from our survey.
Special elections and off-year elections are usually low-turnout, but in both New Jersey and Virginia, the gubernatorial race had a higher number of votes cast than the 2022 midterm elections did. In other words, this isn’t just a story of Democrats dominating in a low-turnout environment. It likely has real implications for the midterms.
Every single piece of evidence coming out of both this year’s elections and high-quality polls suggests that Republicans are on track to lose in 2026, and it’s because they’re bleeding support rapidly with their newest voters.2
But it’s not all good news for the Democrats. We asked voters about their top two issues and, unsurprisingly, 60% of voters ranked “cost of living” as a top-two issue in our survey. But despite Trump’s tariff policy and the continuing frustration with high grocery and consumer-goods prices, Democrats won these cost-of-living voters by just under half a percentage point in our survey.
Those numbers aren’t good for Republicans, but they’re a lot better than Trump’s nightmarish approvals on those issues are — as of Nov. 19, Silver Bulletin has Trump’s approval rating on inflation at -29.1%.
This suggests that Democrats face real trust problems on the economy that haven’t really gone away yet, despite voters giving Trump exceptionally poor marks for his economic stewardship.
But in absolute terms, it also means that the Republicans have completely lost the trust advantage on the economy that they enjoyed in 2024. Strip away that edge, and it’s not so surprising that they’re losing the very voters that flipped over the economy in the first place.
Our full poll, which asks about the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, vaccine policy, Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, and a Newsom versus Vance matchup, will be released tomorrow morning, with full crosstabs available for paying subscribers. Sign up here to become one!
All figures in this list are the results after pushing undecided voters.
If there is a bright side for Republicans, it’s that this is probably the “least bad” way to lose nationally. Most voters are white, and this is especially true in swing states. (Losing 25% of white Trump 2024 voters would have been nothing short of cataclysmic for the party.)
Wishful thinking. But I'll wish along with you.
Inject this into my veins.