The Republican with the most on the line this Election Day isn’t on the ballot: The 2026 midterm campaign is 35 days away from ending, which means the 2028 presidential campaign is 36 days away from beginning.
Currently, the debate among Republicans is not whether the November elections will go badly, but how badly it will go. “We’re gonna get crushed,” one House Republican told MS NOW. “The only question is by how much.”
Senate Republicans’ top super political action committee has already pulled out of North Carolina and moved resources to Kansas, which hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate in nearly a century.
Yet the Republican with the most on the line come Election Day may not even be on the ballot: Vice President JD Vance.
Even if Trump’s approval rating is in the 30s, that dwindling group will make up the Republican primary electorate in 2028 — and its members seem to have already chosen the vice president.
“Politically, there’s just a recognition that it’s always going to be hard to win a midterm when you have the White House, the Senate and the House,” Vance told NBC News last week.
But his party’s problems are greater than historical trends. When the ship goes down, it’s the anchor that usually goes first, as Trump’s average approval ratings have dropped to the mid-30s. Democrats’ lead in the generic ballot keeps growing. The Iran war is stalled. Prices remain persistently high. Many voters who joined Trump’s winning 2024 coalition have fled, while fissures widen among those who stayed. There is little prospect that these trends reverse before Election Day, but there is concern they could grow worse.
Trump’s polls are reminiscent of George W. Bush’s second term, and the Democratic wave of the late Bush years was not confined to the 2006 midterms. A second wave crested in 2008: Barack Obama won the presidency and Democrats gained even more seats in the House and Senate. Most believe that in 2008, whoever won the Democratic nomination would have beat any Republican after eight years of Bush. Obama’s primary race with Hillary Clinton was far closer than his general election… https://www.ms.now/opinion/jd-vance-midterms-trump-2028