The midterm election picture is coming into focus.
This is the bad news no one in the Republican Party wanted to hear.
And now Trump heard a five-word warning that had him bracing for the worst.
Mark Halperin’s Warning
Independent journalist Mark Halperin was one of the stars of the 2024 election.
Halperin was an early voice calling out the cover-up of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, broke the story that Joe Biden was dropping out of the race, and was the lone voice reporting that all the private polling showed Trump beating Kamala when the rest of the legacy media was running wild with Kamala’s summer of joy.
But in a viral social media post, Halperin set off alarm bells on the right with his reporting on the state of play in 2026.
Halperin said it was still possible for Republicans to keep losses in November to a “minimum.”
“Maybe Susan Collins, Roger Marshall, Ashley Hinson, Mike Rogers, Dan Sullivan, John Sununu, Jon Husted, Michelle Tafoya, and even Ken Paxton will all win. I know serious people who think each of those outcomes is possible.
Maybe Republican House losses will be at a minimum,” Halperin wrote.
However, Halperin wrote that the his reporting told him “the wheels are coming off” for Republicans due to high gas prices and an unpopular war with Iran.
“But as I sift through my inboxes and social media feeds over the most recent extended news cycle, what I see instead is the possibilities that the wheels are coming off for a political figure who is swimming against the tide of a Blue tsunami as big as Connecticut, not because Ken Martin is suddenly a genius, but because an unpopular war and high consumer prices is no way to win a midterm election,” Halperin added.
In a column published in the Daily Mail, Halperin stated that as bad as the public polls are for Republicans, and Halperin is on record saying voters should ignore public polls because legacy media polling is broken, the private polls for campaigns and parties are “worse” for the GOP.
What’s Going On
In his post, Halperin ticked a number of domestic, foreign, and economic storms swirling around Trump and the GOP.
Halperin wrote:
* The president is considering spending one of his days on the road between now and Election Day in….Alabama???!! * Florida and Kansas are among the many Red places that have sprung a lot of electoral leaks that are going to need to be plugged and fast.
* The media ban is considered stupid, ill advised, doomed, and counterproductive but way more people than just Peter Baker (including, again, by many of my pro-Trump Republican sources).
* The diesel export ban morass is an own-goal failure on at least three levels, and there is now both no easy answer or route out of the political expectations and policy messes.
* The rumors have started back up that MAGA Inc. will not spend down its cash pile to help Republican candidates, causing all sorts of finger pointing and teeth gnashing.
* The efforts of GOP candidates to distance themselves from the president to save themselves are only just getting underway — and while the White House is (mostly) fine with it (“they gotta do what they gotta do to win”), the defections produce a lot of negative news stories and no one thinks the president will actually be fine with it.
* Mr. Trump’s approval rating are in the toilet, fueled by lost support from key groups like young men, women, Hispanics, and independents.
* On the Warsh watch, there are swirling interactions between interest rates, the bond market, the size of the debt and deficit, and AI spending dangers that could lead to an economic calamity.
* Efforts to get an October Surprise deal with Tehran are almost certainly an illusion and a trap for a dozen reasons, including the inconsistencies of U.S. “allies” in the region about what they want.
But Halperin is also on record cautioning that not all is lost.
Halperin noted that there has never been a bigger financial disparity between two parties in an election as this year since Republicans will spend as much as a billion dollars more than Democrats.
Republicans, Halperin added, possess a vastly superior get-out-the-vote operation.
There are still five weeks for the GOP to turn it around and pull off an Election Day surprise and defy the polls like in 2016 and 2024.
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