More than a half-dozen GOP strategists working on Senate and House races told VICE News that they’ve seen Trump’s numbers plunge in states and districts across the country. His standing with voters was already suffering from his botched coronavirus response — and his inflammatory reaction to national Black Lives Matter protests has pushed him even further down with key groups of voters.
“The environment really sucks for us right now. We’ve got a worldwide pandemic, the economy is slipping and now we have a race war tacked on,” warned one GOP strategist involved in multiple races. “If the election were held today, we’d be talking about a wipeout. We’d be in landslide territory.”
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That source said if the election were held today, it would be “devastating” for the GOP, who would lose not just the White House but the Senate and likely some House seats as well — even though most of the House map is being fought in districts Trump won that Democrats flipped in 2018. And they warned of a mirror-image result of the 1988 presidential election, when President George H.W. Bush won 40 states in an electoral romp.
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But while many Republicans think that things can’t get much worse, there’s no guarantee that’s true. One GOP strategist who’d expressed less worry than many others called immediately after seeing the news of former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s blockbuster accusations that Trump, beginning the conversation with two words: “Holy shit.”
