Veteran election forecaster Charlie Cook said that he’s never seen anything like what President Donald Trump has done to the Republican Party.
Read more MAGA collapse: Trump’s new Wall Street venture is already a failure
For the Tuesday New Republic podcast, Greg Sargent described Cook as saying, “He’s never seen anything like the fiasco Trump foisted on GOP.”
As the 2026 midterm election nears, Cook sees that things are going so badly for Republicans that “normal rules don’t seem to be applying,” Sargent explained.
Looking at local numbers and some of the surveys from AARP and Fox, Cook said that Trump’s approval is running about six to 14 points below his 2024 showing, depending on the poll.
“It averages about 10. That’s a heck of an underperformance that’s there,” said Cook.
“And it means, practically, when it translates into candidates, when you look at the matchups, in every case the Democrat’s doing better among Democrats than the Republican is among Republicans,” he explained. “The Democrats are doing far better among independents. Democrats are doing better among women than Republicans are with men.”
There are three scenarios he sees for the GOP, he said in a Substack post last week.
“Even the really bad one, if I read what I wrote six months ago, I would have thought I’d been on some kind of mushrooms or something,” Cook joked. “I mean, it just didn’t seem possible, didn’t seem realistic. But we’re seeing what we’re seeing. And because Republicans are so underperforming in places that should be gimme-putt states — we have to, in districts, kind of sit back and recalibrate. That the normal rules, even for midterm elections, don’t seem to be applying here. It’s just that much more. And I sure as hell never expected to see this situation happen.”
The three scenarios that he sees as the most plausible for Republicans are that “it will be bad, really bad or truly horrible.”
Read more Trump torn apart for little ‘jokes’ that spark international crises
He hopes, however, that Democrats realize that the “good fortune” that they will likely have in November has nothing to do with their unique brand or issues.
Even after Trump’s tariff fiasco, “The worst-case scenario for the GOP and best for Democrats today would have sounded ludicrous eight months ago,” wrote Cook.
In two out of three of Cook’s scenarios, he expects the Democrats to take back the U.S. Senate. Cook even predicts that things are so bad that Kansas could be competitive. But “close,” he said, doesn’t win elections.
“To me, close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. And you’re going to see Democrats do better than they have in generations, but in some of these cases it’s going to still be short of a majority, or short of what they need to win. But they’ll be beating the point spread, no question about it,” said Cook.
He confessed he was more skeptical than most people about people like Mary Peltola in Alaska, but in case after case, the alternative Republican isn’t performing well.
In the case of Peltola, he said, “to me, come on, you know, yeah, you won a special election and one House general election, but you had Sarah Palin and Nick Begich — Mark Begich — one of the Begiches on the ballot about the same time. That was underwhelming.”
But that same thing is playing out in Texas too with Ken Paxton in a state that Cook asked “how could Republicans lose.”
“And so there’s sort of the electoral impact, and then there’s all the fights [Trump] picked with sort of more normie Republicans, who say, I don’t need this, I don’t want any part of this — or, in the case of Cornyn, tried to hang on and couldn’t,” Cook explained.
Read more ‘We were lied to’: Swing voters abandon Trump as 3 issues spark a crisis
