Trump’s Tariffs Are Consigning the GOP to an Epochal Electoral Disaster

By Noah Rothman

Friday, December 12, 2025

 

The downward trend in the president’s numbers is consistent and alarming.

 

If Republicans find themselves on the receiving end of a drubbing in next year’s midterm elections, there will be plenty of blame to go around.

 

While we cannot forecast precisely what a post-2026 autopsy would say, we can assume that the public’s moribund outlook on the economy will play an outsize role in voters’ decision to put Democrats back in power. Trump’s record on economics — a record the public measures via appraisals of their own personal finances — was one of his greatest strengths heading into his second term. Today, the economy is one of Trump’s biggest liabilities, if not the biggest:

 

 

Associated Press-NORC polls have been among the worst for Trump and the GOP in recent years, but Republican partisans would dismiss these results at their peril. This result is not too far outside the median result that other pollsters have found when testing registered voters’ outlook on the economy. And voters increasingly blame Donald Trump’s tariffs for contributing to their woes.

 

In its recent polling, Politico observed that just 36 percent of Trump voters said tariffs are hurting the economy today but will yield dividends in the long run. Only 22 percent of Trump’s 2024 voters said tariffs are a boon to the economy both now and in the future. “Even people who self-identify as MAGA Republicans were split on one of the president’s favorite tools: 27 percent of those MAGA voters said tariffs are boosting the economy both now and in the long term,” the outlet reported, “while 21 percent of them said tariffs are damaging in both the short and long term.”

 

And that’s just the pro-Trump right. “Fifty-eight percent of U.S. adults said they believed imposing tariffs hurts the economy,” Axios reported of an ABC News-Ipsos survey of American adults from November, “a sentiment shared by 88% of Democrats and 23% of Republicans.”

 

If nothing else, the downward trend in the president’s numbers is consistent and alarming. And Republicans are alarmed. But that’s about it. If the sentiment abroad within the GOP ecosystem is any indication, that sense of trepidation is translating not into resolve but resignation.

 

“It’s not a secret,” said the impeccable pro-Trump Republican National Committee chairman Joe Gruters. “There’s no sugarcoating it. It’s a pending, looming disaster heading our way.” Gruters was resigned to that outcome. “No matter what party is in power, they usually get crushed in the midterms,” he said in a particularly uninspiring defense of his party.

 

Gruters is wrong about that. The GOP’s fate is not written in the stars. The party in control of all the levers of power in Washington has agency and purpose — it is the master of its own destiny. Republicans are simply choosing not to do anything to better their political circumstances.

 

Voters now blame the Trump administration for their struggle to keep up with consumer costs, including Republicans. As Politico observed last week, just 61 percent of self-described Republicans who do not identify as MAGA trust the GOP over Democrats when it comes to the cost of living. That is not a recipe for an enthusiastic Republican electorate.

 

These are calamitous numbers going into a lame-duck president’s second midterm election, when the GOP needs its voters to balance out the passion Donald Trump’s opponents will bring with them into the voting booth.

 

By and large, those voters did not show up in 2025. As a result, Democratic candidates consistently overperformed in special elections and off-year contests, often by double digits. If that dynamic prevails next November, not only would the House fall to the Democratic Party. A scenario in which the Senate goes, too, is now thinkable.

 

It was not all that long ago that the prospect of significant Democratic gains in the upper chamber of Congress was inconceivable. The class of senators facing voters this year was elected in 2020 — a year in which the GOP held its own, relatively speaking, even though the party’s incumbent president lost. The landscape should favor the GOP. Indeed, at the start of the year, only Maine Senator Susan Collins appeared vulnerable, and she has prevailed against worse odds in previous cycles. Overall Democratic gains in the upper chamber are no longer so hard to imagine. Indeed, while a Democratic takeover remains a stretch, it is now being discussed openly — and not just by the party’s most partisan cheerleaders.

 

Electoral maps like the one Senate Republicans will be defending next year don’t come along every cycle. The GOP should be capitalizing on its advantages. In 2028, it will be defending Republicans in places like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and North Carolina, as well as attempting to retake lost ground in purple states like Arizona and Georgia. That will be a resource-intensive year for the GOP’s Senate committee and its candidates, a challenge that would be made more difficult by a blowout in 2026.

 

Building large congressional majorities is a project that does not achieve fruition in one election cycle. They take years to cobble together. Writing one election cycle off in the hope that the next will be better is a recipe for an electoral deficit that will take a long time to repair.

 

Trump has few tools to shape the economic landscape. He can, however, indicate that he has heard the public’s disquiet and is attempting to meet them in the middle by abandoning his mulish affinity for tariffs. Even if he only telegraphed his willingness to pare most of them back, it would send a signal to the public that would at least boost consumer confidence. But Trump is not doing that. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine Trump giving up on a policy in which he evinces near-religious faith. So, with Trump presumably immovable, Republicans are sauntering languidly into a historic buzzsaw.

 

It doesn’t have to be this way. Republicans are not destined for disaster. But so long as they regard the president’s bizarre predilections as forces of nature that they must make peace with, they will traipse into an electoral disaster that could set the tone for the remainder of the decade — handing the reins over to a Democratic Party that is increasingly favorably inclined toward socialism.

 

What the GOP can do — what it must do — is evince some basic political survival instincts. If self-preservation is too much to ask, the GOP and its voters deserve the disaster that is now visible on the horizon.