Non-MAGA Mutiny

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, July 31, 2026

 

A useful way to separate the men from the boys in punditry is to note who obsesses about political polling and who doesn’t. Rarely will you catch Jonah Goldberg or Kevin Williamson drilling down on survey data, and for good reason: Polls, as they say, are just snapshots in time. Even when they’re accurate (which isn’t always, or even often), they can change quickly. And once they do, all of the lessons they supposedly contained are up in smoke.

 

Serious thinkers don’t trifle with polls. Only the hacks do that.

 

So let’s talk about polls.

 

Eleven days ago I wrote about a surprising downturn in Democrats’ polling on the generic congressional ballot. In May the party had a 7-point lead, and the two months since have been arguably the worst of Donald Trump’s five-plus years in office—yet the Democratic margin shrank over that period. My guess was that disaffected “soft Republicans” had begun to drift back toward the president as their anxiety grew about socialism consuming the left.

 

A fine theory. But since that newsletter was published, despite socialist candidates continuing to gain steam even in high-profile Midwestern battlegrounds, the GOP has lost 1.5 points on the generic ballot. Democrats now lead by an average of 6, considerably better than where they stood on the day the war in Iran began. The alleged “red scare” appears to be over already, or at least on hold.

 

Consider it a reminder that interpreting polls is usually a fool’s errand, especially when they involve generic candidates instead of actual ones. But from time to time there’s a shift in the data that’s so striking, and that does involve an honest-to-God real politician, that it qualifies as Real News. And so here we are again, forced to dive in.

 

It’s not unusual for Trump to dip below 40 percent in job approval, but it is—or was—very unusual for him to fall as low as 35 percent. He’s done it three times in the last nine national surveys tracked by RealClearPolitics, though: 35 percent in CNN’s poll, 33 percent in the Associated Press’ survey, and 32 percent in Quinnipiac University’s poll. “That, my friends, is the Bush line,” The Bulwark’s Sarah Longwell said of the last of those three, referring to George W. Bush’s catastrophic decline in support near the end of his second term.

 

Trump stands at 38.2 percent approval today in Nate Silver’s polling tracker versus 58.8 percent disapproval. Not only is that the worst net rating of his second term, it’s lower than any number he’s seen since becoming president in 2017. Yes, really: lower than after January 6.

 

Some meaningful segment of his base appears to have left him. Who is that segment?

 

Fox News knows who it is. Its polling arm regularly asks Republican respondents whether they identify as “MAGA” or “non-MAGA,” and that distinction turns out to be crucial in views of the president. In a national survey published earlier this month, approval of Trump’s performance split 98-3 among MAGA Republicans. Among non-MAGA, it was … 51-49.

 

The split was even more pronounced on individual issues. Approval of the president’s handling of the economy? It was 83-17 for MAGA, 38-62 for non-MAGA. Inflation? Try 72-26 for MAGA, 28-72 for non-MAGA. Iran? That went 83-16 for MAGA, 37-63 for non-MAGA.

 

Trump isn’t on the ballot in November, of course, so none of this matters to his electoral chances. But it does matter—a lot—to his party’s. As CNN’s Aaron Blake noted this morning, the MAGA/non-MAGA divide is also showing up in Fox’s polling of key Senate contests. And it’s pronounced enough that it could tip those races to Democrats.

 

In Texas, Fox has Democrat James Talarico ahead of Republican Ken Paxton by 3 points. No less than 24 percent of non-MAGA Republicans favor Talarico. Ditto in North Carolina, where Democrat Roy Cooper leads by 9 with help from 21 percent of non-MAGA Republicans. Democrat Josh Turek led by 4 in a Fox poll of Iowa taken in late June thanks to support from 23 percent of the non-MAGA right. That’s the same share of non-MAGA Republicans who backed Democrat Jon Ossoff in a late-June Fox poll of Georgia, where he’s currently cruising toward a 13-point landslide.

 

Whether the mutiny among non-MAGA Republicans will last until November is anyone’s guess, but there is a mutiny underway, it appears. And so we arrive at the question made famous by the philosopher Jerry Seinfeld: Who are these people?

 

Reaganites and Roganites.

 

I’m tempted to speculate that the mutineers are “Dispatch Republicans,” Reaganite conservatives whose tribal tether to the GOP has been snapping, strand by strand, over the past 10 years as the weight of their disgust at the state of the right has grown. At last, perhaps, the final atavistic strand has broken.

 

But I dislike that terminology, as I choose to pretend that everyone who reads this site was persuaded long ago to abandon the unsalvageable postliberal freak show known as the Republican Party. More likely, I think, is that the non-MAGA wing contains many *non*-Dispatch Reaganites, the sort of partisan conservatives who spent the last decade resenting RINOs like me for turning against Trump and the GOP—and who now, sheepishly and belatedly, have at last begun to wonder if we had a point.

 

There’s circumstantial evidence for it in the Fox data. I would have guessed that the share of self-described “conservatives” supporting Democrats for Senate in Texas and North Carolina would be almost as tiny as the share of MAGA Republicans who do so. But I would have been wrong: 18 percent of conservatives prefer Talarico and 21 percent prefer Cooper, which in both cases closely resembles the share of non-MAGA Republicans who (for now) intend to cross the aisle this fall. It ain’t just the RINOs who are tilting Democratic this time.

 

GOP operatives are worried about it too. Internal data shared with the Washington Post last week revealed a “lack of enthusiasm [that’s] reaching deep into Republicans’ loyal base, spreading to the party’s most consistent voters—who have shown up to vote in all of the past four primaries and general elections.” One director of an outside right-wing group estimated that around 1 in 5 “reliable Republican base voters” in battleground states are considering staying home in November or voting for a Democrat. Which, coincidentally, is right in line with the “non-MAGA Republican” share that’s defecting in Fox’s polling.

 

So it seems that a sizable share of conservatives is disgruntled. But what sort of Republican is still describing themselves as “conservative” in 2026?

 

I’m sure there are some Reaganites in that cohort who have finally reached their breaking point after feeling pressured to make embarrassingly untenable excuses for Trump every day since 2016. Belief in his greatness on the right has always had an uncanny “emperor’s new clothes” aspect to it: No one wants to step out of line by admitting that he’s naked, but once someone does—and many people are doing so now, per the polling—then the quieter doubters at last find their voices.

 

Not all self-identified “conservatives” are Reaganites, though. Members of Tucker Carlson’s postliberal anti-war faction would also describe themselves that way (more so than “liberal” or “moderate,” anyway), I expect, yet many have presumably begun to reject the “MAGA” label to protest the president’s betrayal in attacking Iran. They’re in the mix here too, perhaps favoring figures like Talarico and Cooper because they want a Senate next year that will be more likely to end aid to Israel.

 

And forget Reaganites: What about Roganites?

 

One of Trump’s core constituencies in 2024 was the Joe Rogan demographic: young men who aren’t staunchly ideological but who shared populist suspicions about the political establishment, resented what Biden-era inflation did to their quality of life, and despised the “woke” pieties that leftists are forever demanding that they swallow. Many of them voted Republican in the last election, and some surely identify as “conservative” now because of their animosity toward the progressive cultural agenda.

 

But that doesn’t mean they’re MAGA. My sense of them is that they don’t worship Trump, aren’t hell-bent on cleansing America of immigrants, aren’t enthused about White House warmongering, and haven’t written off voting Democratic ever again. They thought the president was the better option in 2024, but in 2026 they might think differently. (And might be adjusting their media diet for similar reasons.) They’re “non-MAGA Republicans” too—or at least a considerable chunk of them are.

 

Rounding things off are Hispanics, another group with whom the president famously overperformed the last time he was on the ballot. A Republican vowing to bring down prices and impose “law and order” sounded good to many members of a mostly working-class and culturally conservative demographic like Latinos. So they took a chance on Trump—and got continued inflation, tariffs that made life more expensive, and an ICE crackdown enabled by racial profiling that’s gone way beyond targeting violent criminals and started affecting Hispanic-owned businesses.

 

Plenty of Hispanics who voted to reelect the president still identify as Republican and conservative, no doubt. But if they thought of themselves as “MAGA” before, boy, they sure don’t anymore. Like the Roganites, they’re back to being free agents this cycle, as Talarico might tell you.

 

So much for the various strains of non-MAGA Republicanism. As for why they’ve collectively begun turning against Trump and the GOP, there’s one glaringly obvious reason and one more debatable one.

 

War and corruption.

 

At the risk of ignoring my own advice about not overinterpreting poll data: It’s the war, stupid.

 

Trump has lost control of events in Iran, to the point that the Iranians are now initiating exchanges of fire instead of waiting to respond to new U.S. attacks. The president promised Americans a four- to six-week conflict, and failed. Then, last month, he trumpeted a peace agreement that would supposedly end the war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz—and that failed too, almost before the ink was dry. Fighting has resumed and there’s no apparent way out.

 

The Pentagon is burning through its supply of defensive weapons, imperiling U.S. power projection in other theaters. Trump’s team can’t agree on a strategy, unwilling to absorb the mass casualties and political pain of a ground invasion and unable to forcibly reopen the strait through other means. We might be approaching the point where conceding Iranian dominion over Hormuz and acquiescing to the Islamic Republic’s extortionate “toll” scheme is the least costly option available to the White House, however catastrophic it might be for American prestige.

 

It’s a fiasco, easily the biggest policy blunder in either of Trump’s terms in office. And practically every voter in America, left or right, understands that it’s hurting their personal bottom line by driving up gas prices and inflation more broadly.

 

Only a MAGA fanatic could look past all of that and maintain confidence in the president, and non-MAGA Republicans by definition aren’t fanatics. So it can’t be a coincidence that his job approval began tanking and his disapproval took off a week or so after he declared the peace deal “over.” The Iran albatross is weighing him down. The heavier it gets, the lower his numbers will sink.

 

That’s the obvious explanation for the non-MAGA Republican mutiny. The more debatable theory is that Trump’s corruption has at last grown so promiscuous and degenerate that even elements of the lowly American right have begun to feel sick about it.

 

I’m inclined to dismiss that theory, having been conditioned by the last 10 years to believe there’s literally no behavior so diseased that Republicans won’t overlook or excuse it to preserve a partisan advantage. As I write this, for instance, major newspapers are running stories about GOP Rep. Max Miller having allegedly abused his wife and their 2-year-old child; his now ex-wife happens to be the daughter of Sen. Bernie Moreno, another Republican. Not only hasn’t the party mobilized to demand Miller’s withdrawal from the race, though, as Democrats did with Graham Platner, Moreno himself hasn’t done it.

 

In an alternate morality like postliberalism, the only sin is weakening the movement’s hold on power. What Miller is accused of doing isn’t sinful; calling public attention to it and seeding disunion on the right by challenging him on it would be.

 

It’s hard to believe that any element of a party that functions that way could reach a moral breaking point over the president’s misconduct. Yet, just as not every “conservative” is a Reaganite, not every Republican is a postliberal. I concede the possibility that the “soft” situational Trump supporters of the non-MAGA cohort—Roganites, Hispanics, possibly a few partisan conservatives who still retain a modicum of conscience after 10 years of disuse—have reached their limit.

 

The breaking point.

 

There’s evidence for this too. An Echelon Insights survey published this month found that, when Americans were asked what the biggest issue facing the country is, “political corruption” was the most common answer apart from the cost of living. When respondents were invited to elaborate, a plurality named corruption related to Trump or his administration as what they had in mind.

 

I suspect the obscene “cash for MAGA criminals” slush fund that the president and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche cooked up is the prime driver of the backlash, as it drew more media attention than most Trump scandals and continues to make headlines today. But there must be a “straw that broke the camel’s back” element to that: News of the president’s corruption is now so common, multifarious, and gory in its details that you can open up virtually any major non-populist news site and find some astonishing story of malfeasance to gawk at.

 

For instance: On Wednesday, MS Now published a report about the Secret Service secretly accessing former FBI director James Comey’s phone to track his location. Some supervisors feared that doing so would be illegal without a warrant; the agency did so anyway, resorting to emergency authority by pretending, preposterously, that Comey was an active threat to Trump’s life. “At the time we did not believe anyone’s life was in danger and legally it was a bad idea,” one supervisor noted, but an unnamed “top Justice Department official” ordered the surveillance to proceed anyway.

 

Certain unidentified VIPs on Air Force One were reportedly keeping tabs on the matter, keenly interested in updates on whether the president’s hated political enemy was being properly harassed.

 

If that’s not gross enough, yesterday the Wall Street Journal ran an exposé of how Trump and his top fundraiser routinely shake down U.S. corporations for gigantic donations—sometimes for his vanity projects, like the White House ballroom or presidential library, sometimes for his political PACs, but rarely if ever for anything that might help the country or his party. (“The boss wants this money,” the fundraiser has been known to say with Corleone-esque overtones.) “The president closely tracks who gives,” aides whispered to the paper, with generous donors being rewarded with access to him.

 

One Wall Street analyst framed the ultra vires extortion as a “Trump Transaction Tax,” observing that “we’re replacing the free market with the market for Trump’s affections.”

 

As I write this on Friday, the top political story in Washington is the president threatening to pull Blanche’s nomination to be attorney general because of resistance from Sens. John Cornyn and Thom Tillis. (Whom this would threaten is unclear.) As a condition of supporting Blanche, the two want something in writing from the Justice Department that will modify the “cash for MAGA criminals” slush fund I mentioned as well as the ludicrous deal Blanche signed granting Trump de facto immunity for any tax cheating he may have committed in the past.

 

The president won’t allow it. Forced to choose between getting his nominee confirmed and protecting an indefensibly corrupt abuse of power that places him beyond legal accountability for financial crimes, he’s prioritizing corruption. Cornyn and Tillis aren’t even asking him to scrap the arrangement altogether; they’re seeking to modify it, not repeal it. And they’re not ruling out supporting Blanche despite his role in facilitating that abuse of power. All they want from Trump and his deputy is a written promise that he won’t proceed with it if they vote yes.

 

And still, he won’t do it.

 

There is no public interest that he values more highly than his venal and vindictive personal interests, and the evidence of that has grown so overwhelming lately that even some Republican voters might be struggling to cope.

 

I continue to believe that they’re fine with letting Trump behave as corruptly as he likes, as that’s part of the unstated price of admission in this rotten coalition. But I’m open to the idea that some Republicans—the non-MAGA group, whose loyalty was always conditional on cheaper groceries and who never rationalized their support with claptrap about conservative judges—have grown embarrassed by the president being so open about it. He’s flaunting the impunity they’ve granted him, almost daring them to do something about it. Maybe they will.

 

I’ll end with the most obvious possible point, that the last thing Democrats should do when a group like non-MAGA Republicans is suddenly in play is nominate leftist radicals in major races. That’s the sort of thing that might plausibly scare those voters back toward concluding that Trumpism, for all its flaws, remains the lesser of two evils. But Democrats aren’t going to take that advice, so let’s plan on being back here in a week or two for another hacky poll-obsessed newsletter after Abdul El-Sayed wins the Michigan primary and the generic ballot begins to shift right again.