With the midterm elections just five weeks away, President Trump might want to give a listen to Johnny Cash’s version of the old gospel song “God’s Gonna Cut You Down.”
You can run on for a long time Run on for a long time Run on for a long time Sooner or later, God’ll cut you down Sooner or later, God’ll cut you down
Trump has been president, on and off, for five years and eight months. We have been waiting a long time, and there have been premature declarations in the past, but this time his string is finally running out.
The evidence is decisive.
According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll taken Sept. 17 to 20, the share of voters who disapprove of Trump (66 percent) is twice as large as the share of those who approve (32 percent).
Trump’s support among Latino voters — a crucial ingredient of his victory in 2024 — is falling rapidly. Pew Research found that Trump’s approval rating among Hispanics who voted for him two years ago fell to 66 percent from 93 percent between February 2025 and April 2026.
The way independents break in the end is often determinative in general elections, and they have turned their backs on Trump. In 2024, independents split among the two candidates, favoring Trump by 3 percentage points. Asked now whether they intend to vote for a Democrat or a Republican for Congress — the generic vote question — independents choose the Democrat over the Republican 57 percent to 32 percent, a 25-point difference.
Trump has lost “ownership” of the issues that put him in the White House. In 2024, voters said Republicans would do a better job dealing with immigration than Democrats, 42 percent to 30 percent. Two weeks ago, the NPR/PBS News/Marist Poll national survey found that voters had shifted to favor Democrats by a modest three points, 41 to 38 percent, but that modest three-point advantage actually represents a 15-point swing.
Voters, in other words, are showing a growing determination to repudiate the Trump presidency. Their most direct opportunity to express this determination is electing Democratic majorities in the House and the Senate.
At the moment, poll data gives Democrats a strong chance of taking the House and modest but strengthening odds of taking the Senate.
In 2018, the previous contest in the middle of a Trump term, Republicans actually gained two Senate seats while losing 40 in the House.
Trump, as we have learned to our detriment, cannot tolerate defeat. Jan. 6 was only the most obvious manifestation of that.
He has already taken or announced actions that amount to expressions of desperation: an offer to pay every adult $5,000 if Republicans retain control of both branches of Congress, for example. He also told us, point blank, after he was asked whether he would send National Guard troops or Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to polling locations during the midterm elections, that he would “do anything necessary to make sure we have honest elections; we have to have honest elections.” The only elections Trump recognizes as “honest,” of course, are the ones Republicans win.
That Trump is going to extremes to avoid responsibility for defeat is unsurprising. He has spent much of his political career blaming others for his mistakes, and few things could be more repellent than the Republican losses on the political battlefield when voting ends on Nov. 3, leaving an indelible stain on Trump’s hands.
Cash caught this sensation, too:
Go tell that long tongue liar Go and tell that midnight rider Tell the rambler, the gambler, the back biter Tell ’em that God’s gonna cut ’em down Tell ’em that God’s gonna cut ’em down
Trump remains blissfully ignorant of his political toxicity. On Sept. 9, at the Republican midterm convention that he convened, Trump told loyalists worried about the midterms, “Pretend that I am on the ballot.”
In fact, the latest NPR/PBS News/Marist poll found that a strategy to persuade voters that Trump was on the ballot would backfire disastrously:
A plurality of voters (45 percent) say their choice for Congress is a vote against Trump, including four in five Democrats and about half of independents. About a quarter of voters — including 59 percent of Republicans and 51 percent of Trump 2024 voters — say their vote is about supporting the president.
Steve Deace, a right-wing talk show host in Iowa, gave a warning last Wednesday on X about the dangers facing the Republican Party on Election Day:
Yesterday, Iowa House Republicans were informed by their own pollsters that if you are in a +15 district you’re within the margin for error, if you’re in a +10 district you’re underwater, and that this might end being an even worse midterm environment than 2006. …
If the environment is this bad in my home state, where Trump has been the most popular political figure over the last decade, I can’t imagine where it is everywhere else.
The Trump presidency is at risk, Deace continued, “because if Democrats take control the legislative branch the Trump domestic agenda we all voted for will largely cease between what a Democrat Congress will do and the courts have already been doing.”
Deace placed the blame for his party’s endangered position on the way “This whatever/kinda/sorta/but not really war has become an existential misuse of political capital. Many of us never thought it was worth it, and more and more it appears voters agree.”
“Out here in the cheap seats,” Deace added, “it feels like another Middle East War quagmire regular folks are paying for on both ends all over again.”
The erosion of support for Trump has been a slow and steady process. Polling by the University of Massachusetts Amherst found that over the 13 months from July 2025 to August 2026, the percentage of voters who “strongly disapprove” of Trump rose to 54 percent from 49 percent, while the percentage saying they “strongly approve” fell to 14 percent from 21 percent.
Alexander Theodoridis, a professor of political science and co-director of the UMass Poll, noted in the news release on the survey:
Around 15 percent of Trump voters now tell us they might or would vote differently or not vote at all if they had it to do over again.
This is hardly a mass exodus from the Trump tent, but is enough that it certainly could’ve been decisive against Trump in what was a relatively close 2024 election. More notably, though, there are now clear, consistent signs of an erosion trend.
Election experts, including Eli McKown-Dawson at Silver Bulletin and Jessica Taylor at The Cook Report, contend that given the state of the generic vote, the Democratic Party has a shot at winning the Senate. The RealClearPolitics polling average of 15 recent surveys on the generic vote is currently 8.4 points in favor of the Democrats.
Significantly, the average has been rising: For the last five surveys, the average reached 9 points, well above the 7 to 8 point tipping point.
“If the national popular vote comes in anywhere under D +6, Republicans are the clear favorites to retain the Senate. But Democrats are on track to beat that number, perhaps by a wide margin,” McKown-Dawson wrote on Aug. 15. “That’s a big enough blue wave to give Democrats a real shot at winning enough competitive seats.”
More recently, last Wednesday, Taylor argued:
We wrote a month ago that the race for overall control was a tossup, but one with fundamentals that still slightly favored the G.O.P. Movement in the last four weeks has now made control of the chamber a true coin flip, with viable paths for both parties to win or keep a majority.
She noted:
Though there is clearly a very blue environment forming, it’s not yet clear if Democrats will be able to convert a national wave into a Senate sweep, given the number of double-digit red seats that Democrats still must win as well as Republicans’ sizable financial advantage. But we have entered the most consequential part of the cycle.
Predicting election outcomes is a fool’s game, but as one of the fools, I think Taylor is too cautious. My own experience is that trends are highly predictive of outcomes — and the trend line now is moving decisively in favor of the Democrats.
Amy Walter, the publisher and editor in chief of The Cook Report, wrote last Tuesday under the headline “Political Gravity Finally Caught Up With Trump. Now the G.O.P. Has to Try to Spend Their Way Out of It”:
Trump’s staying power in our politics — even, astonishingly, despite the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol — gave the president the confidence and latitude to pursue unpopular policies and blow off scandals that would have sunk any of his predecessors.
But now, the economic consequences of his sweeping tariffs and the war in Iran have done the one thing all the controversies of his first term were never able to do: splinter his coalition and sink his approval ratings to all-time lows.
Perhaps more damaging, Trump’s inability to pull his candidates across the victory line has become conventional wisdom.
Charlie Cook, a colleague of Walter’s, also wrote last Tuesday:
While many have long predicted that Democrats will enjoy a “blue wave” election, I think of it more as a “red undertow,” which will pull many Republicans under and significantly trim the margins for many others.
A blue wave implies an endorsement or affirmation of Democrats and their policies. But Democrats’ brand is still in tatters. … Fortunately for Democrats, this election will in most cases not be about them.
It will, of course, be mostly about the occupant of the White House. Over the last 90 days, President Trump’s political standing has transitioned from very unpopular to toxic and now to radioactive.
Smarter.Vote, a voter analysis website, currently assesses a 73 percent chance of a Democratic takeover of the House, with a post-election makeup of 228 Democrats to 207 Republicans.
Smarter.Vote foresees a much closer and more contested Senate outcome, with Democrats now having a 57 percent chance of taking control, with a 51-to-49 majority.
Most damaging of all for a wannabe autocrat like Trump, who depends on being the center of attention to maintain his power, there are clear signs that the president is losing relevance.
On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported on its A.I.-based analysis of nearly 70,000 hours of podcasts with a headline that should make even Trump cringe: “MAGA Podcasters Are Tuning Out Trump.”
“Mentions of Trump’s name per hour on conservative podcasts have fallen nearly 70 percent from their peak in the run-up to the 2024 election,” The Journal noted, a drop-off that accelerated after late February, when Trump began his war with Iran.
I was going to end this column with one more verse Cash sang:
Well, you may throw your rock, and hide your hand Workin’ in the dark against your fellow man But as sure as God made black and white What’s done in the dark will be brought to the light
But then “Sinnerman,” performed by Nina Simone, came to mind:
So I run to the Lord “Please hide me, Lord Don’t you see me praying? Don’t you see me down here praying?” But the Lord said, “Go to the Devil.”
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