Gas prices are at a four-year high. Annual inflation has jumped to a nearly three-year peak. Americans are souring on congressional Republicans, President Donald Trump’s handling of inflation and the war in Iran. And his approval rating is at the lowest point of his second term in several polls.
The message from the White House: Things are still better than they were under Joe Biden.
It is not, on its face, the stuff of a winning campaign message — a backward-looking defense at a moment when voters are asking forward-looking questions about their grocery bills, gas tanks and a war with no clear end.
And privately, even some of Trump’s aides acknowledge it.
“The vibe right now is we know we are already cooked in the midterms,” a White House official told MS NOW, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly.
The numbers help explain the gloom. For the first time since 2010, voters say they trust Democrats more than Republicans to handle the economy, 52% to 48%, according to a recent Fox News poll. Economists have largely scaled back their forecasts for the remainder of the year. Energy analysts are warning that oil prices could surge even higher. And Moody’s recession model now puts the odds of a U.S. recession in the next 12 months at nearly a coin flip.
Six months out from the November election, Democrats are favored to take the House and are increasingly rosy about their prospects for the Senate despite a difficult map.
“As of this moment, of course you have to be very concerned,” Rep. Jeff Van Drew, R-N.J., told MS NOW. “If you aren’t concerned, you’d be kind of foolish. … We are either going to win the majority by a little, lose the majority by a little, or lose it by a lot.”
Even so, more than a dozen GOP strategists, lawmakers and White House officials who spoke with MS NOW, said they remain cautiously optimistic that Republicans have enough time to at least stave off a blue wave.
But that optimism is contingent on several unpredictable factors — chiefly, whether the war in Iran comes to a speedy conclusion, and how long its economic aftershocks linger.
White House officials and their allies cautioned against writing the party’s obituary just yet. If 2024 proved anything, they argued, it is that the political environment can change dramatically in a matter of weeks, that news cycles move quickly and that voters have short memories. Internal polling circulating in the White House is not as dire as the public polling, according to one White House official. “Certainly there’s still a lot of work to be done, and that’s not a secret to anyone,” the official said. “But there’s still a lot of time left.”
Retiring Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., one of the few sitting GOP lawmakers openly critical of Trump, expects Republicans to hold the Senate, and told MS NOW that House Republicans can hang on to their razor-thin majority.
“If we’re disciplined, we keep control of the Congress,” Tillis said. “If we’ve lost, on Wednesday morning, don’t blame the Democrats. Republicans, go to the nearest mirror and look in the mirror. That’s why we’ll lose. If we play team ball, if we set aside our petty differences and recognize Republicans getting elected are the most important thing — no purity test, get them elected — then they’re not playing team ball, and they’re part of the problem.”
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The plan, according to two White House officials, is a familiar one: pivot to kitchen-table issues and flood battleground states with Trump and Cabinet surrogates in the coming months. Republicans, these officials insisted, have a record to run on, including a cut in taxes via the One Big Beautiful Bill efforts to reduce drug prices and beefed-up border security.
But conspicuously absent from the game plan outlined by White House officials: any expectation of message discipline from Trump himself.
What matters, the White House official told MS NOW, is “doing what we need to do out on the campaign trail — the events, the fundraising, the retail politics of actually showing up in districts.”
“President Trump is the unequivocal leader, best messenger, and unmatched motivator for the Republican party and he is committed to maintaining Republicans’ majority in Congress to continue delivering wins for the American people,” White House spokesperson Olivia Wales said in a statement to MS NOW. Trump, she added, would continue to draw “a sharp contrast” between his agenda and that of congressional Democrats, whom she said allowed “millions of illegal aliens to flow through the border, unanimously opposed the Working Families Tax Cuts, and are soft-on-crime.”
But there is bubbling frustration among Republican strategists working House and Senate races that the president and his team have been slow to focus on any of it. Trump has been consumed by the war in Iran and by the construction of a $400 million White House ballroom that has become an unlikely political liability — a gilded symbol, his critics argue, of a president more focused on monuments to himself than on voters squeezed by more everyday concerns.
Some of the major fights Trump has picked of late have only made life harder for Republican incumbents. One House Republican up for re-election in a swing district pointed to the president’s inflammatory Easter morning social media posts, his attacks on the pope and his habit of naming things after himself — episodes which, the lawmaker said, only serve to “fire up the people that want to put a check on his power, instead of taking his energy and focusing on stuff that makes their lives better at home.”
“I still think there’s a lot of members that don’t understand what we’re up against — and that includes leadership,” the House Republican said, granted anonymity in order to speak candidly. “It’s hard to tell if they truly believe the rhetoric that we’re gonna hold the House, or if they’re just saying that to make us feel like we can take some risks and take some really [bad] votes, and they’re just trying to get us to walk the plank for another piece of legislation that they feel they need.”
Several Republican strategists who spoke with MS NOW pointed to missed opportunities to tout the president’s record, and said that the window to alter the trajectory of the election is narrowing.
“If we can somehow — on a grand scale — tout our wins, get our message out and find some clearly stated wins with Iran and foreign policy, we’ll be on better footing,” said T.W. Arrighi, a Republican strategist and former spokesperson for the National Republican Senatorial Committee.” But I want to spend the summer doing that, with prices ticking down. I don’t want to be spending just two months of the fall doing it.”
Jacqueline Alemany is co-anchor of "The Weekend" and a Washington correspondent for MS NOW.
Mychael Schnell is a reporter for MS NOW.
Jake Traylor is a White House correspondent for MS NOW.