Fundraising blitz

Trump is on a fundraising blitz. But there are other warning signs for Republicans.

For the first time this year, the Fox News poll had Joe Biden leading Donald Trump by two points, within the poll’s margin of error.

By Adam Wren

For Republicans who spent much of the year crowing about Joe Biden’s weaknesses, Donald Trump’s massive fundraising haul looked like an affirmation, with the former president erasing Joe Biden’s longstanding cash advantage.

But outside of the money race, a series of other developments in recent days have left even Republicans with the impression that November may not be quite as good for the GOP as it once seemed.

First came the GOP’s underperformance in a special House race in a deep-red swath of Ohio that included a swing county. Then, after Republicans over the weekend nominated a far-right candidate for lieutenant governor in Indiana, a top national GOP lawyer predicted a “serious” threat to the top of the ticket even in the heart of MAGA country.

Now, new polling from Fox News shows an 11-point swing in President Joe Biden’s favorability among independents: They prefer Biden by 9 points, a reversal from May, when they favored Trump by 2 points.

Biden: 'Reckless' to say Trump trial was rigged after verdict

For the first time this year, the poll has Biden leading Trump by two points, 50-48, within the margin of error.

Trump may be raking in donations. But across the country, the mood of Republicans has dimmed, according to nearly a dozen Republican operatives, county chairs and current and former GOP officials. It comes amid ongoing concerns about the effect of abortion on Republican candidates. And it follows defections from Trump in the primaries and, most recently, polling that has found Trump’s conviction in his New York hush-money trial hurting him with independents.

Financially, the conviction was a boon to Trump’s small-dollar donor operation. But electorally, the reality of Trump’s conviction has begun to set in, they said.

“I do think this is probably about the time that we should legitimately see a reaction to the guilty verdict, so it certainly makes sense,” said Jason Roe, a Republican strategist and former executive director of the state Republican Party in Michigan.

Or, as Tom McCabe, the GOP chair of swingy Mahoning County, Ohio, put it: “This election is going to be decided on the margins, and short-term, his conviction is hurting him in the polling.”

It isn’t just Trump’s conviction, of course. Republicans are now seeing reasons for concern across the map, even in the most unusual of places. Trump is animating base voters — and donors — with his grievances about the trial. But his standing with swing voters and independents appears to be slipping. And other problems for Republicans are popping up down-ballot.

In a special election in Ohio’s 6th Congressional District this month, massively outspent Democrat Michael Kripchak erased 19 points from Trump’s 2020 margin of victory — still losing, but becoming the first Democratic candidate to carry the blue-collar Mahoning County since Trump painted it red in 2020.

Incumbent Democratic senators in battleground states like Wisconsin, Nevada and Pennsylvania are polling ahead of their Republican challengers. In Arizona’s open Senate race, Republican Kari Lake, a star of the MAGA movement, is underperforming in the polls.

And Republicans across the map are still laboring under backlash to the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. A Gallup poll released this month found record levels of voters saying that, in major races, they would only vote for candidates who share their views on abortion — with the intensity surrounding the issue likely to benefit abortion rights candidates more.

GOP rallies for Trump at Faith & Freedom Coalition

“Republicans have a ton of down-ballot problems,” said Barrett Marson, a Republican strategist in Arizona. “Not the least of which is on abortion.”

In the presidential campaign, there are, of course, reasons to temper the latest developments with caution: Both Trump and Biden are historically unpopular, and Democratic operatives have their own deep-seated concerns about their nominee.

“Both of the presidents have, by historical standards, low job approval,” said Haley Barbour, the former Republican Mississippi governor and former chair of the Republican National Committee. “Biden’s being the lowest, probably, in the history of polling.”

In a Truth Social post, Trump called the Fox News poll “TRASH!”

A Trump campaign spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt, said in a prepared statement, “Crooked Joe Biden and the Democrats’ weaponized the justice system against President Trump and Biden’s failing campaign has spent nearly $80 million on media buys alone, yet President Trump continues to lead Joe Biden in virtually every poll.”

Still, Democrats are quick to point out that polls matter less than voting results, and on that matter, they have been beating expectations in a string of special elections this cycle. Before the Ohio contest, now-Rep. Tim Kennedy in April won a special House election in New York, outpacing Biden’s 2020 performance in the district by about 6 percentage points. Before that, now-Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.) flipped a seat previously held by disgraced former Republican Rep. George Santos.

“The best indicator of how voters are feeling heading into November is how they are actually voting at the ballot box, and for the past three years, in special elections across the country, voters have turned out to support Joe Biden and Democrats’ winning platform of safeguarding Americans’ freedoms against MAGA extremism,” Democratic National Committee spokesperson Maddy Mundy said in the wake of the Ohio vote.

Meanwhile, next door in Indiana, Republicans are fretting that even in a state Trump won by 16 points in 2020, the party’s lurch to the right could be problematic for them come November. Earlier this month, state Rep. Julie McGuire, Sen. Mike Braun’s endorsed candidate for lieutenant governor, narrowly lost to Micah Beckwith, the Christian nationalist pastor and former congressional candidate who has said that God told him he sent “those riots to Washington” on Jan. 6 and that it was God’s “hand at work”

In a memo obtained by POLITICO, James Bopp Jr., the Indiana lawyer who advises National Right to Life, wrote that Trump’s results in the state’s May primary pose “danger” for the party’s own ticket. “Trump got 78% of the Republican primary vote and [Nikki] Haley got 22%,” he wrote. “Now there is very good reason to think that 10 to 12% of that vote were Democrats, leaving 10% of Republicans not convinced to support Trump.”

He added: “This makes the general election very dicey.”