A top White House aide has shrugged off a devastating new poll showing Democrats hold a staggering eight-point lead in the fight for Congress.
Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff and former political director James Blair insisted the GOP’s outlook is “fine” after an NBC poll showed Democrats leading Republicans in the battle for Congress next year, 50 percent to 42 percent.
“Public Polling = Rorschach Test,” Blair wrote on X on Sunday.
Perhaps mindful of the numeric eyesore, Blair included a helpful summary of his prognosis: “By historical standards, midterm outlook is fine [right now] for GOP.”
Users in the comments section weren’t buying it. “You’re a deranged, incompetent a--hole,” one person wrote, to which the aide somewhat bizarrely responded: “Objection! Nobody thinks I’m incompetent.”
Blair’s take paints a fairly rosy outlook compared to what the latest NBC poll actually says, which is that 50% of voters surveyed would elect a Democrat to Congress if a vote were held tomorrow compared to just 42% who’d elect a Republican.
“The largest lead for either party on the congressional ballot in the NBC News poll since the 2018 midterms,” as Jake Sherman, founder of Punchbowl News, put it in his X post earlier Sunday.
While the elections remain just over a year away, the latest survey comes after 42 million Americans lost access to desperately needed food stamps amid an ongoing government shutdown thought to be costing the United States 0.1-2 percent of its total GDP, or between $7 and $14 billion, every week.
Over the past month, as public backlash to the shutdown mounts and the MAGA administration’s attempts to blame Democrats falter, even top elected GOP officials have started to voice their skittishness over what the future may hold if the Trump administration continues along its present trajectory.
Only two weeks ago, rogue Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene told Semafor in a furious interview with Semafor that her party ignores mounting signs of public dissatisfaction ahead of next year’s polls.
“I can’t see into the future, but I see Republicans losing the House if Americans are continuing to go paycheck-to-paycheck,” she said. “They’ll definitely be going into the midterms looking through the lens of their bank account.”
Texas Sen. Tex Cruz meanwhile took last month’s record-breaking “No Kings” protests against the Trump administration as a clear sign of growing mobilization among MAGA’s opponents.
“Unquestionably, we should take political peril seriously,” he told Bloomberg Television. “There is a lot of energy. There is a lot of anger on the left. And elections can be dangerous when one side is mobilized, is angry.”
