Good evening. I’m sending this newsletter from the road, where I’m doing some reporting on a closer-than-expected election. And it’s debate night in three Senate battlegrounds — Maine, Georgia and Michigan. There’s more on all of that below. But first, I asked Sabrina Tavernise to tell us about a reporting trip of her own, one that turned up signs of a shift in Republicans’ enthusiasm for President Trump. —Jess Bidgood
A change in the air
I have been talking to working-class Americans about their political preferences since 2016, and have written many stories about how Donald Trump inspired them. Now, after 10 years, a war and sky-high fuel prices, more and more working-class Americans I am talking to are saying they’ve had enough. Like Jim Pasek, 80, a retired pharma plant custodian, who loved Trump in the early years but now says, “He’s not making sense.” Or Sebastian Covey, 24, a landscaper, who cast a ballot for Trump in the first vote of his life and now is scrambling to find a carpool partner after swapping his truck for a car to cope with the rising cost of gas. Many Americans still support Trump. But something is happening to his support that I have not seen since he took the political establishment by storm a decade ago. One statistic from our public opinion poll last month that I find particularly relevant: Just 29 percent of likely Republican voters said the economy was better than it had been a year ago, down from 72 percent in January. That sentiment is settling into this midterm election, dragging down Republican enthusiasm in a pattern that the independent political analyst Charlie Cook has termed the “red undertow.” Cook points out that it does not mean these disenchanted Republicans will vote for Democrats. Most will not. As Lindsay Kronemeyer, a 35-year-old Christian conservative, told me, “My belief system is still the same.” Instead, Cook argues, the dynamic will be a hindrance for Republican candidates, particularly in close races. But Kronemeyer, an up-and-coming member of the Republican Party in Michigan who canvassed for Trump in 2016 and in 2020, wants to think about the party’s future. And Trump, she says, is not part of it. “He’s just not there in my head anymore,” she told me. Read more about Republicans’ growing sense of fatigue. →DEBATE WEEK
The main event last night was in Iowa, where Representative Ashley Hinson, the Republican candidate for Senate, and State Representative Josh Turek, her Democratic opponent, sparred “politely but sharply,” as Bayliss Wagner wrote. A couple of Bayliss’s takeaways from the debate:
And tonight …The schedule picks up, with debates in Michigan, Maine and Georgia. They’ll offer a glimpse of three very different election landscapes: In Georgia, Senator Jon Ossoff, a Democrat, looks so solid that Republicans have pulled back on TV ads, while in Maine, the incumbent Republican, Senator Susan Collins, has been looking stronger in polls. And in Michigan, the race between Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and Mike Rogers appears to be neck and neck. We’ll be covering that one live. Follow along here. GET CAUGHT UP
THIS WEEK IN POLLS The Times’s poll tracker updates every day with new polls from around the country. Here are a few recent additions that caught the eye of Ruth Igielnik, an editor on our polling team.
WHERE’S JESS?
I’m on the campus of Bethany College — which is affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America — today for a Senate candidate’s campaign event. Can you guess what race I’m covering? Guess a state, and I’ll take you to the correct race’s polling page so you can see if you got it right. I’ll have more to say about my trip in an upcoming newsletter. ONE LAST THING
“It’s going to be a very tough year for Maine.”As the temperature drops, Mainers are stressing. That’s because half the homes in Maine rely on oil for heat, and the war in Iran has caused prices to surge. The issue is moving to the center of the Senate race. Troy Jackson, the Democratic candidate, brought it up at a town hall event this week, joking that people might have to get creative in heating their homes if they can’t shell out money for oil. “It’s a good thing that Susan Collins got all those fire stations,” he said, referring to the pride his Republican opponent has expressed in her efforts to secure federal funds for fire stations. “Because we’re going to have a lot of fires.” Some in the crowd laughed — though one person in the back muttered that Jackson’s line was not funny. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
