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(112,117 posts) Sat Mar 4, 2023, 01:19 PM Mar 2023

Senate Republicans Panic As Trump's Poll Numbers Surge - Ring of Fire

In nearly every poll out there, Donald Trump's lead over his conservative rivals (declared and possible) continues to climb. This is causing massive headaches for Republicans in the Senate, as they were hoping to take back the chamber in the 2024 election. The Republicans have a chance to flip the leadership in the Senate, but having Trump at the top of their ticket could severely hurt those chances. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains what's happening.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

According to a recent report from the Hill, Republicans in the Senate are starting to panic a little bit over the fact that Donald Trump continues to surge in the primary polling. And to be perfectly clear right now, most of the polls also show him beating President Biden. Now, as I've said, I don't believe those polls, I don't believe it for a second, but the primary polls, yeah, that's a big problem for these Republicans. So the Hill pointed out that people like Mitch McConnell, John Thune and John Cornin had all predicted following the 2022 midterms, they said, oh, Trump will fizzle out. You know, he's new Coke. They actually described him as, uh, it's gonna make a big pop at first and people are gonna remember, oh wait, this thing is terrible. Please get it out of here. And they all expected him to just fizzle, fade away.

Nobody's gonna think about Donald Trump. Surely nobody's going to vote for him. Well, those very same Republicans as the Hill points out starting to get a little bit of heartburn right now cuz things aren't exactly going their way. With each new poll that has come out, uh, Donald Trump has gained support. Ron DeSantis is losing support. He was supposed to be the G O P Golden child and things aren't working out that way. Of course, he hasn't officially even announced. So if he did, I know his poll numbers would jump, but right now Trump's running away with the thing. You know, the Fox News poll that came out this week was just one of many polls recently showing Trump Clobbering, DeSantis and everybody else. There's a catch to that. If you were to take off all of the other Republican hopefuls and wannabes, except for DeSantis, DeSantis beats Trump crowded, primary Trump's gonna win.

But here's the thing, the reason these Republicans are freaked out is because they watched what just happened in the midterms. Even Kevin McCarthy was out there talking to donors this past weekend telling them, Hey listen, the reason we did so poorly was because you had crazies at the top of the ticket. You know, you had your Doug Mastri, you had your Carrie Lakes. And those people heard us all the way down. Except, here's the thing, the polling actually shows that it didn't happen. People just didn't vote for the crazies. And then they did keep voting Republican the rest of the way down the ticket. A lot of them did. So it didn't really hurt them the way that they're trying to portray it. But here's why they're scared in 2024, Democrats have more Senate seats to defend than Republicans, right? We're we're in that year. Where it flips last year, uh, was Republicans. Next year it's the Democrats with more seats to defend, which gives Republicans the opportunity. Since they have fewer races to defend themselves, they can devote more money to trying to unseat

A couple, couple Democrats maybe steal back the Senate. But they can't do that if they do have that toxicity at the top because it is going to impact them down the ballot. Now it may be a few thousand VO votes, it could be hundreds of thousands of votes. You know, the midterms did produce a little bit of mixed results. Sometimes they'd ignore the crazy at the top and go Republican the rest of the way down. Sometimes they just wouldn't show up to vote at all. That's what scares the Republicans.