With the 2026 U.S. midterm elections just three and a half months away, President Donald Trump is banking on branding Democrats as "communists" to motivate enough voters to preserve Republican control of Congress. Yet Trump continues to register weak approval ratings across successive polls, and one GOP insider told Politico, "We're preparing for the bottom to fall out."

Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg, a veteran of national campaigns who previously served at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and founded the center-left advocacy group NDN, struck a note of cautious optimism during a late July appearance on The New Republic's "The Daily Blast" podcast, hosted by Greg Sargent. Rosenberg argued that Trump's political liabilities keep expanding, though both he and Sargent conceded that much remains uncertain between now and November. Midterm cycles historically punish the president's party, and Trump's approval trajectory is drawing comparisons to 2018, when Republicans lost 40 House seats.

Referencing what he called Politico's "really striking" reporting, Sargent asked Rosenberg: "I'm just not ready to get that optimistic ... Are you there yet or not? And why?"

"No, I think we have a shot here, right?" Rosenberg replied. "I mean, it's a year of opportunity for us. How well we seize it is really going to be in part up to us. They've created a situation where he's already fallen very far, much further than where he was in 2018 at this point. The national climate is plus seven or so, or above, for us, which means that the House should flip. We have polls showing Sherrod Brown up — independent polls showing Sherrod Brown up in Ohio, and Mary Peltola up in Alaska, and Josh Turek up in Iowa. I mean, these are states that Trump won by more than ten points."

Rosenberg and Sargent went on to examine the range of political headwinds confronting Republicans this cycle, from the war in Iran to the economy and immigration.

Rosenberg pointed to an additional issue he expects will weaken the GOP position before Election Day: health care premium increases. "Both the private plans and the public health care plans — people are going to start getting notices of the premium increases," he said. "And what we're seeing in the data is that even private plans are going to see significant cost increases, and that 50 percent of businesses have said in surveys that they're going to pass those cost increases on to workers in their companies. And so, this is all going to happen in October, right before the election — that tens and tens of millions of people are going to be formally notified that their premiums are going to increase because of Donald Trump and the Republicans, right before the election." Health care costs have long ranked among voters' top pocketbook concerns, and the timing of open-enrollment notices could amplify the issue in the final weeks of the campaign.

Rosenberg also cited emerging data showing that people are being removed from SNAP benefits at a higher rate than anticipated. "You've now got potentially tens of millions of people falling into greater food insecurity than was anticipated," he said. "All of these trend lines together add up to this basic reality, which is that Donald Trump and the Republicans have purposefully done extraordinary harm to the American people and to the United States itself in order to enrich themselves and their friends. And it is an extraordinary betrayal of the American people. People have figured it out."

A separate New Republic report detailed growing private concern among Republicans about the party's trajectory heading into the midterms.