MAGA pollster Rich Baris has interviewed countless Trump voters to gauge Republicans’ chances in November. But he said the main obstacle for Republicans is that the 2024 version of Trump is underperforming with much of the president’s base.

“[I]f we're having an honest discussion, you could be a supporter of the president and you can still be honest. I don't just see what sycophants see: how that helps anybody. I mean, ultimately, it's my job to convey what people are telling me. And they wanted the old Trump back,” Baris said in a conversation on Wednesday with former George Bush speechwriter and Bulwark podcaster Tim Miller.

Baris, who runs the polling firm Big Data Poll and is known for surveying Trump’s base rather than elite opinion, said Michigan and Georgia are effectively locks for Democrats in the upcoming Senate race, and he warned that the outlook is troubling in many “safe” districts as Trump 2.0 diverges sharply from the Trump of his first administration. The comments come with Democrats needing a net gain of four seats — or three plus control of the House — to flip the Senate in November’s midterms.

“People felt like, you know what? I think we might have had it a little bit better than we thought. Can we go back and have a redo? But this administration has not been a redo of 1.0 in many ways,” Baris told Miller.

He said his company publishes a monthly summary of interview responses and that a consistent theme appears across surveys.

“And you could see it if you don't read the transcripts, the interviews, you could see in the word clouds, clear as day. They thought that the first Trump administration was much more focused on domestic policy. And Americans, they're not stupid. They know that the president's job has a lot [on its plate] but it's in the name right there: America First,” Baris said. “Look, I mean, I feel like I have a hard time speaking to some people on the right who are being intellectually dishonest with themselves. I mean, it's in the name, guys.”

Baris said Trump campaigned against “no new wars in the Middle East,” and that his voters clearly intend to hold him to that promise. He added that MAGA supporters, especially younger people, strongly liked what Trump was doing in the first three to five months of his second term, but that period is now far behind them in political terms.

“Republicans are going to run out of a coalition soon if they don't build on what he started to build in 24. And a lot of those gains are squandered because of the direction they took,” Baris said.

He said Republicans “decided by spring, certainly by summer, before Charlie [Kirk] was killed, to conduct Operation Midnight Hammer,” calling it “kind of like a PTSD moment for a huge part of Trump's coalition.” Operation Midnight Hammer was the Pentagon’s name for the June 2025 U.S. strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, an intervention that drew pushback from parts of the isolationist right.

“They just thought, ‘here we go again. No, please.’ And they gave him a lot of grace and they waited and waited and waited, but he never took that pivot back to the domestic,” Baris added.