New polling from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research is stirring anxiety inside the White House, according to Jonathan Lemire, co-host of MSNBC's “Morning Joe.” The center pairs The Associated Press with NORC, a nonpartisan research organization at the University of Chicago, and the survey behind these figures measured U.S. adults rather than a narrower registered- or likely-voter sample.

“A new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that only 17 percent of U.S. adults approve of the Republican president's handling of the cost of living. Just 26 percent approve of his handling of the economy overall, marking a new low,” the report said.

“Do you know how many Republicans that means?” host Joe Scarborough asked. “How many Republicans don't approve? If it's 17 percent.”

Lemire cautioned, “It gets even worse.”

“Reading into some of the crosstabs now, 68 percent of those surveyed directly blame Trump,” he said. “They're not just saying like, oh, this is a victim of circumstance. There are other things out of his control. A majority of Americans, 65 percent, say it's his policies. The tariffs and the war in Iran are what's highlighted here are to blame for what's happening here.”

Lemire described the numbers as so extraordinary that they are “freaking out the White House.”

“This is a White House and Republicans who now really feel the bottom could be dropping out. We've seen a number of elections lately. When it breaks late, it breaks one way,” he said.

In his report for The Atlantic, Lemire spoke with Matthew Bartlett, a GOP strategist who served in Trump's first administration but resigned after the Jan. 6 attack, and who lamented that a “wipeout” may be coming.

“Many recent elections have broken late, and hard, and often in one direction only,” Bartlett said. “Among Republicans there is little hope that things get better before Election Day, but grave concern they may get worse.” Those concerns are landing ahead of the midterm elections, in which every House seat and roughly one-third of Senate seats will be on the ballot — a calendar that turns each subsequent survey release into a before-and-after test of where these numbers stand.

Advertising executive Donny Deutsch argued that Republicans currently have no effective message, while Democrats — despite having been “all over the place” — have excelled at staying unified.

“No matter what they're asked. They all go back to costs and you can't — the grocery store doesn't lie,” Deutsch said. “And on top of that, when you see Trump out there and he's talking about building ballrooms and you see the money his family is making.”

That dynamic, he added, is infuriating. Seeing Trump at 17 percent on anything is striking, Deutsch said, because such numbers are simply not something people in politics ever see — particularly on the economy.

Scarborough added that, in elections framed as contrasts, Democrats could not ask for a sharper one than with Trump, who has dismissed the affordability crisis as a “hoax.”

That contrast, he said, also exists between the affordability crisis and “Donald Trump's family.”

“His son's making billions of dollars on crypto, making billions of dollars, like getting defense contract loans of over $600 million for companies and for hedge funds that they just got into — the contrast of the corruption with middle Americans struggling just to get by every week. That is a strong contrast,” Scarborough said.

This article is based on reporting from Alternet.