Trump sank the GOP in 2026. He could do it again in 2028

Judging by their choices since this month’s Democratic sweep, both the White House and congressional Republicans are vastly underestimating the party’s risk in 2028 if President Donald Trump remains as unpopular as he is now.

Dazed Republicans picking through the wreckage of their losses may console themselves with the thought that Trump’s dire approval ratings won’t pose as large a threat to the GOP in 2028, since he will be leaving the White House. But history strongly suggests that confidence is misplaced.

Outgoing presidents have cast a larger shadow than even many political professionals assume in the election to succeed them — especially when that retiring president faces widespread public discontent, as Trump does now. While popular outgoing presidents haven’t always ensured victory for their designated successors, the inverse has almost always been true: When the outgoing president is unpopular, his party has rarely won the election to replace him.

This month’s election underscored the danger looming for Republicans if Trump remains this weak. In House, Senate and gubernatorial elections across the country, the vast majority of voters who disapproved of Trump’s job performance — usually at least 80% of them — voted against Republican candidates, according to the most recently updated numbers as of November 12 from the Voter Polls conducted for CNN and other media organizations by SRSS.

“This massive repudiation of Republican candidates is totally and completely about Donald Trump,” said longtime GOP pollster Whit Ayres.

Even big losses in a midterm don’t guarantee defeat for the party holding the White House in the next presidential election. But presidents who have recovered from a bad midterm have usually changed direction in response to the rebuke (like Harry Truman after 1946 or Bill Clinton after 1994) or benefited from changing circumstances (as Ronald Reagan did when the economy recovered after his party’s poor 1982 midterm).

Trump, by contrast, remains caught in a grinding war against Iran with no clear exit. And far from adjusting his course, he has reaffirmed it with the appointment of Stephen Miller, his most ideologically extreme senior adviser, as White House chief of staff. House Republicans have responded to their losses in a similar way by choosing pugnacious Rep. Jim Jordan as their new leader.

“Donald Trump is going to double down and triple down” on the policies and style that alienated voters this year, said Steve Schmidt, a longtime GOP strategist who has become a staunch Trump critic. “Any person with any attachment to real life would look at this election and say, ‘Well, they certainly should have gotten the message and they’ll be chastened,’ but that doesn’t appreciate the physics of politics, which is that as an extreme party gets smaller, it becomes more fanatical.”

Novelist Leo Tolstoy famously wrote that every happy family is alike, while every unhappy family is different. The relationship of outgoing presidents to the election to succeed them inverts that maxim: The impact of every unsuccessful president has been largely the same, while the role of successful presidents has diverged.

Good feelings toward popular retiring presidents Theodore Roosevelt in 1908 and Ronald Reagan in 1988 helped each man’s designated successor win election. But despite very strong job approval ratings, both Dwight Eisenhower in 1960 and Bill Clinton in 2000 saw their vice-presidents lose nail biters (although Al Gore, Clinton’s No. 2, did win the popular vote). Barack Obama in 2016 wasn’t as popular as Eisenhower or Clinton, but he also left office with majority approval — only to see his party’s designated heir, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, lose another tight race to Trump (despite, like Gore, winning the popular vote).

But when an outgoing president has lost the public’s support, the record is far more consistent. Since the turn of the 20th century, each time an outgoing president has been broadly unpopular, his party has lost the race to succeed him. That was true for Democrats Woodrow Wilson in 1920, Harry Truman in 1952, Lyndon Johnson in 1968 and Biden in 2024, as well as for Republican George W. Bush in 2008.

According to the exit polls conducted for CNN and other media organizations, 88% of the voters who disapproved of Reagan in 1988 and Clinton in 2000 voted for the other party’s presidential candidate. In 2016, 89% of voters who disapproved of Obama voted for Trump; in 2024, 82% of voters who disapproved of Biden voted for Trump over Vice President Kamala Harris.

Trump’s two victories help explain why a popular outgoing president is no guarantee of success for his party — while an unpopular retiring president has been a more reliable kiss of death.

In 2016, according to the exit polls, Obama’s approval remained at or just above 50% in each of six swing states he had won in 2012. But Trump still flipped all of them — Iowa, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Florida. The reason is that Trump captured a significantly larger share among the minority of voters who disapproved of Obama than Clinton won among the majority who approved. Trump harnessed virtually all the discontent about Obama, while Clinton’s own vulnerabilities prevented her from capturing as much of his support.

In 2024, the equation for Harris proved much more straightforward — and treacherous. Between 56% to 60% of voters in the seven major swing states disapproved of Biden’s performance and between 81% to 87% of those disapprovers backed Trump, powering him to victory in all of them, the exit polls found. Harris made missteps as a candidate, but her biggest problem was that pervasive discontent with the administration in which she served.

In recent times, the presidential nominee who had the most success separating from an unpopular outgoing president of his own party was Republican Sen. John McCain in 2008. Running against Obama, McCain won 30% of voters nationwide who disapproved of George W. Bush, the exit polls found.

As a senator who had occasionally clashed with Bush — and ran a bitter race against him for the GOP nomination in 2000 — McCain wasn’t intrinsically tied to his predecessor as closely as Harris, Gore and George H.W. Bush (who all served as vice presidents to the retiring president) or Hillary Clinton, who worked as Obama’s secretary of state. “There were famously enmities there,” between McCain and Bush, noted Schmidt, McCain’s chief strategist in the 2008 race.

Yet Schmidt said the campaign recognized it would take dramatic, even unprecedented, actions to overcome the public’s disapproval of Bush — which reached a stunning 71% in the 2008 exit poll amid fatigue with the Iraq War and fear and anger over that year’s financial crisis.

“It drove everything as a political consideration because you knew that there was a day of reckoning where you had to disrupt that headwind and fly out of it,” Schmidt said. That impulse, he said, drove McCain’s attempt to name Democrat-turned independent Sen. Joe Lieberman as his running mate. “It was going to take something like that to arrest the trajectory,” Schmidt recalled. (When Republicans rebelled over Lieberman, McCain abruptly pivoted to choosing Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin instead.)

In the end, even McCain could not paddle nearly fast enough to escape the undertow of Bush’s capsizing presidency. Obama that year won a higher share of the popular vote than any Democratic nominee since Johnson in 1964 and flipped nine states that had voted for Bush in 2004. In all of them, at least two-thirds of voters disapproved of Bush’s performance — and at least two-thirds of those disapprovers backed Obama.

Through 2026, the one discordant sign for Democrats was polling consistently showing they were not winning nearly as many voters who disapproved of Trump as during his first term.

Democrats this year didn’t fully match the benchmarks they hit among Trump disapprovers in his first term. But ultimately Democrats carried about the same share of voters who disapproved of Trump as the opposition party did among voters who disapproved of Obama in 2010, Bush in 2006 and Bill Clinton in 1994. In the 2026 CNN Voter Poll measuring preferences in the national House popular vote, 86% of voters who disapproved of Trump backed Democrats; the party also won 85% to 89% of voters who disapproved of Trump in almost all the major Senate contests.

That was plenty to power a Democratic landslide. Disapproval of Trump in this election was not only deep (at 63%, his national disapproval rating was considerably higher than those other presidents in their worst midterm elections), but also broad. Across the 45 states where Voter Poll data is available, most voters approved of Trump’s job performance in only five sparsely populated deep-red states — Arkansas, Idaho, South Dakota, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

In every state where Democrats flipped a governorship, a Senate seat, or both, a substantial majority of voters disapproved of Trump’s job performance — and those disenchanted voters provided the core of the winning Democratic coalition. In Texas, for instance, 96% of the votes for Democratic Senate victor James Talarico came from people who disapproved of Trump.

One reason Republicans could not surmount the Trump discontent in 2028 was that so few displayed any independence from him. As Ayres noted, Republicans concluded that if they clashed with Trump, he would either hound them out of the party or defeat them in primaries. Yet binding themselves to Trump to avoid primary challenges created insurmountable problems in the general election where “Trump and Trumpism have become toxic,” Ayres said.

That same conundrum looms over the potential 2028 Republican presidential field, particularly Vice President JD Vance. Trump is likely to fire social media thunderbolts against any attempt from Vance or other candidates to meaningfully distance from him, and no one seeking the nomination can afford too much conflict with the president, given his durable popularity with the MAGA base. Yet if Trump remains anywhere near as unpopular with the broad public as he is today, failing to separate from him could prove fatal for the eventual GOP nominee in the general election.

Vance himself seems to be aware of this catch-22; CNN reported last week that the vice president has given serious consideration to not running for president in 2028 in the wake of the GOP’s disastrous midterm performance.

All this underscores the GOP’s stake in Trump mounting at least some recovery by 2028. A decisive conclusion to the Iran War that lowered gas and diesel prices might lift him somewhat.

But Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg said it will be extremely difficult for Trump to regain much of the allegiance he lost over the past two years among the new voters who moved toward him in 2024 — particularly Hispanic Americans, Black men and younger men. Most of those voters, she said, feel not only disappointed but angry at Trump for failing to alleviate their economic squeeze as he promised — while focusing so much on his own priorities, like building monuments and padding his fortune.

“Especially for the people who are less ideologically committed to him… the betrayal and the broken promises make it very hard to come back from,” Greenberg said. “It’s not just the bad job performance.”

As problematic, Trump and congressional Republicans show no sign of rethinking the course that ran the party into this electoral ditch. Instead, through the elevation of the belligerent hard-liners Miller and Jordan, the GOP has not only ignored but actively rejected the voters’ roar of discontent.

Add the prospect of extensive congressional hearings exposing corruption and self-dealing in the administration and many analysts believe Trump’s approval rating could fall even lower by 2028. “He may not be at his lowest point,” saud Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz, who has extensively studied the relationship between election outcomes and presidential approval. “He is going to have a hard time clawing his way back up to anything higher than he is now, given what is likely to be happening” with investigations and the economy.

If Vance or Secretary of State Marco Rubio wins the GOP nomination in 2028, they might find it especially difficult to escape negative feelings about Trump, since they served so closely with him. But, as Abramowitz said, “every prominent Republican has tied themselves closely to Trump over the past two years.”

Though voters still harbor many doubts about Democrats, if Trump can’t repair his public standing, those Democratic vulnerabilities may not matter as much as Republicans hope — just as they did little to stop the massive blue tide earlier this month.