Republicans are feeling sick over the nation’s Trump hangover

Last year’s election in Virginia offered early hints that voters were prepared to punish Republicans up and down the ballot for enabling President Trump’s disastrous presidency. Nearly 40 percent of voters told pollsters they cast their votes to oppose Trump, even if they disapproved of the Democratic candidate as well.

In the historic electoral wipeout that followed, Democrats swept every statewide race and flipped more than a dozen seats in the legislature.

Things have only gotten worse for Republicans after a year of inaction in Washington amid skyrocketing gas prices and stubborn inflation.

In Maine, a CNN poll published last week reveals that nearly half of those surveyed view their vote in this year’s Senate race as a chance to oppose Trump’s agenda. A CBS News-YouGov poll published on Sunday found the same trend nationally, where 45 percent said they were voting specifically to oppose Trump.

Half of Americans now use the words “corrupt” and “extreme” to describe Trump’s radicalized Republican Party. Republicans have so badly alienated regular people that voters are actually excited to punish anyone associated with Trump’s failed presidency. I call that voter rage the “Trump hangover effect,” and it is reshaping national races that were once considered reliable Republican strongholds.

Republican strategists weren’t prepared to spend 2026 worrying about Kansas, a state Trump carried by 16 points in 2024, but Trump Hangover Syndrome is complicating the math even among heartland conservatives. A co/efficient poll released last week found Sen. Roger Marshall (R) led his Democratic opponent Adam Hamilton (D) by just 5 points, even though the survey oversampled Republican respondents by 10 points compared to current partisanship models . If Marshall is really underperforming that badly in Kansas, Democrats could enter the final stretch of the midterms with a broader electoral map than even they predicted.

The Trump hangover effect is also on display in Tennessee, where Democrat Justin Pearson (D) narrowly trails Republican Brent Taylor (R) by 4 points in the state’s redrawn 9th Congressional District. Trump won the newly constituted district by 20 points in 2024. Pearson is no doubt helped by the fact that Trump’s popularity has cratered to a net minus-3 rating among Tennesseans, with high gas prices and affordability issues driving voters’ negative feelings.

In fact, Trump’s unpopularity nationwide is staggering in its consistency. Kansans give Trump a minus-17 approval rating , his lowest-ever in the state, which concerned Republicans enough that they dispatched Vice President JD Vance to try and bolster Marshall’s flatlining campaign. Marshall also distanced himself from Trump’s increasingly toxic presidency this week by backtracking on his support for Trump’s dubious promise to issue $5,000 checks to every American if Republicans win the midterms.

Most of Trump’s unpopularity comes from his inability to slow the surging price of oil , which just surpassed $100 per barrel for the first time since May, but Republicans aren’t being helped by the total incoherence of their party’s message on oil prices.

Last Sunday, Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) admitted on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that gas prices and inflation were “ gutting people like a fish ” and that a dysfunctional Republican Congress had the power — but not the political will — to address inflation before the election. Two days later, Fox News host Laura Ingraham made the exact opposite argument. She that gas prices were actually decreasing . One day after Ingraham’s remarks, Trump acknowledged the high price of gas but told voters that high prices were the necessary cost of preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear bomb.

Faced with a crisis they created and yet can’t seem to fix, Republicans are saying everything — and as a result, voters are hearing nothing. Americans across party lines now tell pollsters they feel Trump has failed on the economy, with just 35 percent of Americans approving of his job performance in the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll. The man who claimed he could fix everything has actually made everything worse, and voters are sick of waiting for solutions they no longer believe Republicans are capable of delivering.

By making their party into a giant celebration of Trump, Republicans have tied themselves to every one of his very public failures. If Republicans thought the drubbings they got in New Jersey and Virginia last year were catastrophic, wait until they meet voters who are even angrier at Trump today than they were a year ago.

Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.