This month, GOP operatives and others close to Donald Trump have grown increasingly nervous over trends they’ve seen in recent private polling data produced by different Republican organizations and conservative allies.
It’s not just the swing-state polling or the national surveys that are causing distress lately. The anxiety-spiking numbers are coming out of Trump strongholds like Ohio and Florida, according to three GOP sources, including two people close to the former president, who have reviewed the private polls.
“They’re looking worse than they should,” one Republican operative who has seen the internal data tells Rolling Stone. “Donald Trump is not losing Florida or Ohio, but that isn’t what’s concerning … It’s a trend of softening support.”
The polling results are a mirror image of what spooked Democratic operatives — prior to President Joe Biden dropping out of the 2024 contest — when both public and private polling data showed Biden shedding support in safe terrain like Minnesota, New Mexico, Virginia, and even New York. The question was never, for instance, if the president would win New York; his soft support in liberal bastions foretold doom in critical battleground states.
But within the past month, after Biden ceded the ticket to Vice President Kamala Harris, the Harris-Walz campaign has significantly cut into (or in some cases reversed) Trump’s leads, infuriating the former president with less than three months until Election Day.
Several of those signs, much to the consternation of some of the national Republican Party elite, are now popping up in Trump country.
The three sources would not allow Rolling Stone to print any of the referenced data pertaining to these solidly red states, or to publicly identify which conservative groups or GOP organs had run the recent surveys.
There is a sense among various Republican consultants that the poll numbers would not be helpful to party morale or — more optimistically speaking — merely present a snapshot of a Harris 2024 “honeymoon.” Indeed, two of the sources say they personally have not briefed the data or their concerns to Trump yet, fearing it would only upset him.
For certain veteran party pollsters, the ex-president’s ongoing 2024-related woes aren’t at all surprising.
“When you address things that voters don’t care about [such as obsessing over Harris’ crowd sizes], they punish you — and Trump’s being punished right now for not staying on message and not addressing issues people care about,” says Frank Luntz, a longtime pollster and conservative Trump critic. “This election was his to lose, and he’s losing it … And he’s incapable of changing.”
Luntz adds that, based on his own data, he sees that most voters across the nation actually rate Trump, on policy issues they care about most, “as better able to solve them than [Harris] — but they just don’t like him. And that’s playing a bigger and bigger role in her surge and his falling back. She’s even expanding the voter pool, specifically among younger women who didn’t want to support Biden or Trump, and that changes the makeup of the electorate.”
Over the weekend, The New York Times reported that “two private polls conducted in Ohio recently by Republican pollsters — which Mr. Trump carried in 2020 with 53 percent of the vote — showed him receiving less than 50 percent of the vote against Ms. Harris in the state.” (Sen. J.D. Vance, Trump’s extremely MAGAfied vice presidential pick, is from Ohio.)
And in the realm of public and nonpartisan polling, the red-state warning signs for Trump and his party are blaring.
“I was surprised that Harris is within striking distance, being only five points down,” David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center, said, regarding a USA Today/Suffolk University/WSVN-TV poll of likely Florida voters released this week.
There is a long, two-and-a-half-month stretch between now and Election Day, and the presidential race between Harris and Trump remains effectively in toss-up territory. Nobody who works on or close to the Harris or Trump campaigns whom Rolling Stone has spoken to say it is even remotely likely that Trump loses to Harris in Florida or Ohio this November.
Still, at this late stage in the campaign, Team Harris is reveling in recent polling news and a palpable uptick in Democratic voter enthusiasm. Meanwhile, Team Trump is suddenly playing defense, a position they largely were not expecting to be in at this point in the election cycle.
“We are going to go to bed early on Nov. 5, as Donald J. Trump will be announced as our 47th president. Early,” Republican National Committee co-chair and Trump family member Lara Trump said a month ago, at a late-night afterparty during the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. “I’m calling it at 10 o’clock at night. How does that sound to everybody?”
Among much of the Republican Party’s national apparatuses, more and more operatives are growing less cocky by the day. Several of Trump’s own lieutenants and advisers are also leaning away from premature football-spiking.
“It’s going to be a close race,” John McLaughlin, one of Trump’s top pollsters, tells Rolling Stone. “We haven’t even hit Labor Day, and Trump and Harris haven’t even debated, so there’s a long way to go. We’re up against a tougher team with Harris compared to Biden, and we’ve got to run on the record and the policies that created that lead over Biden. We have to make that case. With 75 percent of all voters telling us the country is on the wrong track in our latest survey … we have a lot of advantages to win this race.
“The fun is just beginning,” he says.
Donald Trump speaks in front of the American flag at the White House, on May 12, 2026.
It’s the Corruption, Stupid
Let’s say it plainly: There has never been a president as corrupt as Donald Trump. There is no close second in our history.
Take two days in May as Exhibit A. Americans just found out that in the first quarter of this year, Trump’s stock portfolio made 3,600 trades — an average of nearly 60 a day. This is a rapacious pace that would make a day trader on meth blush. Many of these appear suspiciously timed to benefit from actions approved by the president himself. For example, his Nvidia stock surged after Trump announced the company would be permitted to sell its cutting-edge AI chips to China. Similar suspiciously well-timed calls were made ahead of big government moves involving other companies, from Intel to Palantir to Boeing. The Trump Organization says all trades are made by a third-party investment advisor. If so, they appear to be psychic.
But the apparent insider trading scam being run from within the Oval Office is small change — merely millions of dollars — compared to the self-dealing plunder of $1.8 billion tax-payer dollars being pushed through the DOJ and IRS.
There’s never been a sitting president who sued his own government for $10 billion. That’s because it’s absurdly corrupt. But that’s what Donald Trump did, arguing he had suffered damages from prosecutions pursued before he was reelected. Trump, like many of his supporters, persistently confuses persecution with prosecution.
The judge who heard the case convened an independent panel to review the suit, suspecting it might be a scam. Before the case could be dismissed, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — who had previously served as Trump’s personal lawyer — declared that the bogus suit would be preemptively settled, not for $10 billion, but for the symbolic sum of $1.776 billion, which Trump said will be distributed to persecuted political allies.
This is a shakedown. The president is compelling a Justice Department he controls to redirect money from taxpayers — that’s you — to his most fervent supporters. This slush fund will set off a cash grab among MAGA lawyers and be used to reward partisan fanatics who attacked the U.S. Capitol — and police officers — on his behalf.
If that wasn’t enough of a blatantly illegal use of presidential power, it was revealed that the “settlement” deal included a pledge signed by the acting attorney general that would ensure — in the hysterical all caps of a Trump tweet — that the government would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing” any tax claims, audits or related prosecutions against Trump, his family or their businesses. This is an attempt to get a permanent get-out-of-jail-free card for the Trump family — a license to steal.
All of this is insane. All of it is unethical, and much of it is illegal and impeachable — but our system was not designed to deal with a shamelessly self-dealing president, a spineless Republican Congress, and a complaint conservative Supreme Court that has refused to enforce the emoluments clause of the Constitution and ruled that Trump has immunity for actions he takes as president. That ruling may prove to be the most consequential — and most corrosive — act of judicial abdication in American history. Against this partisan-group think, individual acts of courage matter. So kudos to the top lawyer at the Treasury Department, Brian Morrissey, who at least had the integrity to resign rather than oversee this tax-payer funded plunder.
Just to close out the corruption-palooza, Trump announced that he would endorse the Lone Star State poster-boy of corruption, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, in his primary against incumbent GOP Senator John Cornyn. Paxton’s scandals include a truly buffoonish array of fraud and bribery charges that resulted in him nearly being impeached by the state legislature. But corruption is a feature, not a bug, of Trumpland.All this smacks of late Rome and you’d be forgiven for half expecting Trump will next appoint a horse to an open Cabinet position, with Republicans rationalizing the need for more equine representation. It is no more absurd that the cavalcade of Trump appointees refusing to say that Biden won the 2020 election during their confirmation hearings in the Senate. The decision to parrot unreality for partisan gain defines deviancy down.
But in the search for something hopeful to hold onto in dark times, you can find some comfort in the fact that corruption is often the thing that turns the tide against authoritarian-adjacent administrations. And there is evidence this is happening.
Trump’s billions in self-enrichment, his reflexive twisting of U.S. policy to sell out long-term national interests and enduring values, comes at a moment when nearly half of Americans say they are feeling extremely anxious about their own financial situation.
That anxiety is driven by the widening gap between Main Street and Wall Street, a gap set on fire by a trade war and a real war Trump started, which has no end in sight but promises to further raise energy prices, fertilizer prices, and strangle the global economy. While CEOs embrace the transactional nature of this president, kissing his ring and offering vigs, the situation is grim if you’re not lining up at the Trump trough. At a time when the super-rich are getting richer, everyone else is told to go to hell by the man in the White House.
These are precisely the kinds of conditions that turn people against an aging, autocratic president who shows contempt for the very people who put him in office. It is not just that Trump’s approval numbers have plummeted to the point where two-thirds of Americans disapprove of the job he is doing. It is that Trump, for the first time, is opposed by a majority of non-college-educated white voters — a.k.a. his base — and they feel betrayed because Trump is raking in billions of dollars while they struggle to pay rent and buy groceries. Trump has dismissed and discounted their concerns, turning a blind eye to the anger about rising costs that carried him back into the presidency.
Trump’s aim is to make his thievery so blatant that we collectively become numb to it and disfigure our democracy in the process. Once upon a time conservatives warned about the dangers of “crony capitalism” and corruption. Now they are silent and complicit. It is the temporary triumph of partisanship over principle. Patriotism demands that we reassert the basic American idea that no man is above the law and that our presidents are not kings.