President Donald Trump is tanking the Republican Party in important special elections, according to a recent analysis — and that augurs poorly for the GOP in the upcoming midterm contests.“Democrat Alex Holladay prevailed in a special election on Tuesday for a state legislative seat in Arkansas, marking the ninth time since President Donald Trump took office last year that the party has flipped control of a state legislative seat in a special election,” reported NBC News’ Allan Smith. “In that same time, Republicans have not flipped a single state seat controlled by Democrats.”Smith added that, in addition to Holladay, Republicans have lost seats in special elections to Democrats in Georgia, Iowa, Mississippi, Pennsylvania and Texas. “When adding in the flips from last fall’s off-year elections in New Jersey and Virginia, Democrats have flipped 27 total seats controlled by Republicans, while Republicans are still searching for their first flip, according to data compiled by The Downballot,” Smith wrote. He added that this trend is compelling Republicans to search “for answers on how to get their coalition to the polls without Trump on the ballot, a problem they’ve been trying to solve for years.”Bo Renshaw, the Republican billionaire who lost the Arkansas state legislative contest to Holladay, admitted after his defeat that “I’d rather be us than them. We also know that we have to do the work. We’re not winning these elections because we’re sitting on the sidelines and letting the environment take hold.”Perhaps anticipating that Trump’s persistent unpopularity would drag down the Republican ticket, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders tried to postpone the special election until June, but Democrats successfully sued to force the election to March so that the seat would not remain vacant for eight months.Overall, “since Election Day 2024, 88 special elections featuring candidates from both major parties have taken place for institutions including state legislatures and the U.S. House,” according to a report by The Conversation. Within this grouping, “on average, [Democrats] are running ahead of Harris’s 2024 margins by a whopping 13 percentage points. That’s better than they did in 2018, when they ultimately picked up 40 seats in the House and seven governorships across the country.”Last month The New Republic’s editor Michael Tomasky argued that, because the trends are so overwhelmingly negative for Republicans, Trump has a plan to “rig the midterms.” Activists close to the White House are sharing an alleged Trump proposal to declare an emergency via executive order and use it to ban mail-in voting and require voter ID by arguing China rigged the 2020 election against him.”The premise, it almost goes without saying, is a total lie,” Tomasky wrote, adding, “But Trump administration officials—including Attorney General Bill Barr — pushed the China lie aggressively. So it’s very easy for Trump today to invoke China again and lie that the threat of even greater Chinese interference in 2026 demands that he take emergency measures.”
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