A leading pollster at one of the right’s favorite polling firms is sounding an alarm that many Republicans would prefer not to hear. Mark Mitchell, the chief pollster at the conservative Rasmussen organization, says the GOP’s midterm struggles are not a fluke or a messaging hiccup. In his view, Republicans are losing because President Donald Trump failed to deliver on what he promised, and the party has no idea how to speak to the voters it desperately needs.
“Republicans are going to lose because they don’t understand politics,” Mitchell told Steve Bannon during a candid conversation on Thursday. It was the kind of line usually reserved for party outsiders, not someone whose work is often cited by conservative media. But Mitchell didn’t stop there. He argued that voters under 50 simply are not drawn to traditional conservative ideas anymore. “People under 50 don’t really care about conservatism,” he said, adding that many of the values the party relies on “have basically failed America.”
From his perspective, younger voters are responding to what they see around them, not what political strategists wish they saw. “The schools suck. Like everything’s falling apart,” Mitchell said. He described the data he’s looking at daily as “absolutely abysmal,” and he framed the current moment as a kind of reckoning, a recognition that the usual Republican pitch is losing its grip. The party, he argued, still assumes voters will default to them because “nobody likes socialism,” yet, he warned, “we’re getting to the point where people are considering socialism.”
Mark Mitchell: Donald Trump Is Now Polling Under 40% With Voters Under 30 Years Old @honestpollster pic.twitter.com/3jeUBHpO5Y
— Bannon’s WarRoom (@Bannons_WarRoom) November 12, 2025
Mitchell said Trump himself carries a share of the blame. The president, he argued, came into office with a rare opportunity. “All he had to do was come in and literally just reform government and smash the oligarchy,” Mitchell said. “And he’s not going to.” That failure, he said, has left younger Trump supporters drifting away from conservatism entirely. “All these people like the Trump voters under 40, they are not conservative at all.”
Rasmussen’s internal tracking, Mitchell said, shows exactly when things began to slide. During the government shutdown, Trump’s numbers started falling sharply. “About three weeks into this, when Donald Trump’s flying around the world talking to dignitaries and we’re building the east wing of the White House and now food stamps are going to get defunded and we’re walking into an election, all of the sudden his number started tanking,” he said.
Mitchell sees the episode as part of a larger pattern. “It was very clear that in my opinion, the Republicans had no plan,” he said. As voters watched the chaos unfold, he said, “everybody went on the internet and everyone was ripping their faces off,” a mix of frustration, confusion and burnout.
Democrats, he argued, aren’t winning because they’ve suddenly become wildly popular. They’re winning because they’re motivated. “Democrats are excited to go vote because they hate Trump, and that motivates them,” Mitchell said. The Republican base, he added, tends to be motivated by something different: “smashing the oligarchy and burning the government down.” And lately, in his view, Republicans are doing neither.
His forecast for the midterms was bleak. “We got 355 days to an election and the Republicans are going to lose this one,” he said flatly. “They are just going to lose it.” He noted that the party’s fallback strategy, a “gerrymandering war of attrition,” now appears to be failing as well.
To drive the point home, Mitchell offered a jab at the GOP’s long-term thinking. “J.D. Vance polls really well. But, you know, 2028, this time we mean it, is not a good campaign slogan.” It was a rare moment of frankness from a pollster whose warnings weren’t meant for Democrats at all, but for the very party he says is running out of time.
