Trump might have lost the political plot — but here’s how he can still win the midterms
By Mark Mitchell
Published Feb. 4, 2026, 8:03 p.m. ET
Donald Trump did not win the 2024 election because America suddenly became meaningfully more Republican.
He won because voters, many of them independents and crossover Democrats, many of them young, had lost trust in the system and believed he was willing to confront it. I’m the head pollster for Rasmussen Reports. In our final 2024 polling, 42% of Trump’s electorate came from independents and Democrats.
That is not a MAGA monoculture. It is a fragile coalition built on one thing: accountability.
Voters did not elect Trump to manage decline. They elected him to fix things that were not working. That is why DOGE mattered. For a brief moment, it validated what Americans, particularly younger voters, already believed: that the federal government is bloated, corrupt, self-dealing and largely insulated from consequences.
The path to victoryUnder-40 voters, the most disillusioned cohort by many measures, were the most supportive of DOGE, the most open to arrests for corruption and the most likely to agree with the statement that “he who saves his country violates no laws” (57%).
Trump’s approval among voters under 40 briefly hit 60% almost exactly when Google search interest in DOGE peaked. That alignment should have frozen Republican politics in Washington in place.
Instead, DOGE was quietly sidelined, and Trump’s approval among younger voters has since fallen sharply into the low 40s. That is not coincidence. It is a signal.
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https://nypost.com/2026/02/04/opinion/trump-might-have-lost-the-political-plot-but-heres-how-he-can-still-win-the-midterms/
