2026-03-15T10:00:35.546Z / https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/15/politics/gop-trump-midterm-elections-blue-states-analysis
在唐纳德·特朗普总统意外在全国多个深蓝州表现出竞争力后，共和党人在2024年选举中对民主党多年来主导的地区的前景表示乐观。但随着中期选举临近，这些前景已逐渐黯淡。
在深蓝州——从新英格兰和纽约到加利福尼亚——特朗普在2020年至2024年间的表现显著提升，民调显示自他重返白宫以来，总统的支持率大幅下跌，这可能为大多数其他共和党候选人带来潜在的危险暗流。
尽管特朗普2024年的表现引发了共和党人希望他们在这些州建立了新的滩头阵地，这是基于对民主党过度行为的强烈反对，但总统未能巩固这些收益意味着共和党人再次只能寄希望于少数如缅因州参议员苏珊·柯林斯和新罕布什尔州州长凯利·阿约特等具有独特独立性的候选人，他们能够在充满挑战的深蓝州环境中脱颖而出。
迪克·瓦达姆斯（前科罗拉多州共和党主席）代表了整个深蓝地区众多共和党运作人士的观点，他表示，他不相信民主党已经消除了公众对犯罪、移民和经济管理等问题的疑虑，这些疑虑为特朗普2024年的胜利打开了大门。但他补充道，在深蓝州，“即使选民喜欢你（作为候选人），他们会把州长职位交给一个共和党人和特朗普政党的成员吗？这就是问题所在。”
考虑到自2024年以来特朗普支持率的下滑，共和党人如果能够将对深蓝州的反弹控制在一定范围内，并在今年秋季摇摆州（选举州长和参议员的州，包括亚利桑那州、密歇根州、宾夕法尼亚州、威斯康星州和佐治亚州）中保持竞争力，可能会被视为一种胜利。早期民调显示，这些州也受到了特朗普全国支持率下滑的影响。
正如我之前所写，理解各州当代政治倾向最具启发性的方法是考察它们在特朗普三次总统竞选中的投票情况。三次都投票支持他的25个州构成了红色美国的核心。19个州三次都投票反对他；它们构成了蓝色美国的基础。（尽管红色阵营包括更多州，但人口分布更为接近，25个特朗普州约有1.49亿人口，而反对特朗普的州和哥伦比亚特区（也三次都反对他）约有1.42亿人口。）
在他三次竞选期间任何时候发生转变的六个州（铁锈地带的密歇根州、宾夕法尼亚州和威斯康星州，以及阳光地带的亚利桑那州、内华达州和佐治亚州）构成了最大规模的紫色州群。（北卡罗来纳州通常也被定义为摇摆州，尽管特朗普在所有总统竞选中都相对窄幅地赢得了该州。）
每个政党现在在其区域内的其他职位上占据主导地位。在19个一贯反对特朗普的州中，民主党现在拥有38个参议院席位中的37个（除了柯林斯），19个州长职位中的17个（除了阿约特和佛蒙特州邻近的菲尔·斯科特），以及185个众议院席位中的146个。共和党在其区域内也有相应的优势。
但在乔·拜登总统任期内，共和党人在广泛的深蓝州显著改善了表现，尽管他们很少翻转最受瞩目的目标。在拜登任内，深蓝州的共和党人在新泽西州、明尼苏达州、新墨西哥州、俄勒冈州和弗吉尼亚州的州长竞选中表现异常强劲（例如格伦·杨金在2021年获胜）。最引人注目的是，共和党众议员李·泽尔丁在2022年与民主党州长凯西·霍楚尔的竞选中表现极具竞争力，在纽约市的长岛郊区以压倒性优势击败了她，并将其全州支持率控制在53%以下。
共和党人在深蓝州的收益部分源于全国对拜登政府表现的不满，特别是在移民和通货膨胀问题上。但共和党人也认为，对拜登的反弹巩固了人们对地方民主党治理记录的日益增长的疑虑——主要集中在犯罪、移民、税收和政府支出等相同问题上。这种动态在泽尔丁2022年对霍楚尔的持续攻击中表现得最为明显，他指责该州减少现金保释金的举措和他所谓的鼓励非法移民的政策。
新泽西州共和党战略家迈克·杜海姆表示：“这成为了（深蓝州民主党人）在某种实际现实面前选择某些意识形态目标的时刻。人们开始质疑，‘民主党人的优先事项在哪里？’不仅仅是特朗普，还有很多其他共和党人都在说，‘嘿，我们必须重新开始关注关键的民生问题。’”
2024年，深蓝州的共和党人继续取得进展。与2020年相比，特朗普在全国几乎所有地方的表现都有所提升。但他在深蓝州取得了一些最大的进步，包括纽约州、新泽西州、缅因州、新墨西哥州、弗吉尼亚州、明尼苏达州和新罕布什尔州。在这些州中，特朗普在大型城市中心尤其取得了重大突破，特别是对有色人种蓝领选民。
尽管一些保守派战略家承认共和党人在深蓝地区仍面临持续障碍，但他们认为特朗普2024年的表现为构建一个围绕反对被批评为过度自由的政策（犯罪、移民、跨性别权利和课堂教学）的多种族工人阶级联盟提供了模板。
但从他第二任期一开始，特朗普不仅未能巩固他在深蓝州的滩头阵地，反而与这些州展开了一系列对抗。保守派曼哈顿研究所高级研究员查尔斯·费恩·雷曼表示：“特朗普有潜力获胜的地方是当他似乎在一些大型深蓝州和城市行政长官面前表现得更理性的时候。但他现在显然没有做到这一点。”
特朗普系统性地试图终止对深蓝州和城市几乎所有主要国内活动（教育、医疗保健、基础设施）的联邦资金支持，除非它们采纳一系列共和党州的社会政策，而这些政策他们一直拒绝。（法院几乎阻止了政府所有设定这些条件的尝试。）去年，共和党大规模的和解法案对主要在深蓝州实施的《平价医疗法案》（ACA）下扩展的医疗补助项目进行了最大幅度的削减。特朗普向洛杉矶、华盛顿特区和田纳西州孟菲斯部署了国民警卫队；并威胁要将其派往其他管辖区，直到去年年底最高法院阻止了他。最激进的是，特朗普在洛杉矶、芝加哥和明尼阿波利斯发动了大规模的军事化移民扫荡——后者最终导致两名美国公民（Renee Good和Alex Pretti）死亡。
在所有这些方面，特朗普对待深蓝州选民更像是一个用来激发其核心支持者的对手，而非需要争取的选民群体。埃默里大学政治学家艾伦·亚布拉莫维茨表示：“这几乎就像是他故意针对这些州的选民，而不是真正试图扩大这些优势。”
没有哪个问题比移民问题更能体现这种转变。特朗普在2024年竞选期间的激烈攻击显然让许多深蓝州民主党领导人对移民问题感到不安和不确定。
然而，尽管特朗普对边境的处理仍得到大多数美国人的正面评价，但对其激进大规模驱逐计划的广泛反弹至少暂时颠覆了该问题的政治格局，特别是在深蓝州。例如，在2022年选举中几乎完全处于移民防御状态的霍楚尔，今年采取了进攻姿态，提出立法禁止地方警长与移民和海关执法局（ICE）合作，并谴责她可能的共和党对手——拿骚县行政长官布鲁斯·布莱克曼“支持特朗普移民计划中最糟糕和最黑暗的部分”，正如她的竞选团队在最近视频中所说。
在最新的锡耶纳大学民调中，63%的纽约选民表示ICE执法行动过于激进。同样，在新罕布什尔大学2月份的民调中，新罕布什尔州、缅因州、马萨诸塞州、罗德岛州和康涅狄格州的一半以上成年人认为ICE执法使美国变得更不安全而非更安全。加州民调研究所（PPIC）最近的一项民调显示，73%的可能选民不认可该机构的表现，61%的人表示其行动使社区更不安全。莱曼表示：“坦率地说，他把自己最擅长的问题——移民——变成了一个累赘，特别是对深蓝州共和党人而言。”
明尼苏达州前共和党州长候选人克里斯·马德尔今年早些时候退出竞选，抗议政府在那里的移民执法策略，他更直白地表达了对深蓝州共和党人的威胁。马德尔在退出后表示：“如果摧毁明尼苏达州的共和党品牌是特朗普政府的实际任务，那么这是A+，10分满分。”
在所有深蓝州，特朗普如今看起来比2024年大选刚结束时要弱得多。新罕布什尔大学最近的民调显示，新英格兰地区的特朗普支持率在新罕布什尔州和缅因州仅达到43%，在康涅狄格州和罗德岛州下降到约35%，在马萨诸塞州仅为24%。锡耶纳大学最新调查显示，他在纽约州的工作支持率仅为36%。加州民调研究所（PPIC）的民调发现，只有30%的选民对他表示肯定。
对民主党人来说，这些糟糕的数据明确了他们2026年选举策略的首要任务。几乎所有在深蓝州参选的民主党人都在强调他们决心像温斯顿·丘吉尔所说的那样“在海滩、田野”上与特朗普对抗。
纽约州长竞选视频中的旁白强调：“在其他人选择沉默而非勇气并退缩的时代，凯西·霍楚尔正勇敢地站出来对抗唐纳德·特朗普。”缅因州民主党州长珍妮特·米尔斯宣布竞选参议院席位挑战柯林斯时，其视频突出了米尔斯去年在白宫就跨性别政策与特朗普的对抗：“这次选举将是一个简单的选择，”米尔斯宣称，“缅因州将屈服还是抗争？”在加州，民主党众议员埃里克·斯瓦尔韦尔以他在特朗普第一任期弹劾案中的角色宣传自己，发起了州长竞选。“加州人永远不会屈服，”斯瓦尔韦尔在反特朗普的“无国王”集会上的讲话图片旁配文。
特朗普支持率的下滑给深蓝州共和党人带来了更复杂的选择。一般来说，对特朗普在社交媒体上可能的雷霆一击的恐惧劝阻了他们公开与他决裂，而动员那些投票率较低但为他蜂拥至投票站的工人阶级选民的希望，鼓励他们强调一些同样尖锐的文化问题。但杜海姆指出，这些相同的问题有疏远中间派独立选民的风险——特别是在特朗普第二任期国内外采取激进行动的背景下。
杜海姆表示：“共和党人面临的困境是，为了改变深蓝州的局势，我们需要让这些特朗普支持者出来投票，但同样的问题既激励了这些选民，又排斥了独立选民——而这些独立选民肯定会投票。”
2025年，这种困境难住了新泽西州和弗吉尼亚州（特朗普去年在这两个深蓝州取得巨大进展）的共和党州长候选人。去年，即使特朗普采取明确损害他们州利益的行动（例如暂停纽约-新泽西主要过境隧道的资金，或启动政府效率部门流程扰乱了许多联邦工作人员的生活），杰克·恰塔雷利（新泽西州）和温森·厄尔-西尔斯（弗吉尼亚州）都没有批评特朗普。
相反，他们认为，与特朗普合作的共和党人会更好地服务于他们的州，而不是一个本能反对他的民主党人。但这些论点在民主党人米基·谢里尔（新泽西州）和阿比盖尔·斯潘伯格（弗吉尼亚州）指责他们的共和党对手将优先安抚特朗普而非捍卫其州时，几乎没有防御作用。
结果正如杜海姆指出的，在这两个州，共和党人面临最糟糕的两种情况。即使如此亲近特朗普，恰塔雷利和厄尔-西尔斯都没有在蓝领特朗普选民中引发激增。但他们拒绝与特朗普划清界限，使得民主党人很容易将他们与特朗普捆绑在一起；根据包括CNN在内的多家媒体组成的联盟进行的出口民调，在这两个州，大多数选民都不认可总统的工作表现，而超过90%的不认可者投票支持民主党人。斯潘伯格和谢里尔轻松获得了两位数的胜利。
在整个深蓝州，共和党候选人几乎都做出了同样的计算：拒绝与特朗普划清界限，并强调他们能与他合作的能力。例如，在纽约州，布莱克曼坚定地捍卫ICE，并将明尼阿波利斯枪击事件归咎于当地民主党官员而非联邦政府。（“当涉及到唐纳德·J·特朗普总统时，我将永远支持他，”布莱克曼曾说。）
在加州，领先的共和党州长候选人史蒂夫·希尔顿也捍卫了特朗普的移民执法政策。少数如新罕布什尔州参议院候选人约翰·苏努努等试图尽量少提及特朗普，并坚持他们的竞选将由地方问题决定。甚至在“摇摆州”如佐治亚州、亚利桑那州、密歇根州、威斯康星州和宾夕法尼亚州，所有共和党人都尽可能地与特朗普捆绑。
民主党州长协会通讯主任山姆·牛顿表示：“这对他们来说将是一个巨大的问题。”
锡耶纳大学最新调查显示，在大多数选民不认可特朗普工作表现的州，布莱克曼仅获得7%的不认可选民支持，而只有5%的人表示他们打算投票给共和党众议院候选人。
在2018年和2020年（特朗普最后一次入主白宫）选举中，柯林斯是唯一一位在共和党参议院候选人或现任参议员中获得超过8%不认可特朗普选民支持的共和党人。2020年，柯林斯获得了23%的不认可选民支持；新罕布什尔大学最新民调显示，尽管该州许多不认可特朗普的选民仍未决定，但柯林斯现在仅获得8%的不认可选民支持（对阵米尔斯）和7%的支持（对阵米尔斯的竞争对手格雷厄姆·普拉特纳）。
特朗普在深蓝州支持率的迅速崩溃，戳破了那些认为他2024年胜利引发了持久选举重组的共和党人的乐观情绪。但在我们日益两极分化的政治时代，两党都难以在对方的核心地区建立持久立足点；特朗普治下深蓝州共和党人的弱势，与拜登任内红州民主党人的失利形成了鲜明对比，甚至更为严重。
除非任何一方能找到稳定扩大其地理影响力的公式，否则白宫和国会的控制权将始终悬于一线，两党各自巩固对其影响力范围的控制，而少数长期摇摆州将决定权力天平的倾斜。
CNN的奥斯汀·卡尔佩珀提供了报道。
The GOP’s blue-state blues
2026-03-15T10:00:35.546Z / https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/15/politics/gop-trump-midterm-elections-blue-states-analysis
After President Donald Trump’s unexpectedly competitive showings in big blue states around the country, Republicans emerged from the 2024 election expressing optimism about their prospects in places that Democrats have dominated for years. But as the midterm election approaches, those prospects have dwindled.
In blue states — from New England and New York to California — where Trump significantly improved his performance from 2020 to 2024, polls show the president’s approval ratings have plummeted since he returned to office, creating a potentially treacherous undertow for most other Republican candidates.
Though Trump’s 2024 showing spurred hopes that Republicans had established a new beachhead in those states built on a backlash to Democratic excesses, the president’s inability to consolidate those gains means Republicans are once again reduced to hoping that a few uniquely independent candidates such as Maine Sen. Susan Collins and New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte can overcome a challenging blue-state environment.
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Dick Wadhams, the former chair of the Colorado Republican Party, speaks for many GOP operatives across the blue landscape when he says he does not believe Democrats have erased the public doubts on issues such as crime, immigration and managing the economy that opened the door for Trump’s 2024 gains. But, he adds, in blue states, “even if voters like you (as a candidate), will they entrust the governorship to someone who is a Republican and part of the Trump party? That’s the question.”
Given the erosion in Trump’s support since 2024, Republicans might consider it a win if they can contain the backlash to the blue states and preserve their competitiveness this fall in swing states electing governors and senators — including Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Georgia, states that early polling suggests are also being affected by the national erosion in Trump’s support.
As I’ve written, the most revealing way to understand the states’ contemporary political allegiances is to examine how they have voted in Trump’s three presidential races. The 25 states that have voted for him all three times represent the core of red America. Nineteen states have voted against Trump all three times; they represent the foundation of blue America. (Though the red bloc includes many more states, the population balance is much closer, with about 149 million people in the 25 Trump states and roughly 142 million in the anti-Trump states and the District of Columbia, which has also voted against him all three times .)
The six states that have flipped at any point during his three races (Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in the Rust Belt, along with Arizona, Nevada and Georgia in the Sun Belt) constitute the largest concentration of purple states. (North Carolina is also usually defined as a swing state, even though Trump has carried it — relatively narrowly — in all his presidential bids.)
Each party now dominates the other offices in its section. In the 19 consistently anti-Trump states, Democrats now hold 37 of 38 Senate seats (all but Collins), 17 of 19 governorships (all except Ayotte and neighboring Phil Scott in Vermont) and 146 of 185 House seats. Republicans are comparably strong in their section.
But during Joe Biden’s presidency, Republicans significantly improved their performance across a wide expanse of the blue states, even if they flipped few of the highest-profile targets. Under Biden, blue-state Republicans registered unusually strong performances in gubernatorial races in New Jersey, Minnesota, New Mexico, Oregon and Virginia (where Glenn Youngkin won in 2021). Perhaps most dramatically, Republican Rep. Lee Zeldin ran a highly competitive race in 2022 against Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul in New York, crushing her in the Long Island suburbs of New York City and holding her to less than 53% statewide.
Republicans’ blue-state gains were partly explained by the nationwide discontent with Biden’s performance, particularly on immigration and inflation. But Republicans also believed that the backlash against Biden crystallized gathering doubts about the governing record of local Democrats around largely the same set of issues: crime, immigration, taxes and government spending. That dynamic may have been most evident in the success of Zeldin’s unrelenting 2022 attacks against Hochul over the state’s moves to reduce the use of cash bail and state policies that he said encouraged illegal immigration.
“It became this moment when (blue state Democrats) were choosing some of these ideological goals over a kind of practical reality,” said Mike DuHaime, a New Jersey-based GOP strategist. “People just started to say, ‘Where are the Democrats’ priorities?’ Not just Trump, but a lot of other Republicans came in and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got to start worrying about the key kitchen-table issues again.’’’
The ball kept rolling for blue-state Republicans in 2024. Compared with his 2020 showing, Trump improved almost everywhere across the country. But he notched some of his biggest gains in blue states, including New York, New Jersey, Maine, New Mexico, Virginia, Minnesota and New Hampshire. Across these states, Trump made especially big inroads in large urban centers, particularly with blue-collar voters of color.
While acknowledging the continuing obstacles for Republicans in blue places, some conservative strategists saw Trump’s 2024 performance as the template for constructing a multiracial working-class coalition around opposition to what critics viewed as excessively liberal policies on crime, immigration, transgender rights and classroom instruction.
But from the outset of his second term, Trump not only failed to consolidate his beachheads in blue states but also engaged in a succession of confrontations with them. “Where Trump has potential to win is when he appears to be the more reasonable guy against some of these big blue-state and city executives,” said Charles Fain Lehman, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute. “But he certainly isn’t doing that right now.”
Trump systematically has attempted to terminate federal funding to blue states and cities for virtually every major domestic activity (education, health care, infrastructure) unless they adopt a range of red-state social policies that they have uniformly rejected. (Courts have blocked almost all the administration’s attempts to set those conditions.) The GOP’s massive reconciliation bill last year imposed its greatest Medicaid cuts on the mostly blue states that expanded the program under the Affordable Care Act. Trump deployed the National Guard into Los Angeles; Washington, DC; and Memphis, Tennessee; and threatened to send it into other jurisdictions until the Supreme Court stopped him late last year. Most aggressively, Trump launched massive, militarized immigration sweeps through Los Angeles, Chicago and Minneapolis — the latter culminating in the killings of two American citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
In all these ways, Trump has treated blue-state voters less as constituency to be wooed than a foil to energize his core supporters. “It’s almost just like he is deliberately aiming to antagonize the voters in those states, instead of trying to actually expand these inroads,” said Alan Abramowitz, an Emory University political scientist.
No issue captures this shift more powerfully than immigration. Trump’s vociferous attacks during the 2024 campaign clearly left many blue-state Democratic leaders shaken and uncertain over immigration issues.
Yet while Trump’s handling of the border itself continues to receive positive grades from most Americans, the broad backlash against his aggressive mass deportation program has, at least for now, upended the politics of the issue, especially in blue states. After spending the 2022 election almost entirely in a defensive crouch over immigration, for instance, Hochul has gone on the offense this year, proposing legislation to bar local sheriffs from partnering with ICE and slamming her likely Republican opponent, Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, for “backing the worst and darkest parts of Trump’s immigration plan,” as her campaign put it in a recent video.
In recent Siena University polling, 63% of New York voters said ICE enforcement has gone too far. Likewise, in February polling by the University of New Hampshire, half or more of adults in New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut all agreed that ICE enforcement was making the US less, not more, safe. In a recent Public Policy Institute of California poll, 73% of likely voters disapproved of the agency’s performance and 61% said its actions were making communities less safe. “To put it bluntly, he took his best issue — immigration — and made it into a liability, particularly for blue-state Republicans,” said Lehman.
Chris Madel, a former GOP gubernatorial candidate in Minnesota, expressed the threat to blue-state Republicans even more starkly when he quit the race earlier this year in protest of the administration’s immigration enforcement tactics there. “If wrecking the GOP brand in Minnesota was the Trump administration’s actual assignment,” Madel said after he withdrew, “then A-plus, 10 out of 10 execution.”
Across the blue states, Trump looks much weaker today than he did immediately after the 2024 election. The recent University of New Hampshire polls found his approval ratings across New England topping out at just 43% in New Hampshire and Maine, sagging to around 35% in Connecticut and Rhode Island, and scraping only 24% in Massachusetts. Siena’s latest survey put his job approval at just 36% in New York state. The Public Policy Institute of California poll found only 30% of voters gave him positive marks in the state.
For Democrats, these dismal numbers have clarified the prime directive of their 2026 electoral strategy. Virtually every Democrat running in a blue state is emphasizing their determination to fight Trump, to borrow from Winston Churchill, “on the beaches … the fields.”
“At a time when so many others are choosing silence over courage and backing down, Kathy Hochul is standing up to Donald Trump,” a narrator insists in one video from the New York governor. Maine Democratic Gov. Janet Mills announced her Senate campaign against Collins with a video that highlighted Mills’ confrontation with Trump at the White House last year over transgender policies: “This election will be a simple choice,” Mills declared. “Is Maine going to bow down or stand up?” In California, Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell launched his gubernatorial campaign with a video that touted his role in Trump’s first-term impeachment. “Californians will never bend the knee,” Swalwell declares over images of him speaking at an anti-Trump “No Kings” rally.
Trump’s decline has created much more complicated choices for blue-state Republicans. Generally, the fear of a thunderbolt on social media from Trump has dissuaded them from openly breaking with him, and the hope of mobilizing the working-class voters who vote less frequently but flock to the polls for him has encouraged them to emphasize some of the same sharp-edged cultural issues. But those same issues, DuHaime notes, risk alienating centrist independent voters — particularly against the backdrop of Trump’s aggressive second-term actions at home and abroad.
“Republicans face the conundrum that in order to change the equation in a blue state we need to get these Trump voters to come out,” DuHaime said, but the same issues that energize those voters “push away the independents — who are definitely voting.”
In 2025, this dilemma stumped the GOP gubernatorial candidates in New Jersey and Virginia, two blue states where Trump recorded big gains just the year before. Neither Jack Ciattarelli in New Jersey nor Winson Earle-Sears would criticize Trump even when he took actions that unequivocally hurt their states (suspending funding for a major New York-New Jersey transit tunnel, for instance, or launching the Department of Government Efficiency process that upended life for so many federal workers in Virginia.).
Instead, they argued that their states would be better served by a Republican who would work with Trump rather than a Democrat whose first instinct would be to fight him. But those arguments proved little defense against the charge from Democrats Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey and Abigail Spanberger in Virginia that their Republican opponents would prioritize placating Trump over defending their state.
The result was that in both states, as DuHaime notes, the GOP faced the worst of both worlds. Even while hugging Trump so closely, neither Ciattarelli nor Earle-Sears generated a surge in blue-collar Trump voters. But their refusal to distance themselves from Trump made it easy for Democrats to bind them to him; in each state, a strong majority of voters disapproved of the president’s job performance, and over 90% of those disapprovers voted for the Democrats, according to the exit polls conducted for a consortium of media organizations, including CNN. Spanberger and Sherrill cruised to double-digit wins.
Across the blue-state landscape, Republican candidates are almost all making the same calculation, refusing to distance themselves from Trump and stressing their ability to work with him. In New York, for instance, Blakeman has stoutly defended ICE and blamed the Minneapolis shootings on actions by local Democratic officials rather than the federal government. (“When it comes to President Donald J. Trump, I will always have his back,” Blakeman has said.)
In California, Steve Hilton, the leading Republican gubernatorial candidate, has also defended Trump’s immigration enforcement policies. The closest thing to independence from Republican candidates has been the few, like New Hampshire Senate hopeful John Sununu, who have tried to talk about Trump as little as possible and insisted that their race will be decided by local issues. Even in “swing states like Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania — all of the Republicans are tying themselves to Trump as much as possible,” says Sam Newton, communications director for the Democratic Governors Association. “That’s going to be a huge problem for them.”
Polls are already quantifying the risk in that approach in states where a clear majority of voters disapprove of Trump’s job performance. In the recent University of New Hampshire polling, likely Democratic Senate nominee Chris Pappas was already drawing support in the state’s open seat race from about 90% of voters who disapprove of Trump. In New York, Siena’s polling has found that while a substantial slice of Trump disapprovers remain undecided, Blakeman is drawing just 7% of them against Hochul — and only 5% say they intend to vote Republican for the US House of Representatives.
Maine’s Collins was the only Republican Senate incumbent or challenger during the 2018 and 2020 elections — when Trump was last in the White House — to win more than 8% of voters who disapproved of him, according to the exit polls. In 2020, Collins captured a stunning 23% of them; the recent University of New Hampshire poll, while also showing that many Trump disapprovers there remain undecided, found her now drawing just 8% of them against Mills and 7% against Graham Platner, Mills’ rival for the nomination.
The quick collapse of Trump’s blue-state support has punctured the optimism of Republicans who thought his 2024 victory triggered a durable electoral realignment. But in our increasingly polarized political era, both parties have struggled to establish lasting footholds on the other side’s core terrain; the weakness of blue-state Republicans under Trump is a bookend to the losses red-state Democrats suffered under Biden and, to an even greater extent, President Barack Obama.
Until either side can find a formula that stably expands their geographic reach, control of the White House and Congress will remain on a knife’s edge, with each party tightening their grip on their sphere of influence, and a tiny handful of perennial swing states tipping the balance of power between them.
CNN’s Austin Culpepper contributed reporting.