The year 2025 can’t end soon enough for Republicans. Losing the Miami Mayor Race, another Georgia seat, and a closer-than-expected call in deeply red Tennessee has the party scrambling.
The party’s policies of 2025 are likely contributing to this crisis at the polls for the GOP.
Former County Commission Eileen Higgins crushed Trump’s hand-picked and heavily endorsed candidate, Emilio Gonzalez, for the Miami Mayor’s race, the first woman to win the city’s chief executive position, and the first Democrat in 30 years to prevail in that race. She ran on affordability and against the heavy-handed ICE raids.
“When I hear what the residents have to say about affordability, it’s real,” Higgins said. “They’re facing expensive rent, expensive property insurance, costs of all sorts of things, especially even now the things they’re buying in the stores due to the tariffs… I think every leader in America needs to think deeply about what they can do to help get the affordability crisis under control for the American people.”
Democrats, fresh from winning two Public Service Commission (PSC) seats, their first since 2000, also flipped a GOP State House seat in another red area. An olive oil shop owner won a special election for the Democrats in a seat that Trump carried by double-digits just last year.
Already, the party was reeling from November losses in Virginia, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Mississippi, not just New Jersey and New York City, where the President was personally invested. Republicans dismissed the results as being from “blue states,” but after December’s contests, that’s not the case, unless “most of America” is a blue state.
Only in 22 states does Trump have higher approval ratings than disapproval ratings, as the Midwest flips against him.
Trump, shortly after declaring himself “the affordability president,” now claims affordability is a hoax. Voters don’t seem to agree, as Trump has fallen to the lowest level of any president in November in their first year in office since the end of the Cold War.
Even Trump’s own supporters are calling out the cost of living problems in surveys.
As Erin Doherty reports in Politico, “Across parties, age groups, races, genders and income levels, Americans say the cost of living is the nation’s top problem, The POLITICO Poll finds, a sign that the economy will again overshadow other political topics in next year’s midterms.
The poll underscores just how pervasive the affordability crisis cuts across Americans’ everyday lives. A 45 percent plurality list grocery costs as the most challenging things to afford, followed by 38 percent who say housing costs and 34 percent who say health care. (Respondents could select multiple responses.) Forty-three percent of Americans — including 31 percent of Trump voters — say there is less economic opportunity in the U.S. now than there has been in the past.”
The reason why even Republicans recognize there’s a problem stemming from inflation-causing taxes on international trade, which are boosting prices. The One Big Beautiful Bill gave a big tax break to the top one percent of earners, while cutting the social safety net and adding $4 trillion to the budget deficits.
ICE raids have made businesses, families and friends very nervous.
Perhaps that’s why a number of Republicans (and Democrats) have begun to retire from the House of Representatives, seeing the writing on the wall. These range from Nebraska moderate Don Bacon to Georgia conservative Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Knowing that even those with double-digit district leads like Tennessee’s aren’t safe, expect more incumbents to leave.