Republicans, Do Not Get Distracted by the Rage

For the first time since 2004, Republicans won the national popular vote for the presidency. They also won the national popular vote for Congress. Though they have a tenuous hold on the House of Representatives, they have the United States Senate and look good, so far, on the path to holding the Senate in 2026.

Over the past seventy-two hours, the national press corps has made a very big deal about a town hall in the Seventh Congressional District of Georgia, where my good friend Rich McCormick is the Congressman. ABC News covered it on its broadcast. The Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other media outlets all did stories about the McCormick event and a few others, but mostly his. CBS News’s Face the Nation ran a story on it yesterday. Government-subsidized Politico uses McCormick’s event as a sign of real backlash.

The classic early signs of backlash are beginning to surface — a batch of worrisome polling, angry town hall scenes, protests — and congressional Republicans are beginning to get nervous.

Notice that Politico uses a video via a Reddit link that originates from a left wing account. That, right there, is your tipoff that this is something more than just organic frustration.

Rich got ambushed by a very hostile crowd that lashed out at him over government cuts. It made headlines nationally and remained the top story at the Drudge Report for about forty-eight hours. It came after weeks of Democrats urging activists to stand up, take action, and fight. The town hall began percolating in progressive group chats. The crowd of angry left-leaning voters swelled. The town hall was held in the northern Atlanta suburbs at the district’s south end, which is also where the bulk of Democrats in the district live.

However, many of the people who were at the town hall were not actually voters within the Seventh Congressional District, according to the Congressman’s staff and numerous others who attended the event that I have spoken to. The press has ignored that little detail. These were people who lived in the adjoining Democrat district and, notably, were people who had not voted for Trump in 2024.

The Seventh Congressional District is actually, according to the Cook Political Index, an R+11 district that Donald Trump won with 60% of the vote. McCormick, himself, outperformed Trump with 63% of the vote. The rage at the town hall is not reflective of Congressman McCormick’s district, but of the anger of a minority of the voters and the national press corps willingness to amplify that anger to scare Republicans.

I cannot emphasize this enough — it is not a coincidence that so many press outlets just happened to cover this particular town hall, held within about fifteen miles of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And it is not a coincidence that much of the press coverage left out how many of those who were there to complain were not even residents of that particular congressional district.

As my readers and listeners know, at the end of the 2024 Presidential campaign, I raised a lot of concerns from Republican strategists, some of whom were in the Trump campaign, that the Tony Hinchcliffe stand-up about Puerto Rico was affecting Trump. The media, too, seized on that and amplified it with outraged Puerto Rican voters in swing districts and strategists.

We were all wrong. Trump won the Puerto Rican vote and many of those swing districts. He also won Springfield, OH, for the first time, despite all the negative press coverage about his comments there.

The media generated narrative of voter outrage against Trump was not accurate, but had been so amplified by organized progressives and the press that many Republicans themselves began to believe it.

Right now, we are a few months removed from an election where Donald Trump won the popular vote. In most polling averages, Donald Trump has a slightly positive approval rating or an even split in views. And we all know that Americans hate Washington, D.C., and most Americans are okay watching the bureaucrats suffer.

This is not to say there are no problems on the horizon. If bird flu keeps spreading, Trump will own it, and voters, not the press, will tie it to CDC cuts. If other bad things happen, the voters will blame Trump.

For now, cutting the government is only a trigger for the left, which may hold the popular vote in the press covering these town halls, but if I were a Republican in Congress, I’d remember the data, not the press-amplified left-wing rage. The data shows the GOP is on solid footing with its actions. While there is some negative movement in the polls, most of those hits are being taken by Elon Musk, not Trump or the GOP. Likewise, while Trump is net-negative with Independents, he has consolidated the Republican base, and actually, the Democrats are not as opposed to him as they could be.

But most telling, from Harry Enten at CNN, is that the DOGE cuts are the number one issue for people who oppose Trump. At 24%, those who voted against Trump say those cuts are their biggest problem with Trump. But, and this is the big but, those are a minority of the voting public. So they are vocal and organized on that one issue but are not a majority of the electorate. Actually, Trump has transformed the electorate to his advantage.

The sound and fury of the loser left amplified by the press corps that sympathizes with them is a strategy of the left to induce Republican nervous nellies to surrender. The data itself does not bear out that surrender or retreat is necessary.

What will bear out surrender is if the DOGE cuts do not actually materialize. DOGE claims it is saving a lot of money. But in the sound and fury of what is happening, we have not seen Congress ratify those cuts in spending. What we are getting is pauses in spending, not rescissions in spending. That is where the rubber will meet the road and we see reality, not just the present entertaining spectacle.