Bush approached the November midterms with an approval rating of 37 percent, a restless electorate and a party increasingly anxious about the political consequences of his presidency. Today, Donald Trump finds himself in similar territory. With his approval rating hovering in the 30s and Democrats enjoying a substantial advantage in national congressional polling, the president who returned to Washington promising to remake American politics is confronting a distinctly old-fashioned problem: an electorate that may be growing tired of the man it elected.
Bush would discover the consequences on Election Day, when Republicans lost control of both chambers of Congress. Will history repeat itself with Trump in seven days? The irony is difficult to ignore: Trump built much of his political identity around repudiating the Republican establishment that Bush once embodied, only to find himself confronting the very same electoral nightmare.
Yet history has a peculiar sense of humor. And, let's be honest, the American electorate has an even shorter memory. In October 2006, a USA Today/Gallup poll placed Bush's approval rating at 37 percent, with 58 percent disapproving of his performance.
A /Ipsos survey conducted October 22 to 26, 2026 puts Trump's approval at 32 percent, with 66 percent disapproving. Although we're talking about different pollsters, electorates and, of course, political eras, the similarities are there. The congressional picture is hardly more reassuring for Republicans: the /Ipsos survey found Democrats leading Republicans 53 to 44 percent among likely voters on the generic congressional ballot.
And more revealing still is what Americans believe that they are voting for. An NPR/PBS News/Marist poll published October 27 found that 44 percent of likely voters described their congressional choice primarily as a vote against Trump. Just 21 percent characterized theirs primarily as a vote in his favor.
This is the peculiar cruelty of midterm elections: a president can spend years persuading Americans to elect him, only to discover that his name has become the most consequential one on a ballot on which it does not even appear. Bush can tell you all about that devastating discovery. It would be too convenient to treat the comparison as proof that Trump has become the very Republican that he once promised to replace.
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