"I think the Republicans are in much better shape than what a lot of these media polls are showing, and look, we still got a long way to go between now and Election Day," pollster Jim McLaughlin said.
Page A17From§Eachthe sunrise edition — 31 August 2026
Republicans trail in eight Senate races as Marjorie Taylor Greene warns party is now 'Trump's new MAGA' brand.
As it ran on the front
Read the polling and the quote together. Eight battleground Senate seats, and by the aggregate, Republicans are behind in every one of them, two months out. That same week, a sitting Republican congresswoman goes on record saying the party as it currently operates — Loomer's rhetoric setting the tone — is not the party she signed up for, it's 'Trump's new MAGA and Republican Party,' her words, like it's a separate entity that took over the old one's furniture.
That's not an outside critic. That's not an op-ed writer with a grudge. That's a member of the conference, in the room, naming the shift out loud while the same conference is measurably losing ground in the places that decide who holds the Senate. Usually when a ship is taking on water, the crew doesn't stand on deck describing, on the record, which compartment flooded first and whose fault it was. They usually wait until after the vote.…
…(cont) Here's the stakes part. Whoever wins those eight seats decides who confirms judges, who funds or defuses the next shutdown fight, who sits on the committees deciding whether your kid's school lunch program or your parents' Medicare rate gets the next round of cuts. That's not abstract. That's the actual furniture in the room Greene is describing as rearranged. And the polling says the public, watching the same rearranging she's describing, is not currently inclined to hand that furniture back.
You don't have to take a position on who's right about Loomer to notice the arithmetic: a party trailing in eight competitive races is, at the same moment, arguing in public about what it even is anymore. Usually that's the kind of infighting a party works out quietly, in a room, months before anyone's watching. This time it's happening on the record, in an election year, with the scoreboard already up. That's not a prediction about November. That's just where the two receipts sit, next to each other, this week.
“A sitting congresswoman says her own party got taken over, on the record, the same week the polling shows them losing eight Senate seats. When the crew starts narrating the leak out loud, the ship's already listing.”
“Congresswoman Greene's comments reflect healthy internal debate within a big-tent party, not a crisis — a big-tent party that's currently trailing in eight competitive races, which, fine, is a data point, but not a crisis.”
The receipts
Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) on Sunday slammed right-wing influencer Laura Loomer's remarks posted on social media, condemning them as President Trump's "new MAGA and Republican Party." Greene reacted to an inflammatory post…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.