New Poll Spells Doom for the GOP With Key ‘Double Hater’ Voters

“I’m confused,” said oft-confused manosphere influencer Joe Rogan on his podcast yesterday. “I can’t believe we went to this war. When we started bombing Iran, I was like, ‘This can’t be true.'” His guest, Theo Von, another manosphere influencer who has interviewed Trump, practically echoed a Splinter column in response to Rogan saying that the U.S. is “trying to stop the terrorists.” Von retorted “That’s crazy though. You’re the fucking terrorists! You know what I’m saying? Like, if you wanna stop them, fucking stand in front of the fucking mirror and start there.”

In related news, a new CNN poll came out today revealing that “double haters,” the roughly quarter of the public who holds negative views of both parties, prefer the Democrats in the upcoming midterms by a whopping 31 points. Data scientist G. Elliott Morris said, “this might be the largest party lead I’ve ever seen among the double haters.” Rogan and Von both have established themselves as conservatives in the zeitgeist, but not in the way that a snake like Tucker Carlson has. Carlson is a pretty classic right-wing media figure consumed by political junkies, while Von and Rogan are basically right-wing media for low information voters, and that is where you will find many double haters.

The phrase “low information” can seem like a slight, but it is a descriptive term about one’s media diet and not about one’s ability to gain knowledge. Practically everyone reading this is in a minority of routine political news consumption, and understanding that we are outliers to a degree is a great way to not go insane in a country that largely doesn’t want to pay attention to the news. It’s understandable in part these days because it’s bleak as hell out here, and a lot of people’s lives getting ground up in the gears of capitalism each day are difficult enough already. As Theo Von said to an unsympathetic Rogan who crassly suggested he go on antidepressants, “all of our fucking money goes to Israel and they’re using it to fucking genocide people.”

These are the kinds of voters that Democrats can ride to a shocking majority in Congress next year.

I don’t want to hold up Von as some avatar of what a double hater voter looks like, or do what many in media are doing and praise him for doing the bare minimum after it’s too late, but I do think he is representative of a significant part of the electorate right now. He campaigned for Trump in 2024, and his shallow so-called comedy show was one of the reasons Trump is president. It would be nice if these discount Daily Wire podcasters would own up to the hellish reality that they helped create which they now get hailed for critiquing, but mankind has been waiting for comedians to own up to their bullshit for centuries, so I guess the trend will continue ad infinitum.

What I think is important to take from the manosphere influencers slowly turning on Trump is that it is a real-world marker of dynamics that are showing up in polling. To use journalistic parlance, it’s a second source confirming the first source’s account–a reportable story. MAGA Republicans will never ever leave dear leader and poll after poll after poll shows how Trump can literally do anything and they will support it, but ever since one year ago on liberation day, Trump has been shedding support from non-MAGA Republicans. You can see these trends everywhere.

Something interesting is happening here. This is *just Republicans* souring on the economy.

civiqs.com/results/econ…

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— Daniel Donner (@donnermaps.bsky.social) April 3, 2026 at 9:56 AM

As CNN notes, “voters who had unfavorable views of both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton proved decisive in the 2016 election and broke in Trump’s favor again in 2024.” CNN exit polls showed double hater voters breaking hard for the GOP in 2022 too. Now that constituency is plus thirty freaking one for the Democrats. That’s a 48-point swing from 2022. The kind of swing that can make a once impenetrable lead in the Senate with a friendly GOP map suddenly look vulnerable in red states like Alaska and possibly even James Talarico’s Texas.

The Downballot has an excellent free tracker for special elections, and they are comparing the margins to the 2024 and 2020 presidential races in those same districts. As of right now, Democrats have run 12.8% ahead of their 2024 presidential margins, and 8.5% ahead of 2020 throughout the special election cycle in 2025 and 2026. Special elections have swung from a Republican home game to a Democrat one in the age of Trump, so that caveat applies, but not anywhere near enough to offset these huge gains in a lot of red districts. Democrats even recently flipped Trump’s home district in Florida.

This is real. There’s evidence for a serious anti-Trump shift in special elections, Republican polling, low information voter polling and the mega popular podcasters they listen to. The doomers can talk all they want about how the GOP is trying to do baby’s first fascism–and they are–but this is the most incompetent fascism the world has ever seen. So incompetent that Theo Von now looks right at home in a rabidly anti-Trump Democratic base turning on Democratic leadership and Israel.

The only way that Republicans won’t lose the House in November is through some extreme act of cheating or an act of God turning around the worst poll numbers at this point for any president in history. GOP Senator Mike Lee said “if the SAVE Act does not pass, Republicans will lose power — likely for a long time” as a threat to try to get Republicans to pass their voter disenfranchisement act, and Trump has echoed this sentiment too. It’s likely too late to try to win a semi-fair fight and the GOP knows it (one thing I think they could do to try to change the equation is force a Supreme Court justice out and give their voters something tangible to get off their couches and vote for).

CNN’s poll has Democrats with a generic +6 advantage, and in a typical midterm environment where ICE isn’t throwing out ballots in Democratic neighborhoods, I think comparisons of 2026 to 2006 are now warranted that Trump has guaranteed a spate of oil-induced inflation for an indeterminate amount of time. That election was D+8 at the ballot box, and it resulted in a net gain of five Senate seats and 31 House seats for the Democrats during a time that Americans were broadly dissatisfied with a criminally negligent and wildly corrupt Republican presidential administration waging an unpopular war in the Middle East as the economy began to show cracks in the foundation.

There’s good reason to think that Democrats could overshoot their projection and surprise to the upside, as CNN’s poll revealed that 67% of Democratic and Dem-leaning registered voters are “extremely motivated to vote in 2026,” versus just 50% of Republican and GOP-leaning registered voters. Add the D+31 double haters to this mix and there just is no current path to the GOP retaining the thinnest House majority in a century. House Majority Leader Mike Johnson is nearly guaranteed to be a one-hit wonder relegated to the dustbin of American history’s most ineffectual House leaders. The math is so bad for the GOP that this column is not going to end at the House, because the Senate has become worth talking about. 

This Senate cycle was never supposed to be winnable for Democrats in any real sense, as Cook Political rates 16 safe seats for the GOP out of 22 held seats with 31 not up for reelection, giving them 47 Senators in the next Senate before you look at any other races. First, Democrats must defend all of their 13 seats up for grabs, including two tossups in states that voted for Trump in 2024 (Georgia and Michigan), while winning the open primary in the slightly blue live free or die state of New Hampshire. Then, they have to win four Republican-held seats to command a majority of 51.

Maine is a must-win, as it increasingly looks like the Democrats will rely on a doofus with a Nazi tattoo to try to take down the mighty Susan Collins machine in another tossup election. North Carolina’s seat left open so Thom Tillis can charge exorbitant speaking fees pretending he didn’t completely support the Trump agenda is also a must-win, and there is more good news for Democrats as their candidate Roy Cooper is up a few points on the Republican in early polling there.

Before we even get to the hard part, Democrats must win races in three 2024 Trump states and two barely blue states just to keep them in the game. That gets them to 49, which means that four very red states rated as lean Republican and likely Republican hold the key to a Democratic majority in both chambers of Congress. Democrats’ best chances currently lie in Alaska and Ohio, the latter of which will see former Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown mount a serious challenge to replace Vice President Phony McFuckface in the seat Vance vacated to a Republican to become dear leader’s footstool. The next two likeliest pickups are in Iowa and Texas. That’s it. Get all four and the GOP is at their baseline of 47 Senators. Democrats must run the table in a GOP home game, then win two more very difficult road games to win the Senate. But it’s possible.

I am already on record believing that James Talarico has real political talent, and you never know what could happen to succeed a retiring Republican in a “recession economy” whose best explanation for her vote on the unpopular GOP murder bill was “well, we are all going to die.” I also think that Dan Osborn presents a unique wildcard in Nebraska after his impressive showing as an Independent in the last Senate race, and the farm economy being annihilated by Trump’s tariffs and his wildly unpopular war in Iran further broadens the Overton Window of how bad this could get for the GOP given how many farm states are currently rated as safe by pollsters (Idaho, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Wyoming). There is a lot of time between now and November and even more in Trump time, but it’s clear that the current math simply does not add up to a GOP House majority. The math is so bad the prediction markets that in-the-know Republicans are using to insider trade on Trump’s war crimes are currently betting that Democrats will win both the House and Senate.