Morning Joe paints 'nightmare' midterm scenario for GOP: 'They’re walking over the cliff!'
In the wake of the stunning election upset in Texas where a Democrat flipped a red district for the first time in nearly 50 years, MS NOW’s Joe Scarborough warned Republicans that they were in for a “nightmare” midterm election that could see the GOP lose control of both chambers of Congress.
On Saturday, Democratic candidate Taylor Rehmet flipped a Texas Senate seat in and around Fort Worth by 14 points. It was a district that President Donald Trump had carried in 2024 by 17 points and that had been held by a Republican since 1978.
The reason for the upset, Scarborough theorized, was the ongoing “nightmare” of the Trump administration that Republicans have largely supported.
“We're not talking about a sliver of the richest Dallas' northern suburbs, we're talking about Fort Worth, Texas switching like that!” Scarborough said. “This is just, for Republicans, a nightmare, and they're not doing anything about it. They are walking over the cliff!”
“Sleepwalking over it, actually,” added journalist Jonathan Martin, who appeared on “Morning Joe” Monday alongside Scarborough.
Martin had warned three weeks earlier that the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement operations were “motivating the left and alienating the center,” and that after the Border Patrol killing of Alex Pretti last month, moderate Republicans and Hispanic voters were more motivated than ever to vote against GOP candidates, something, he predicted, could very well result in an election blowout for Democrats this fall.
“This district is the perfect confluence of what the Republicans' challenge is: it's a district made up of a lot of Republican suburbanites, and a lot of Hispanic voters. They're basically Republicans!” Martin said.
“There's a lot of districts around America that are very similar to this in the U.S. House; significant populations of Hispanic or Asian voters and a lot of suburbanites who are in the political center. If you can't win those demographics, you're not keeping the House this fall.”