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A veto-proof majority? Not gonna happen in any realistic scenario. I doubt Trump's approval rating will drop below the high 30s for any sustained period of time, he just has that much of a lock on the Republican base. Trump has also invested quite heavily in purifying the party from all critics. He's been much more focused on that than any durable policy goals. With all that in mind, Republican legislators (beyond a few dissidents) will not broadly from Dear Leader.
Would you take even odds against Trump's approval rating falling below 37% for at least 30 consecutive days before the midterm elections according to yougov's data?
Looking at Trump's first term approval ratings, the 37% mark is close to where I'd put the 50-50 at. But 1) I make a habit of not betting on prediction markets unless I have a decent alpha, and 2) Trump is one or two standard deviations more buffoonish this term than he was in his first term, which needs to be factored in. I could probably barely be persuaded to make an even-money bet at 35%, and I'd feel genuinely good if I could make the bet at 33%.
I probably put the 50/50 around 35% rather than 37%, but it does seem like we're actually pretty close in our assessment of how things are likely to go in terms of approval rating.
That said, the actual number to watch is "how many reps can go against Trump without being voted out". If Trump's approval rating drops to 35% or 37%, that indicates that his enthusiastic approval rating is probably a fair bit lower, which means that at least some republican reps will be in districts where less than half of the republican voters are enthusiastic Trump supporters. I pulled down 10 representatives at random from the House website and then did a vibe check of how Trump-aligned they were and whether they could/would oppose him if he got unpopular.
So if Trump became deeply unpopular (and a 35% approval rating is pretty deeply unpopular, even end-of-term Biden only dropped to 38%), I think at least 3 and maybe 4 of these 10 reps would oppose Trump if he was pushing to do something deeply stupid and unpopular. With 218 democrats and 223 republicans in the house, you'd need about a third of republicans to flip... and it looks like about a third of republicans could flip if there was a compelling enough reason (and "compelling enough" is quite a bit short of "literally Hitler").
I'd personally do my napkin math from the Cook PVI instead.
I'd break Republican Reps into the following buckets
So I see what you're saying as fairly unlikely. Trump would have to do something truly cataclysmic to get a third of Republican Reps to fear losing re-election more than Trump coming after them with a primary challenge. The 2022 midterms showed Trump would gladly prioritize eliminating "traitors" over actually having Republicans win. Purifying the party is something Trump has always shown very consistent determination in doing, far above any actual policy goals.
Cook PVI seems useful from a contestedness-of-district perspective. I do think Trump-alignment-of-winning-rep matters too, especially in cases like Sheri Biggs, who won in SC-3 over her Trump-endorsed opponent Mark Burns. SC-3 isn't contested at all (72% R), and so your analysis would put her as "low susceptibility to breaking from Trump".
Keep in mind that Trump would have to do something pretty bad to get his approval ratings all the way down in the 35% range. For reference, his approval rating is currently sitting at 45% (and within-Republican-party approval rating sitting at 90%). So I agree that as things stand now, representatives mostly can't oppose him.
But the question is what happens when 25-30% of his own party disapproves of what he's doing. Once we're conditioning on him doing something bad enough that his loyal base stops being so loyal, I think the set of safe actions for house representatives changes too.
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Probably true, but even a 55-45 margin in Presidential elections implies a landslide. Bush/Dukakis was 53/46.
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