Mark Mitchell: Trump Is Throwing the Midterms

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Mark Mitchell came back on the show about nine months after his first appearance, and a lot has changed. Last time he was still inside Rasmussen, the independent voice they couldn't quite silence. Now he's been fired for criticizing Trump publicly, he's launched The Honest Poll on his own dime, and the midterm picture he's been warning about for over a year is exactly as ugly as he said it would be.

When Mitchell sat down with Trump in November and told him to his face that he was going to lose the House unless he delivered on economic populism and visible government reform, Trump spent fifteen minutes of that forty-five-minute meeting talking about Lindsey Graham. That's the whole story, right there.

I came into this conversation as an economic populist nationalist who voted for the mandate and still wants it delivered. What we got instead was Iran, meme coins, antitrust corruption, and donor appeasement. Mitchell's polling quantifies what I've been watching in real time.

By the time we got to the end of the conversation, we were both back at the same place I always land: the root of all of this is the money. If you don't fix the money, you can't fix any of the rest of it. No political coalition holds together long enough when the fiat printer enables infinite crony spending, infinite war, and infinite betrayal of the people who put you in office.

Key takeaways

• Trump built the biggest GOP coalition in modern history and is burning it through donor capture, a war nobody wanted, and messaging that lands as gaslighting. Mitchell's Honest Poll has the generic ballot at Democrat +4 on the low end, with pollsters like Rich Barris and Emerson tracking closer to Democrat +10 or +11. Betting markets put a Democratic House pickup at around 85%.
• The mandate was economic populism and austerity. What the country got was Iran. The July Treasury statement tells the story: $334 billion in receipts against $766.3 billion in outlays, a $432.3 billion single-month deficit. National debt approaching $40 trillion, with trailing-twelve-month interest expense surpassing both healthcare and defense spending. "Golden age" messaging into those numbers is gaslighting, and voters feel it.
• The antitrust scandal is the most underreported story in the Trump administration. Mitchell's account of what allegedly happened to DOJ antitrust chief Gail Slater, and the Live Nation case she was building, is a textbook example of a lobbyist retainer killing a consumer-popular case against a monopoly. It would have been universally popular. Instead, by Mitchell's telling, it got killed.
• Under-40 voters, including Trump voters, are polling in favor of nationalizing major industries and taxing excess wealth. Three in four under-40 Trump voters support nationalizing major industries, by Mitchell's data. Nearly 60% support excess wealth confiscation. Pounding the chest about Reaganomics and trickle-down into this electorate is a losing message, full stop.
• Ballot harvesting and election irregularities are no longer fringe concerns. They're accepted operational reality. What was taboo to say in 2020 is now just how the game is played, and Mitchell walks through the Michigan primary as the clearest recent example.
• The root cause is the money. Every betrayal, every crony contract, every forever war, every donor capture, all of it is downstream of a monetary system that lets governments issue unlimited debt with no real consequence. Bitcoin is the Hayekian exit. It's the only fix that doesn't require winning a political fight you can't win.

How Mark Mitchell Lost His Rasmussen Job for Telling the Truth

The George Gallup theory of polling is simple and noble: the country is too big and too diverse for elected representatives to actually represent the people, so you need someone to measure what the people think and tell the people in Washington that they're screwing up. Mitchell bought into that mission completely. The problem is the polling industry has been almost entirely co-opted, either by left-wing media conglomerates, by academia, by dark money NGOs, or, on the right, by outfits whose paychecks depend on keeping Trump-aligned donors happy.

That's what happened at Rasmussen. Mitchell describes a polling conglomerate with its foot deep in the PAC business on the right. If you want a check from a Trump-friendly donor or anyone affiliated with the RNC, you cannot publicly criticize Trump. It hurts the business. Mitchell was told exactly that.

He was silenced for a few months while he built The Honest Poll on the side. Then he got out.

When he was ready to launch, he went back on Twitter, Carolyn Levitt said something he disagreed with, he criticized Trump publicly, and Rasmussen fired him for it. One of the biggest names in independent polling, gone, because the money mattered more than the mission.

The Honest Poll is his answer to that. Subscription-funded, no corporate or political clients, no paycheck to misrepresent the numbers. Monthly tracking polls, heavy on sentiment work that most pollsters won't touch because they don't actually care what the public thinks. They only care if someone's paying them to shape it.

The Mandate Squandered: What the Numbers Actually Show

Mitchell's polling is not a comfortable read if you wanted to believe the Trump administration was delivering.

The generic ballot sits at Democrat +4 on the optimistic end, per Mitchell's most recent measurement around July 4th. He thinks it should have been closer to +6 even then. Barris and Emerson are tracking Democrat +10 or +11. That's the range. Betting markets are sitting at roughly 85% probability of a Democratic House pickup.

The historical comparison that keeps coming up is 2006: second-term Republican president mired in an unpopular war, opposition with a structural polling lead, turnout collapse in special elections on the incumbent's side.

The gut punch in Mitchell's data is the promise-keeping question. Only 33% of Americans say Trump has kept his promises more than recent presidents. Fifty percent say less. One in three. A mandate is being measured against its own terms and coming up short.

The numbers on the economy are just as grim. Only 35% of Americans say today's children will be better off than their parents. Over 70% think politicians are profiting off their positions. More than 80% think big tech needs to be reined in. Consumer confidence is near decade lows even when the administration is pointing to the Dow.

I've been watching the Treasury data in parallel. July's statement had $334 billion in receipts against $766.3 billion in outlays, a $432.3 billion deficit for one month. The national debt is approaching $40 trillion.

On a trailing twelve-month basis, interest expense on the debt has crossed above both healthcare and defense spending. That's the empirical reality underneath the golden-age messaging. Voters feel it even when they can't cite the specific numbers.

Republican turnout in special elections is running well below presidential-cycle levels. Democrats are near 70-80% of their 2024 turnout. The best-case scenario Mitchell can construct for Republicans is that redistricting has entrenched enough seats to limit losses and squeak out a narrow majority. The worst case is a 30-seat swing, and he doesn't think the conditions for the best case are materializing.

The Antitrust Corruption Story Nobody Is Covering

I want to be direct: I hadn't heard this story before Mitchell told it on tape. My reaction was immediate.

Gail Slater came into the DOJ antitrust role with a mandate to actually use it. Mitchell knows her personally and describes her as someone who genuinely put the American people first. She started going after real monopolies. One of those cases targeted Live Nation and Ticketmaster: the reason you pay $200 for a concert ticket is because there's a monopoly in the room, and breaking it up would have been universally popular. Democrats hate it. Republicans hate it. Everybody pays Ticketmaster fees. It was a layup.

According to Mitchell, Mike Davis was allegedly hired as a lobbyist for Live Nation at a $300,000-a-month retainer and a $1 million success fee. Slater was fired. Mitchell says her office was raided by law enforcement inside the DOJ.

He also describes a separate Hewlett-Packard acquisition case that got overturned after Kellyanne Conway allegedly took a seven-figure check. He says there's video documentation already on YouTube, and he expects these stories to come out in formal Democrat oversight proceedings by September.

These are Mitchell's allegations, attributed to him. I'm not going to soften my reaction to them, because my reaction was visceral and immediate and on tape: it's objectively the same guy with the monocle in the smoke-filled room from the political cartoons of 1905. It's the exact kind of donor capture that cost Republicans the coalition they had.

You had a chance to be the party that broke up Ticketmaster and handed every concert-goer in America a visible win. Instead, a lobbyist got paid and the case got killed.

That's the Trump administration in miniature. And the meme coin launch on inauguration night is the same story in crypto: you had a mandate to clean things up, and out of the gate you're launching a meme coin. What the fuck is going on? It's objectively corrupt, and pretending otherwise is just cope.

The Economy Voters Actually Want

This is where Mitchell's polling gets genuinely interesting, because it upends a lot of what the Republican donor class wants to hear.

Under-40 voters are not ideological in the way the party wants them to be. They don't care about Reaganomics. They don't respond to chest-pounding about capitalism and conservatism because they've watched capitalism, at least the version they've been handed, fail them. Sixty-five to sixty-seven percent of under-40 voters say the economy is unfair to young people.

Three in four under-40 Trump voters support nationalizing major industries. Nearly 60% of under-40 Trump voters support excess wealth confiscation. These are not fringe numbers. They're landslides.

Mitchell's framing is Teddy Roosevelt: a Square Deal, not socialism. The monopoly structure and the bailout culture have made it so markets don't actually function for most people. The American people lived through the '50s and '60s, when a janitor with a high school diploma could own a house, raise five kids on one income, and retire in the same town. That wasn't magic. That was a system with high marginal tax rates on the wealthy, strong labor protections, and antitrust enforcement that kept concentrations of power from eating everything.

I pushed back on the framing a little, because I think the deeper issue is that what we're describing isn't capitalism. A doctor who comes to your house and you pay him cash, that's capitalism. A private equity-backed roll-up of urgent care chains you can't afford is corporate fascism. And that's not a slur I'm throwing around loosely: Mussolini's own definition of fascism was the tight combination of corporate and state power.

I'm not calling Trump a fascist. I think that meme is lazy. But I do think the system has embedded itself so deeply that we keep calling corporate socialism "capitalism" and then wondering why capitalism has a bad name with young people.

A meme circulating on X has been making the rounds recently, comparing 1950s minimum-wage purchasing power priced in gold to what a middle-class American earns today. Mitchell didn't need the meme. He's seen the same reality in his data for years. The people he's polling grew up watching the same thing play out in their communities.

Why It All Comes Back to the Money

This is where I have to be direct, because this is the part of the conversation that matters most to me.

I am an economic populist nationalist. I voted for the mandate. I welcomed austerity and still do. And I've watched everything Mitchell described, the donor capture, the crony contracts, the meme coin, the antitrust corruption, the Iran war, all of it, and I've come to the same conclusion I always come back to: you cannot fix any of these problems through the political process alone, because the political process runs on fiat money.

Every favoritism problem Mitchell described is enabled by the same thing: the ability to issue debt without consequence, because the Federal Reserve will always be there to monetize it. There is no real opportunity cost. There is no real accountability.

The printer exists, so the cronyism can persist indefinitely. You cannot build a coalition strong enough to hold against that, because the money can always be used to buy off the margins, fund the opposition research, and outlast the reformers.

Hayek described it in the '80s: the sly roundabout way to take monetary control away from governments. You can't win a direct political fight against the fiat machine. The institutions are too captured, the incentives too entrenched, and the money too available. But you can build a parallel system that removes the ability to print in the first place.

That's Bitcoin. That's the whole thesis. Fix the money, fix the world is a diagnosis. Every problem Mitchell and I talked about for two hours, the crony oligarchy, the forever wars, the donor capture, the wage stagnation, the housing unaffordability, all of it is downstream of a monetary system that lets the people in power run infinite deficits with no real reckoning until the system itself breaks.

Mitchell added the Fourth Turning frame: we're in a systemic failure of integrity. The institutions built on post-WWII ideals mean nothing to younger generations who never experienced them as functional. What the young people want, across party lines, is fairness, accountability, and a system that works for them.

That's intuitive, not ideological, and it's exactly what sound money would produce if you let it run long enough.

The political path forward is uncertain. JD Vance is the only true populist Mitchell sees in the field, but he's attached to Trump's diminishing coattails and hated by the establishment Republicans who understand exactly what he'd do to their business model. A youth coalition large enough to be a Ross Perot-scale spoiler is possible. Tucker's ten-points piece was the kind of olive-branch move that could start building real cross-ideological common ground.

But honestly, when I sit on my back porch and look at all of this, the thing that makes me least despairing is Bitcoin. It's the one structural change that doesn't require winning a political fight against an opponent with an infinite printing press. That's the exit. That's the whitepill.

And in the meantime, I keep coming back to what I said at the end of the conversation: it makes you want to focus on local politics. Get down to the county, city, and state level. That's where you can actually move things. That's where accountability is still legible.

About Mark Mitchell

Mark Mitchell is the founder of The Honest Poll, an independent polling firm he launched after departing Rasmussen Reports, where he had been one of the most prominent voices in conservative-leaning political polling. His work focuses on representing actual public sentiment without the influence of corporate or political clients. He publishes on Substack and on Twitter/X at @honestpollster. Mitchell has spoken directly with Donald Trump about midterm strategy and has been an outspoken critic of polling methodology that serves donor interests rather than accurate public measurement.

Sources mentioned

• The Honest Poll (thehonestpoll.com): Mitchell's independent polling firm and Substack, source for all polling figures attributed to him in this episode
• U.S. Household Debt Falls for First Time Since COVID as Subprime Cracks Spread (TFTC): the consumer balance sheet context underneath the Mitchell polling on economic anxiety
• White House to Host Crypto Roundtable as SEC Cancels Reg Crypto Vote (TFTC): background on the crypto/meme coin policy environment Mitchell and Marty discussed
• U.S. Treasury Monthly Statement (treasury.gov): source for the $334B receipts, $766.3B outlays, and $432.3B deficit figures Marty cites from the July statement

Watch the conversation

Timestamps

• 0:07 - Bitcoin wins in a world of central banks gone nuts
• 1:30 - Why Mark Mitchell left Rasmussen Reports
• 5:06 - The Honest Poll: push polls, Iran, and pollster corruption
• 14:05 - Funding model and independence
• 19:31 - Generic ballot numbers and the 2006 comparison
• 25:39 - Sponsors
• 40:32 - Wages priced in gold and the 1950s economy
• 44:41 - Sponsors
• 50:42 - The Live Nation antitrust scandal
• 1:04:45 - Meme coins, corruption, and the mandate squandered
• 1:10:17 - Youth turnout, ballot harvesting, and what comes next

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