Top Conservative Pollster Says Trump Abandoning MAGA, Setting Up the GOP to be “Crushed”

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Respected conservative pollster Richard Baris, known for his accurate reads on voter sentiment and one of the few who correctly forecasted Trump’s wins in both 2016 and 2020 when most others failed, has issued a stark “5-alarm” warning to President Trump and the MAGA movement. In analysis following the recent off-year elections in Virginia and New Jersey, Baris uncovered a troubling trend: significant drop-off among Republican voters who simply stayed home. While losses in deep-blue states were expected, the sheer scale of GOP abstention points to deeper MAGA discontent that could spell serious trouble for the 2026 midterms.

Baris, director of Big Data Poll and a regular on Steve Bannon’s War Room, stresses that traditional kitchen-table issues like the economy, immigration, and crime, are not what’s killing enthusiasm right now. Instead, his post-election surveying in New Jersey and Virginia revealed two standout grievances: Trump’s perceived sidelining of domestic priorities in favor of foreign entanglements (particularly, the administration’s focus on Israel) and his gross mishandling of the Epstein files release. The recent government shutdown ranked a very distant third.

Trump’s initial dismissal of Epstein questions as a “Dem hoax” landed poorly with a base that sees elite accountability and the Deep State as core reasons they voted for him. As Baris noted on X while quoting his earlier warnings: “Five months after our early warning poll, it’s becoming mainstream knowledge the mishandling of the #EpsteinFiles played a bigger role in the decline of Trump’s approval than some wanted to believe . . . I tried, CK. I did.”

Baris’s reference to Charlie Kirk (“CK”) was an apparent reminder that he had warned Kirk and others in the Trump orbit months earlier that downplaying or bungling the Epstein release would demoralize key voter demographics.

In a separate appearance relayed by Trump administration alum Grace Chong, Baris told Bannon bluntly: GOP voters feel the administration “got sidelined with things they did not care about,” and the shutdown only compounded the malaise. “The right needs a wake-up call,” he said. “They need to change this fast or they are going to get crushed.”

These frustrations are now showing up in broader polling, with Trump’s approval ratings softening amid nonstop attacks from Democrats, the media, and even 2028 hopefuls inside the party. Many in the base remain furious over the continued lack of accountability for Deep State figures despite repeated promises to drain the swamp.

The clear message is: don’t panic yet, but act immediately. There is still time to course-correct before the midterms, but pretending Democrats are too extreme to stage a comeback ignores recent history like New York City’s extreme leftward lurch. Baris’s track record makes his alarm impossible to dismiss as establishment spin, especially since he’s one of the only pollsters praised by Trump for his accuracy.

The path forward, according to Baris and other pro-MAGA analysts, is straightforward: refocus relentlessly on what actually animates the base: crushing inflation and economic pain, sealing the border, fighting crime in the streets, releasing the Epstein files unredacted, and delivering real prosecutions of the Deep State. If the President ignores this, the GOP will get crushed in 2026.