What a brutal, exhausting day this has been news-wise.  It’s a good thing my mom taught us that “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” because I had probably looked for good news over a dozen times today, with no luck.  You know it’s bad when even the Hopium guy doesn’t have much that’s positive.  Finally I found something!

The Poll that Should Freak Out Every Republican Running Office

Trump’s support among Latinos starts to crumble and that’s bad news for the GOP in ’26 and beyond

by Dan Pfeiffer

Donald Trump is obsessed with his poll numbers. Not the real numbers — that truth would be too brutal for his brittle ego — but a series of imagined ones. In an interview with CNBC this week, Trump showed just how detached he is from the reality of his polls. Despite being pressed by anchor Joe Kernen, an ally, Trump continued to assert that his poll numbers were the “best he ever had” (not true) and that there were polls showing his approval rating at “71%” (utterly ridiculous). If your 79-year-old relative said things this delusional, you’d call a family meeting.

The truth is that Trump’s poll numbers are historically bad. The only president with a worse approval rating at this point in their term is… Donald Trump in 2017. His numbers have fallen significantly since the beginning of his term.

These numbers should be concerning for Republicans running for reelection next year. Presidential approval is historically correlated with their party’s success in the midterms. However, a new poll from Equis Research on Latino voters should scare the living daylights out of Republicans — including, and especially, Donald Trump — because it portends real problems in the midterms.

A Crucial Voting Bloc

For Democrats, one of the most shocking and confounding aspects of the Trump era is his significant gains with Latinos over the last eight years. According to Catalist, a Democratic data firm, Trump gained 16 points with Latinos from 2016 to 2024 — a massive shift that fueled his victory and Republican claims of a permanent electoral majority.

Much of the panic from Democratic strategists after the election centered on this shift. Latinos are the fastest-growing population in America. If Republicans continue to make gains with Latinos while holding their overwhelming margins with working-class white voters, Democrats could be locked out of power. It’s simple math.

In the near term, Republicans need Trump-level Latino support to hold onto the House.

However, according to the Equis Research poll, Latino voters are already starting to sour on Trump and the GOP, just seven months into his term.

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As an aside, I would like to say that it’s so frustrating that Latino voters are talked about as if they are a single voting bloc, all the same, when they clearly are not.

On the non-political TV front, I am liking Ballard so much that I am sad that I’m already on episode 9 out of 10.  The only thing that could make it better is more Bosch.

On the food front, I am making do without my oven or cooktop.  I made an excellent stir fry on my new electric skillet.  Haven’t figured out how to cook my corn on the cob yet – any ideas?  I have never made it in the microwave but if it’s a decent way to cook it, please share instructions.   I wanted to make mac and cheese today – I needed comfort food! – and I had it all figured out except I didn’t have a way to boil the noodles.

Today I made my favorite, egg custard, in my countertop oven.   It was much better than when I tried it over the weekend and forgot to turn off the convection feature.  Pretty sure that egg custard is probably close to the top of the list of foods that do not benefit from hot air blowing over them.

Tomorrow I’ll make broccoli quiche – a friend loaned me her little plug-in induction thingie so I can sauté the green onions and the garlic, and everything else I can do in my countertop oven.

Open thread.