Fox News chief political analyst Brit Hume used the president’s favorite network on Wednesday, Sept. 30, 2026, to hand Republicans a bleak forecast, telling viewers of “Special Report” that his party has little working in its favor with the midterm elections barely a month away.
The grim read came after anchor Bret Baier walked through fresh polling from the network showing Democrat Abdul El-Sayed at 51 percent and Republican Mike Rogers at 48 percent among registered voters in Michigan’s U.S. Senate race; among likely voters, the split was 50 percent to 49 percent. Hume said the margin was “just too small” to declare that the contest had flipped.
Baier also highlighted another figure from the survey that should alarm the GOP: 7 in 10 Michigan voters said the cost of living will be extremely important to their Senate vote, with less than five weeks remaining before Election Day on Nov. 3.
A Warning From Inside the Network
Asked to assess the numbers, Hume did not try to soften them. “I would say that the Republicans don’t have much going for them this cycle,” he said, pointing to the polling, the affordability issue and the mood of the country.
Hume said he had trouble seeing the picture improving much before voters go to the polls, allowing that it could change a little and noting that conditions had turned around somewhat in the Strait of Hormuz. What should worry Republicans, he said, is that opinions appear to have solidified — and not in their favor.
Trump, 80, has continued to wave off affordability complaints even as his war on Iran squeezes drivers at the pump, a dynamic that runs directly into the issue Michigan voters told the network’s pollsters will weigh most heavily on their Senate vote.
Disapproval Hits a Second-Term High
Michigan is not the president’s only problem. Trump registered the highest disapproval rating of his second term, 61 percent, in an Angus Reid USA survey of 1,205 American adults taken between Sept. 19 and 25. Just 34 percent said they approve of his actions as president.
The breakdown is worse among the voters who typically decide close races. Seventy-two percent of independents said they disapprove of Trump’s performance, while his support remains heavily concentrated in his core MAGA base — a combination that leaves him exposed heading into the Nov. 3 elections.
El-Sayed Runs on the Affordability Crisis
El-Sayed, a Michigan-born epidemiologist who would be the Senate’s first Muslim member if elected, has built his campaign against the Trump-endorsed Rogers around the president’s economic record and a push for Medicare for All. Trump has incorrectly branded the Democrat a communist and attacked his policy platform.
El-Sayed has argued that the name-calling pulls attention away from the cost-of-living squeeze facing voters, especially the price of gas, which he ties to the president’s war against Iran. “People are paying nearly $5 in gas because of a war he started,” El-Sayed told CNN in August, adding that the president is more focused on him than on an affordability crisis he described as generational.
Rogers, meanwhile, has drawn scrutiny over his past claim of a Florida home as his primary residence, as well as over his ties to a church abuse scandal.
For a network that counts the president among its most devoted viewers, the segment amounted to an unusually blunt accounting of where the 2026 midterms stand. The polling Baier presented put a Democrat ahead in a seat Republicans need, and the network’s own veteran analyst told the audience that the mood driving those numbers is unlikely to shift much in the weeks that remain before Nov. 3.
