Brent Buchanan

Hey, good to be here.

Well, you're seeing a degradation of the political environment in general, but it's not necessarily affected the generic ballot, which is, are you going to vote for the Republican or Democrat for Congress?

So one thing that we saw, let's go a step above Trump's image, and that is, how do people view the direction of the country?

And in just one month, we have seen a 25-point net drop among strong Republicans in direction of the country, yet they're still voting for the Republican candidate for Congress.

And so the reason that I frame it in this way

is that this whole narrative that the president's image and the direction of the country are indicative of what's going to happen in the election just isn't true anymore.

And so, yes, his image has decreased, but not as bad as the direction of the country has decreased.

Yes, the generic ballot has dropped a little bit, but Republican votes only went to undecided, not to Democrats.

So there's still a lot of fluidity in all of this.

And I don't think that somebody's approval on Donald Trump's handling of the economy is the be-all, end-all that maybe it was 20 years ago in politics.

No, I believe that the Iran issue, for two reasons, has driven a decrease in his image.

One, these younger men who took a chance on him in the 24 election that he was going to be different today.

He was not going to create new wars.

He was going to end wars.

And then also gas prices.

It's simply the one price that everybody sees every single day when they're driving around, whether you purchased it or not.

And it is the in-your-face reminder.

I'm not an economist, so I don't know how long increased diesel prices will impact the cost of everything else.

But if by this summer, we're not talking about an Iran war, you're starting to see prices come down, which is something that voters don't remember.

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