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Common Power Executive Director Charles Douglas joined me for our weekly Friday live, and this one was a genuinely fun conversation while being one of the more analytically sharp ones we’ve had.
Charles just got back from Georgia, where Common Power was on the ground for the special election in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s former district, and he brought real field intelligence to go alongside the polling. If you want to watch it, I’ll warn you: we went on some hilarious tangents. So if you don’t want lighthearted banter to end your week, skip this episode.
But underneath the banter, the substance was real. We broke down why the MAGA fractures are not just a new MAGA media drama - they are showing up in the data.
We talked about Trump’s plummeting poll numbers and how his Republican support has dropped to the 70s and 80s instead of 90% and above in his first term. We talked through the NBC News poll showing Republicans are split 50/50 between MAGA and traditional Republican identity. We talked about the Pew Research numbers showing 42% of Republicans no longer believe Trump acts ethically in office. And we talked about what Democrats need to do with those numbers, specifically: the anti-corruption message, the economic populism argument, the Hungary proof of concept, and where Common Power is deploying volunteers right now to turn these fractures into wins.
This midterm environment is ripe with opportunities. The fractures are real, the polling supports it, and for the first time, there is a permission structure in place that lets Republican voters question Trump without feeling like they’ve lost their identity. That is a door opening. The question now is whether Democrats will choose to walk through it.
You can watch our full conversation above and read key takeaways below.
100% Of A Shrinking MAGA Pie
Trump’s team loves to cite his near-universal support within MAGA. What they don’t mention is that MAGA itself is shrinking. I raised this in the live because it reframes the entire conversation about his base.
The December 2025 NBC News Decision Desk poll, conducted among 20,252 adults between November 20 and December 8, found that Republicans are now split exactly 50/50 between identifying as MAGA and identifying as traditional Republicans. In April 2025, that split was 57/43 in MAGA’s favor. That is a seven-point shift in eight months.
The intensity numbers are also moving. Among self-identified MAGA Republicans, strong approval of Trump dropped from 78% to 70% between April and December 2025. That eight-point drop in the most loyal slice of his base is significant. The share of Republicans who strongly approve of Trump’s job performance dropped from 52% in January to 43% by April, according to CNN.
My framing in the live: you can have 100% of a shrinking pie, and that gets you nowhere. If MAGA is now only half the Republican Party and that half is also softening in intensity, the structural math for 2026 and 2028 is genuinely bad for Trump’s coalition.
Charles made the point that Trump was already on Fox News with Maria Bartiromo pre-spinning the midterms, essentially saying all presidents lose the midterms. When a president starts normalizing a shellacking before it happens, he knows what’s coming.
The Anti-Trump Permission Structure
The gains made in the Georgia special election in MTG’s former district were a direct product of these fractures. Charles came back from the ground with a clear read on what made that race competitive and why the permission structure concept is the key to understanding this moment.
Charles explained that MTG gave Republican voters a way to question Trump without fully breaking with him. The early framing was strategic: blame the administration, blame the people around him, blame Vance or Musk, and preserve your fealty to Trump himself. That gave voters an offramp. Then she ramped up her criticism at key betrayal moments, from the Epstein Files to the Iran War. Now, we’re here.
That emotional and psychological scaffolding is what made the Georgia district competitive. Shawn Harris didn’t make big gains because Republicans voted Democratic. He got close because the most MAGA district in the country had a permission structure to feel conflicted, and some of them acted on it.
I made the point that once that first crack appears, a cascade follows. With cults, you only need one question. Once someone allows themselves to question one thing, they start questioning everything. The de-radicalization is self-driven because the radicalization was self-driven in the first place.
Both Charles and I flagged that Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene are likely eyeing 2028. The early opposition to the war and to Trump’s most extreme moves is not just criticism; it is credential-building. They want to be able to say in two years that they called this. Obama had the Iraq War credibility in 2008. These people are trying to manufacture a version of that.
Not a Moral Awakening. A Market Opportunity.
Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Alex Jones, Megyn Kelly. They are not waking up. I want to be precise about this because conflating their positioning with principle does real damage to how we think about what’s happening.
I made the core argument: these are people who see a media market for anti-Trump, right-leaning content and are moving to monetize it. There are donors behind this who are losing money, losing market access, losing business partners because of the war, the tariffs, and the economic chaos. That money is now looking for a new lane. The influencers are following the money and the audience simultaneously.
Charles added the donor dimension explicitly: wealthy people who had shares in Trump, politically and financially, are now looking for an exit and pushing influencers toward a new position. It is the same ecosystem that funded MAGA media, now being redirected.
Don’t mistake any of this for allyship.
The Anti-Corruption Message
The Pew Research data from January 2026 is one of the most important polling numbers in this conversation and the one I think Democrats are finally starting to amplify on.
Pew found that only 42% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are confident that Trump acts ethically in office. That is down from 55% at the start of his second term, a 13-point collapse within his own party in one year.
Separately, only 52% of Republicans say Trump respects the country’s democratic values, down from 60%. Only 66% say he has the mental fitness to do the job, down from 75%. The direction is consistent across every measure Pew tracked.
I flagged that this is the anti-corruption message’s opening. When 42% of Republicans already don’t think their own president acts ethically, you don’t have to convince them that Trump is corrupt. You just have to give them a candidate who offers the alternative clearly and boldly.
Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) is already running this playbook. He’s been giving speeches and cutting clips demanding Congress investigate the insider trading patterns around Trump’s market-moving posts. He looks presidential doing it. Charles noted that Rob Sand in Iowa is running a similar frame, with his line “not bluer or redder, but truer and better” as the pitch.
The Hungary parallel is the international proof of concept. I raised Peter Magyar as an example of what this looks like when it works. Magyar ran on anti-corruption, asset recovery from Orbán’s cronies, and populist economic policy. He was a former Fidesz insider who turned on the party, won a two-thirds supermajority, and ended 16 years of Orbán’s rule. That is the energy Democrats need to match.
How Democrats Can Use MAGA’s Fractures Against Them
The economic case is the thread that ties all of this together. Charles and I spent the back half of the conversation mapping out what the message should actually be and where Common Power is putting its resources.
Charles made the argument that wealth redistribution is actually wealth re-redistribution. The money was taken through stock buyback policy, favorable tax treatment of investment income, defunding of schools and social services, and, most recently, the big beautiful bill, which I have been calling the reverse Robin Hood bill since it passed. It was the largest upward transfer of wealth in modern American legislative history. Getting it back is not radical, it is repair.
I raised the war cost argument: Trump himself said explicitly that the federal government cannot afford daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, and childcare because we have a military to fund. He made the connection for us. The first week of the Iran war alone could have helped fund universal college. Democrats should be tallying that number and saying it out loud constantly.
Several Democratic senators are already floating proposals to exempt the first $75,000 of income from federal taxes. That is the kind of bold economic proposal that cuts across the partisan divide and speaks directly to the working-class voters Charles described as increasingly including people earning six figures in blue cities who still can’t afford to live.
Charles mapped out where Common Power is deploying: Atlanta, Bakersfield, Bangor, Dubuque, Memphis for Justin Pearson, and Alaska for Mary Peltola in the fall, with plans to hit every competitive Senate race they can reach. They are one of the only organizations getting into primaries right now, which matters because the fight to define what the Democratic Party stands for is happening in primaries, not general elections.
I closed with the de-radicalization point: MAGA voters self-radicalized, which means they can only truly self-de-radicalize. What Democrats can do is give them a roadmap, a pathway back, a permission structure of their own. You don’t condescend them. You meet them on the economic betrayal, on the war, on the corruption, and you let them walk themselves out. Charles saw it on the ground in Georgia. It works.
Bottom Line
The fractures are not media noise. They are showing up in the NBC News data, in the Pew ethics numbers, in special election results, and on the ground in every district Charles and Common Power have been working. Trump has 100% support of a base that is shrinking and softening. The anti-corruption message has a 42% opening inside the Republican Party itself. The economic populism argument crosses every partisan line when it’s made clearly and boldly.
Democrats don’t need to wait for MAGA to collapse. They need to run toward the fractures with a message that deepens them and gives people a reason to vote for them.
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