'They're worried': GOP leaders said to be secretly aware 'they're in a lot of trouble'

Republican leaders in Congress understand the dire situation their party faces going into the midterms as the public turns against them on everything from the economy to immigration crackdowns, analyst David Drucker told MS NOW's "Morning Joe" on Thursday.

"Those polls that we just ran through are brutal," said anchor Jonathan Lemire. "They're brutal for the president, they're brutal for his party, and they're brutal on issues that are supposed to be his strength. As you talk to Republicans, I mean, they can read the numbers, too. How worried are they?"

"They're worried, right?" said Drucker. "I mean, look, first of all, political professionals and I've been emphasizing this, right? The people that are actually actively advising congressional candidates that work on campaigns, they get the joke, they know what's happening, right? And then Republican leaders whose job it is to try and preserve these thin majorities, and it's going to be more difficult to do so in the House than it will be in the Senate, at least as things stand today. But the leadership understands the gravity of what they're facing."

That said, he continued, "you always want to put a good, you know, face out to the public, because the minute you acknowledge the trouble you're in, the headlines say even Republicans admit that they're in a lot of trouble."

Further complicating this, he added, is that neither Trump, who "lives in his own bubble," nor the MAGA base in solid red districts, want to hear the bad news and let GOP lawmakers get on the defensive.

"One of the reasons why it's hard for Republicans to get their arms around this is because too few of them represent states and districts where they have a variety of voters who are going to tell them that their policies or their focus has gone astray, right?" said Drucker. "So when you represent a red district in the House and everybody in that district is watching conservative or populist or pro-Trump media, when you represent a red state and it's like that and you go home, you know what everybody tells you mostly keep fighting the fight. Trump's right. Don't back down. And so the feedback loop is very dangerous."

One of the other big takeaways of all this, he said, is that "tactics matter."

"Politics isn't just, do you support an issue?" said Drucker. "It's like health care reform. Find me a voter that's against health care reform. Do you know where the fight is? Obviously. How are we going to go about it? Where are the winners and losers? How's that? How is that going to affect me and my state versus you and your state? And it's simple. Politics is simple, but everybody complicates it because in part, they don't want to deal with the problem they have because they don't know how to deal with it."

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