Rolling Stone reports:

This month, GOP operatives and others close to Donald Trump have grown increasingly nervous over trends they’ve seen in recent private polling data produced by different Republican organizations and conservative allies.

It’s not just the swing-state polling or the national surveys that are causing distress lately. The anxiety-spiking numbers are coming out of Trump strongholds like Ohio and Florida, according to three GOP sources, including two people close to the former president, who have reviewed the private polls.

“They’re looking worse than they should,” one Republican operative who has seen the internal data tells Rolling Stone. “Donald Trump is not losing Florida or Ohio, but that isn’t what’s concerning … It’s a trend of softening support.”

The polling results are a mirror image of what spooked Democratic operatives — prior to President Joe Biden dropping out of the 2024 contest — when both public and private polling data showed Biden shedding support in safe terrain like Minnesota, New Mexico, Virginia, and even New York. The question was never, for instance, if the president would win New York; his soft support in liberal bastions foretold doom in critical battleground states.

But within the past month, after Biden ceded the ticket to Vice President Kamala Harris, the Harris-Walz campaign has significantly cut into (or in some cases reversed) Trump’s leads, infuriating the former president with less than three months until Election Day.

Several of those signs, much to the consternation of some of the national Republican Party elite, are now popping up in Trump country.

The three sources would not allow Rolling Stone to print any of the referenced data pertaining to these solidly red states, or to publicly identify which conservative groups or GOP organs had run the recent surveys.

There is a sense among various Republican consultants that the poll numbers would not be helpful to party morale or — more optimistically speaking — merely present a snapshot of a Harris 2024 “honeymoon.” Indeed, two of the sources say they personally have not briefed the data or their concerns to Trump yet, fearing it would only upset him. [Continue reading…]