Dramatic shifts in polling numbers indicate Donald Trump and his Republican Party are heading for a drubbing in November’s US midterm elections.

Historically low personal approval ratings for the President are driving his party on to the rocks in elections that both experts and the data suggests are all about Trump, despite him not being on the ballot and his Republican colleagues desperately try to distance themselves from the man in the White House.

Polls across the US have seen huge swings towards the Democrats, who are now forecast to take control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate, which the Republicans were previously expected to hold. Critically for both parties, seven out of ten voters say their assessment of Trump is a factor in casting their ballot, according to a PBS new/NPR/Marist survey.

Averages from multiple polls show around 60 per cent of Americans disapprove of the President’s performance, with one poll from Reuters/Ipsos showing a record low 66 per cent disapproval rate. Meanwhile the critical independent voters who are not members of either party and often decide a race are leaning towards the Democrats by 25 per cent.

“At this point in time, this is the worst polling that any incumbent president going into a midterm election has ever had,” says Jason Reifler, a professor of political science at the University of Southampton.

David Andersen, associate professor in US politics at Durham University, agrees. “This is bad. It’s getting to the point where Republicans can’t even find a silver lining.”

Andersen says the American public has turned against Trump, leaving the Republican Party to try to salvage some signs of hope in the face of the President’s unpopularity. “All the polls on the issues show that the things that Trump has done, and the things that Republicans are currently talking about, Americans hate.”

He adds: “They’ve turned against his immigration policies. They are absolutely against his economic policies. They’re opposing tariffs. They’re opposing the Republican stances on data centres and AI. There is almost no positive message Republicans can find in the data right now.”

Even so, Trump continues to get involved in crucial races across the country, telling delegates at the first-ever GOP midterm convention in Dallas last month to “pretend that I’m on the ballot – just one more time”, and vowing to visit 35 swing states during the midterms campaign.

Reifler notes that Trump’s comments would have dismayed Republican strategists who see the free-wheeling President as a liability in close-fought Senate races in states like Maine, Texas, Ohio and Alaska. “I guarantee you there were a lot of Republican campaign managers across the country who really wish he hadn’t said that.”

Whether under pressure from Republican strategists, or to boost his own ego, Trump is so far sticking to the deep red states where his supporters are clustered, leaving other Republicans to make the case to Americans that they would be better off with Republicans maintaining control of both the House and Senate.

Trump faces additional challenges stemming from his war on the mainstream media, with even formerly loyal Fox News joining other US broadcasters in confronting the President over him limiting White House access for news outlets he deemed too critical.

Amy Tatum, a lecturer in communication and media at Bournemouth University, and an expert on US politics and representation, points to declines in support among previously loyal Republican voters as a particularly worrying sign for Trump.

“He’s down to just over 70 per cent approval amongst Republicans, that’s not good,” she says, adding that with Fox News joining the media boycott of the White House last week during Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit, “what we’re seeing is those people who would normally be very loyal are distancing themselves from him”.

Alongside Trump’s war with the media, the real war against Iran rumbles on, with fighting spreading to Yemen and prices rising for US consumers and businesses.

“It has been a steady trend away from President Trump, and part of this is that Americans are dealing with very real problems,” says Andersen. “The costs of fuel are sky-high right now and the President not only isn’t addressing it, but he doesn’t seem to care. Americans are getting the sense that this president is not governing for them, he’s governing for himself.”

Surrounded by sycophants who shield him from bad news, Trump may not even be aware of how bad the polling is, says Andersen. But the public is growing increasingly critical of the White House.

“You can only get people to suspend disbelief for so long,” says Reifler. “When Trump is out there continuing to say, ‘Things are great, the economy is great, there is no inflation, prices are lower than they were before,’ people just know that that’s not true.”

And if Republicans lose control of Congress, Trump and those around him could be in serious trouble, says Andersen.

“If the Democrats win the House of Representatives, the big change is that they can start investigating the Trump administration. There will be investigations of every cabinet official, of the President himself, of the Vice President, of anybody who’s ever had lunch with any of these figures,” he says. “And that’s what Democrats are aiming for. They want to air the dirty laundry of the Trump administration.”

The final weeks of the election campaign are likely to turn nasty, says Tatum, who thinks Republicans will try stoking culture war issues that rile up their supporters in order to limit the damage done by Trump’s unpopularity.

“Midterms are always difficult for the parties in power,” she adds, “but what we’re seeing now is different, so Republicans have to try and counteract that. I think [that] is why they’re falling back on those more traditional scaremonger tactics that we often see around identities and morals and around family values.”

Democrats, for their part, will need to spend the last weeks of the campaign holding steady and not messing things up, says Andersen. “I think they just enjoy the ride while they can. Trump is so unpopular that all they have to do is not be unpopular themselves and they can win this election easily.”