Henry Olsen is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
The Republicans’ midterms mood has turned ever-gloomier as the Iran war, gas price spikes and airport logjams have driven President Donald Trump’s job approval rating to a new second-term low. But there remains an X factor in the race: Trump’s $300 million in campaign cash.
If there’s a game changer in the campaign ahead, it probably lies in how the president and his political team deploy their stunning financial advantage — assuming big advertising campaigns can still move swing voters in this polarized age.
Set that assumption aside for a moment and first take in the remarkable fundraising at the Trump-supporting super PAC controlled by close allies of the president. Even in this age of humongous campaign spending, MAGA Inc. — the super PAC — is a massive piggy bank.
In the 2024 cycle, all Republican congressional candidates and outside committees combined spent nearly $2 billion on ads. Already, this Trump stash is about 15 percent of that, and it’s only March. If MAGA Inc. continues to raise money this year at the rate it has, hundreds of millions more will pour in.
Add to that the successes of the Republican National Committee, which had over $109 million on hand at the end of February. That’s so much that in the most recent reporting period, the committee earned over $7 million simply from interest and dividends alone, only a few million less than the Democratic National Committee raised in total during that time.
It’s reasonable, then, to project that Team Trump will have well over half a billion dollars to spend pretty much how the president wants. They could expand the playing field, deploying money to fuel any promising campaign struggling to raise money. They could also spend heavily to define a Democratic nominee that emerges bruised from an expensive primary, such as the ones taking shape in Michigan and Maine. Democrats would be hard-pressed to match that. MAGA Inc. and the GOP could flood key races with traditional candidate-centered ads.
But this is the thing we know we don’t know, to borrow a useful category from former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The big question is how much all that money matters given today’s polarized politics, because the winners in November aren’t going to be based on dollars raised but votes cast.
We know that big money can help mobilize a party’s voters and persuade them to back a party’s nominee. That’s the playbook Republicans used to defeat three strong Senate Democratic incumbents in 2024. Discontent with President Joe Biden had Republicans on the upswing then, and activating GOP-leaning voters was a winning tactic. But with polls as bad as they are now, repeating that accomplishment would simply stave off the worst-case scenario.
Republicans need a game changer, not a loss-minimizer, which raises an option that neither party has used for decades. What if Trump used his cash haul to go big, define his achievements and contrast them with the Democrats via a major, partisan-focused advertising campaign? Essentially: “Vote Republican.”
That’s what President Ronald Reagan did in the 1982 midterms. We often forget how bad things looked for the GOP that cycle. The nation was in a long and deep recession, and tight monetary policy had yet to break inflation’s back. Reagan’s job approval rating sunk throughout the year and was at around 42 percent — about where Trump’s is now — on the eve of the election. Yet the GOP lost fewer House seats than expected and held on to the Senate.
The secret was that Reagan consistently asked voters to “stay the course” on his economic program. This helped him convince supporters who had grown uneasy about his first two years in office to stick with him — to essentially cast one more vote in the hope that things would change for the better.
It worked in part because voters remembered how bad things had gotten under unified Democratic control before 1981. In the 2022 midterms, Biden struck a similar theme, albeit without major partisan advertising to support him. He relentlessly focused on the purported dangers that giving control to “MAGA Republicans” would bring, and the red wave many foresaw gathering around Biden’s 42 percent job approval never materialized. Instead, Democrats gained a Senate seat and only narrowly lost control of the House.
A big partisan play would be a riverboat gamble for Trump. To have a chance, he’d have to place well-crafted, coordinated ads in the largest media markets in targeted states and districts. That would be expensive even with sophisticated analytics helping to target the spots. Meanwhile, candidates facing Democratic attack ads will howl that the money isn’t being used to aid them more directly.
This strategy also requires unusual personal discipline from Trump. His campaign speeches would need to hew to the themes in the ads so that his earned media would support the paid media message. He was able to do that in 2024, but his impulsive side seems to have returned in force since he took the oath of office. All that money would be wasted if Trump was giving the media a different story to dissect on a daily basis.
Trump’s usage of his significant cash advantage is nonetheless the great “known unknown” of this cycle. How he deploys that money should be one of the most watched developments as the year unfolds.
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