Is Donald Trump trying to help Republicans win the midterm elections? The obvious answer to this question is yes, of course, simply because all political leaders benefit from their party winning elections. Yet several of Trump’s actions throw this normally perfunctory question into at least some doubt.
Traditionally, candidates laboring under the burden of an unpopular president seek to detach themselves from the national brand. Trump is making this impossible. He has launched a national ad campaign focused on himself, and thrown a high-profile “midterm convention” designed to further reinforce the synonymity of the party and its leader. Trump has also made several remarks that convey an emotional detachment from the election’s outcome—comments such as “I’m not affected by the election” or “I don’t care about the midterms.”
Perhaps he is merely feigning indifference. Maybe he truly does not care. More likely, Trump cares about the outcome, but not enough to permit Republicans to acknowledge his lack of popularity. His approach, at any rate, nicely illustrates the drawbacks of handing total control of a political party to an egomaniac.
Midterm elections have historically disfavored the president’s party. Candidates for office who are running in neutral or hostile territory accordingly tend to emphasize their differences with the president—think of Joe Manchin running an ad in West Virginia in 2010 showing him firing an actual bullet at Barack Obama’s cap-and-trade bill, or the Republican Will Hurd in 2018 criticizing Trump’s racism and affinity for Russia.
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Trump’s public standing is unusually dire. He is currently polling far worse than either he did at this point in 2018 or Joe Biden did four years ago. In theory, this ought to give Republicans an especially strong incentive to edge away from Trump and emphasize local themes in their elections.
Trump has decided to block this escape route. He is commandeering earned media with his “Trumpapalooza” show, drawing attention to the person endangered Republicans desperately need their constituents to forget. He has hoarded the party’s ad budget, warning Republicans, “This is my money that I control,” and that he would spend it on “Republicans that I think are good,” which is to say, slavishly loyal. He has promised to barnstorm the country, telling reporters, “I’ll be making a lot of stops,” including in Alaska, where the Republican Dan Sullivan is trailing.
There is an old Simpsons episode in which the elderly oligarch Montgomery Burns informs the obsequious Smithers that, upon his own death, his loyal aide will be buried alive at his boss’s feet. Trump appears to be thinking along similar lines.
This self-defeating behavior makes a degree of sense if you accept that Trump’s interest in politics is purely egocentric. He has difficulty caring about anything that does not directly involve himself, and the prospect of Republicans holding seats by repudiating his record is likely unpalatable.
The benefits of same-party control of Congress are also smaller for Trump than other presidents, because he governs mainly through executive action. To the extent that a Democratic majority in either chamber might threaten him with oversight, he will surely disregard it, as he did during his first term. Although he finds Republican majorities preferable, the size of those majorities matters to him far less than their composition—a fully loyal minority may seem preferable to a fractious majority.
What makes less sense is the willingness of many Republicans to cooperate with a strategy that consigns many of them to defeat.
Consider, for instance, Mike Rogers, the Republican Senate candidate in Michigan. Rogers came up through politics long before Trump entered it, and is trying to win office in a state where the president’s approval rating is 25 points underwater. A recent poll of the state found Trump’s endorsement made voters less likely, by a 55 percent to 27 percent margin, to support a candidate. Yet Rogers has opened no daylight whatsoever with the unpopular president, even echoing his false claims of having the 2020 election stolen from him. When Trump launched a trade war with Canada, a move that poses an especially dire threat to Rogers’s own state, he declined to take the opportunity to display independence. Instead, he issued a statement mumbling his approval. (“President Trump is right to put America First—and tariffs are necessary, but are not a one-size-fits-all solution.”) The same dynamic is occurring in other races, where Trump is throwing himself behind incumbents who are in danger mainly because voters don’t like him.
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To be sure, some Republicans subscribe to the theory that the Trump era has suspended normal midterm election dynamics. According to this account, a decisive sliver of voters are loyal to Trump, and not his party. Republicans can win only by enticing them to vote, which means making the election about their hero. “We’ve seen that a lot of Trump voters—they will crawl over glass to vote for the president,” one Republican strategist explained to Politico.
Yet Trump has tried before to insert himself into non-presidential elections. And his efforts have mostly failed—not only in the 2018 midterms, when he refused to lie low, but also in multiple off-schedule elections (the most famous case being Georgia’s 2021 Senate runoff, which he made into a referendum on his effort to overturn the 2020 election). In the Trump era, his party has fared well only when it has been able to focus on the shortcomings of unpopular Democratic opponents, such as Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Biden and Kamala Harris in 2024. Making elections about Trump—which also occurred when he ran for reelection in 2020—has been a losing gambit.
The political tip sheets in recent days have been filled with the lamentations of fatalistic Republican operatives. “We have no choice. We’re stuck on the boat with him whether we like it or not,” a top Republican campaign official confessed to Axios. They cannot stop Trump from staging Trumpapalooza, so they are reduced to praying for low ratings. “My only hope is that no one watches it since it’s competing versus NFL opening games,” a person close to the White House told Politico. “Hopefully nobody notices the embarrassing show.” Republicans are cooperating in a strategy that sacrifices their best chance of political survival, because the past decade has trained them to believe that resistance to Trump is futile.
Trump did far less damage to the country during his first term, both because institutions and norm-following officials restrained him, and because his pathological instincts frequently undermined his support. The former limitation has broken down in the second term, but the latter one remains. Trump’s support has collapsed in large part because of his own poor choices.
The post Trump’s Midterm Strategy Is All About Him appeared first on The Atlantic.
