Welcome to The Midterms, Actually. Every week I’ll be writing about two things: one big idea or trend I see forming across the 2026 primaries, and one thing I’m hearing from a voice on the ground. You can sign up here to get it in your inbox every week. Let’s get into it.
One big idea: What are Republicans actually running on?
The first-of-its-kind Republican midterms convention began in the same vein as President Donald Trump’s second term: open grift. The president announced a pledge to give every American $5,000 if Republicans win the House and the Senate — part of what he’s calling a new dividend for American voters, and what some Democrats are calling an attempted bribe.
Obviously, there are lots of questions about Trump’s announcement: Who will pay for the $1 trillion-plus dividend? Taxpayers. Could this even happen without congressional approval? Probably not. Why not just vote on it now, while Republicans control Congress? It would likely fail.
But I think the pronouncement — and the GOP convention broadly — is best understood as a proxy for the Republican message in the midterm elections, not a policy roadmap for what Trump would do if Republicans maintained control of the House and Senate.
So what can we actually glean from the GOP’s two-day bonanza in Dallas, and how does the message they were offering on that made-for-TV platform match up with the message they’ve delivered on the campaign trail? I took a close look at the convention speeches on Wednesday and Thursday, dug through our America, Actually reporting focusing on Republican voters and their candidates, and pulled together some trends that help explain the GOP strategy for defying the odds (and the polling) come Election Day.
1. Republicans are mostly in hiding — One reason Trump’s midterm convention sticks out in this year’s landscape: It’s one of the rare places Republicans will campaign out loud. Congressional candidates, even in battleground House districts, have rarely held public events or town halls this year. And as Trump’s unpopularity has continued to grow, driven by rising gas prices and an unpopular war with Iran, it’s not like the GOP has responded by mounting a defense of its leader. They’ve mostly gone AWOL, a result of the electoral pickle the president has put them in.
Trump is undoubtedly still the most powerful figure within the party, particularly among the Republican base, but Trump is also the biggest motivator for the Democratic base, and is increasingly off-putting to independent voters, who backed him in 2024. His approval has sunk to 33 percent in one recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, the lowest of his presidency, and that same poll found Democrats markedly more fired up for the midterms than Republicans — an enthusiasm gap that’s poison for the party in power. The independents who put him over the top have soured as the war drags on: a UMass poll found more than two-thirds disapprove of his handling of Iran nationally, and four in five say the war has driven up their gas and food prices.
So when Trump tells voters at the GOP midterm convention to “pretend that he’s on the ballot” and turn out in November, I think his opponents listen with glee. Democrats are in the position they’re in because of a brewing electoral backlash to Trump — and the reason Republicans are so hard to find on the campaign trail is that they sense that same backlash is brewing, too. Check out what Ted Cruz said on The View this week: “The big open question is, do Republicans show up?” Cruz asked. “If we stay home, there’s a blue wave.”
2. Even Trump is on the defensive — It’s rare to see Trump acknowledge any semblance of failure, but he came close during his speech during the convention’s first night. Trump was clearly on the defensive throughout his remarks: he sought to make the case for his (unpopular) tariff policy, he defended the (deeply unpopular) Iran war but without the usual bluster, and he acknowledged that gas prices may not fall until after Election Day. Last year, he predicted gas prices would soon hit $2 a gallon; this week he’s asking for still more patience after they hit a record $4.15 on Labor Day. From his speech:
“You know, it happens to me all the time. Guys come up, ‘You know, I wish you didn’t do the war in Iran, gasoline’s up, ba, ba, ba.’ And I say, ‘Well, let me ask you…let me ask you one question. Can Iran have a nuclear weapon?’ ‘Absolutely not.’ ‘Well, then I’m right, then I win, okay?’”
But it’s worth remembering that “be patient” is a controversial message even among Republican voters. When our America, Actually team spent a day outside gas stations in Allentown this summer — deep in PA-7, one of the most contested House districts in the country (watch the episode) — we heard a clean split. There were some Republicans willing to eat the higher price in service of Trump’s war:
“Yes, because our president is actually doing something about Iran. He’s not sugarcoating it. It’s something we need to do, and in the long run it’s gonna be better for everybody.”
And there were other Republicans who voted for Trump and are furious: “I voted for him with his promises to the American people…and I think he’s let us down.”
Another put the broken promise plainly: “I blame the president because he indicated to us he’s gonna drop all these costs. I know it can’t happen overnight, but when is it gonna happen? It’s outrageous.”
The message now is to wait until after the election. A lot of the president’s own voters at the pump aren’t sure they can.
3. Notice the candidates who weren’t there — Maybe the most revealing thing about Trump’s convention was the guest list, or more notably, the no-shows. MAGA celebrities who owe their careers to Trump packed the stage, but not a lot of the Republicans who are actually on the ballot in places they must win. Notable absences include candidates like John Sununu in New Hampshire and Susan Collins in Maine, and various congressional candidates from battleground races. And while their political calculus may be obvious — they want to avoid a Dallas-with-Trump photo op that ends up in a challenger’s attack ad — it reflects the “win by hiding” strategy that candidates not named Vivek Ramaswamy seem to be deploying.
Here’s the play in a nutshell: keep enough distance from Trump to maintain credibility and independence, but rely on Trump to raise money, drive up Republican turnout, and savagely attack Democratic opponents.
When conservative activist CJ Pearson came on our show, he insisted the GOP doesn’t have an electability problem at all — voters will see Democrats as too radical on topics like socialism and transgender women in sports, which came up repeatedly in the convention, and Republicans can still find ways to address affordability concerns. “These are 80/20 issues,” he said. ”And so I actually really like our odds here…we’re going to overperform. The Senate, we’re gonna hold onto. The House will be a dogfight, but I like our chances.” He even predicted this exact week, telling me the party would “see a change in his messaging and a reset at the midterm convention in Dallas,” after which “you’ll see those numbers start to change.” Whether Dallas actually delivered that reset — or just a $5,000 bribe and a defensive Trump — is, generously, an open question. And the attendance sheet suggests some of Pearson’s own party’s candidates aren’t waiting around to find out.
4. The JD Vance tightrope — One person who doesn’t have the benefit of keeping distance from Trump is JD Vance, his vice president and the presumed GOP frontrunner for the 2028 presidential nomination. He’s close to right-wing voices who have soured on Trump, and has to worry about voters longer than the president will have to, and the Iran war, tariffs, and Trump’s promises all present conflicts for him. Just last week, he took heat from prominent voices in Trump’s coalition for his refusal to disavow Tucker Carlson, the podcast host and former TV anchor who’s become a vocal critic of the Israeli government and Trump’s second-term agenda.
Looking ahead to his speech tonight, I’ll be watching how carefully he handles Trump’s tariffs, the Iran war, and gas prices. He’s tried to strike a more empathetic note on the economy than Trump, who has described talk of an affordability crisis as a made-up narrative to hurt him politically that — to the extent it was real — was President Joe Biden’s fault anyway. “They caused [it], but we’re fixing it,” the president said Wednesday.
Vance says he won’t “sit down” with Trump to discuss his 2028 plans until after the midterms, but Trump is not the kind of person who seems likely to give his successor a lot of room to run away from his record.
What I’m hearing
This week I talked to Charlotte Matherly, a reporter at the Concord Monitor who has been following the underdiscussed New Hampshire Senate race. New Hampshire is one of the Democrats’ must-win states to take back the Senate, but there’s been some concern that Republican candidate John Sununu — a former New Hampshire senator with a long family legacy in the state — could give Democratic nominee Rep. Chris Pappas deep problems. I talked to Matherly about lessons from the state’s primary and what to expect in the general election.
So, the New Hampshire primary just happened — what were the takeaways? And why has this race gone under the radar?
With the progressive versus moderate conversation happening nationally, that was my biggest question heading into Tuesday. Would we see that progressive wave or ripple or whatever you want to call it here too? Because we did have a progressive candidate [Karishma Manzur] run against Chris Pappas, who really focused on humanitarianism and ending what she saw as US complicity in foreign wars.
Voters who liked her were really passionate about her, but in the end, I think people just wanted to vote for what they know, and [Pappas] was already in Congress. The progressive wave that we’ve seen across the country has not necessarily translated here.
Why do you think New Hampshire has stood apart from the national progressive wave?
To give you context for New Hampshire politics, it’s always kind of different from the national electorate. We’re a true purple state — independents are the largest voting bloc here. But there are some quirks. Like, for the past 20 years, except for a few exceptions, voters tend to send Republicans to the state legislature, but usually vote for Democrats when it comes to Congress or presidential elections. So splitting your ticket is really common here. And I hear from people every time I go out to the polls that someone has switched their party in the past few years, or they fall back and forth. So it’s really hard to tell where the partisan lines fall here.
How has the Republican candidate, John Sununu, handled Donald Trump’s popularity?
Years ago [in 2024], Sununu actually penned an op-ed calling Donald Trump a “loser.” And there’s been some bite from the party about that. But Trump actually ended up endorsing him, and he’s also shared the backing of powerful fundraisers and a lot of conservative organizations hoping to flip the seat red. But still, Sununu is trying to emphasize his independence from the administration. He’s saying he’s not worried about currying favor or anything like that, but he hasn’t really put too many policy differences between himself and Trump.
One example that I can think of is that he said he opposed the [reported $300 billion] included in Trump’s deal with Iran that was earmarked for reconstruction. He had said he didn’t think that the US should provide any money for reconstruction. And so there’s been a few things like that that he has tried to sort of strike out on his own from the president.
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