For vulnerable politicians, the safest place to be in a difficult midterm year is usually far from an unpopular president.
Donald Trump has other plans.
Next week, as primaries give way to a perilous general election campaign for vulnerable Republicans, Trump will headline two nights of a GOP political convention in Dallas. Over the next two months, his super PAC plans to run advertisements that feature his name and play up his political record. And although he will not appear on any ballot in the midterms, he has told voters they should behave as if he is. Even the party’s program for prized congressional recruits, previously known as “Young Guns,” has been renamed the “MAGA Majority.”
It is a risky strategy two months before Election Day. Vulnerable Republicans cannot afford to antagonize Trump because they need his help to turn out his base and tap into the $400 million war chest he controls. And he is not extending the leeway past presidents have for candidates to run their own races, even if that means keeping their distance.
Trump has told aides he wants ads paid for by his super PAC, MAGA Inc., to tout his second-term record, according to two people familiar with the conversations. Advisers already prepared some ads for the Texas Senate race and showed them to Trump, who provided detailed feedback, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal strategy.
Some donors, skeptical of the strategy, have become resistant to giving more money to Trump’s super PAC while it sits on hundreds of millions of dollars without sharing any plans about how it will use the money, said a Republican strategist involved in Senate races, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss unfinished plans.
The Trump-centric approach marks a reversal from 2022, when the super PAC ran ads in competitive Senate races that did not mention Trump — a sign that his own advisers accepted his liabilities. A MAGA Inc. spokesman declined to comment, saying the PAC doesn’t reveal its plans through the media.
As his poll numbers have fallen to record lows, Trump has repeatedly insisted that his record deserves to win in November. He has argued that voters are overlooking his economic achievements and defended the Iran war and its economic costs as the price of preventing Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
At a Las Vegas rally in early August, Trump touted rising manufacturing investment, record stock market gains and falling prices, despite a more complicated economic picture with rising inflation. “We had the greatest economy in the history of our country in my first term,” he said. “But this is blowing it away.”
“Trump doesn’t want people distancing themselves from him. He sees it as a personal insult,” said Tevi Troy, a presidential historian and former White House domestic policy adviser under President George W. Bush. “His greatest power is his ability to destroy a Republican who goes against him.”
Trump’s posture differs from that of his recent predecessors — and even from his own first-term approach. But Troy said Trump’s political calculation is rooted in a simpler reality: In an era of heavily gerrymandered districts, many races are increasingly decided by which side can turn out its own voters.
“What we’ve seen over the course of the past decade is, when Trump is on the ballot, you get better turnout if you’re a Republican,” Troy said.
Trump has not been able to deliver every candidate he supports to victory. His picks recently lost gubernatorial primaries in Iowa, Georgia, Wyoming and Minnesota, as well as House races in Tennessee and Michigan. He snapped that losing streak Tuesday when Darline Graham, his choice to succeed her late brother, Sen. Lindsey Graham, won South Carolina’s GOP Senate runoff, and Mike Mazzei narrowly won a runoff to be the Republican nominee for Oklahoma governor.
General-election polling underscores the risk for vulnerable Republicans. Trump’s approval ratings remain historically low, and national polls show Republican House candidates running six points ahead of him among registered voters: 44 percent support the GOP for Congress, while 38 percent approve of Trump. Republican Senate candidates are also outperforming the president by about two points on average, though some of that gap reflects large numbers of undecided voters in several races.
That gives Republicans in the most competitive districts an incentive to calibrate their proximity to Trump — embracing him where he remains an asset while trying to keep their contests from becoming referendum on his presidency.
“The president’s going to look right in the camera and say, ‘I am on the ballot,’” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) said of the Dallas convention on Thursday at an event with vulnerable Rep. Monica De La Cruz of Texas. “Because even though his name isn’t, right, his administration, his legacy, the America-first agenda is.”
The Dallas convention forces Republicans to decide between angering swing voters by appearing with Trump or angering Trump by staying away. None of the Republicans in competitive Senate races responded to questions from The Washington Post on whether they will attend.
“It’s going to be a Trumpapalooza you’re not gonna want to miss!” RNC Chairman Joe Gruters said in a social media video.
Aides to one Republican who has announced his plans to skip Dallas, Rep. Tom Barrett of Michigan, rejected the suggestion that he is distancing himself from Trump. They noted that Barrett has appeared with the president several times, including at a General Motors proving ground in Milford last month.
“Attending a convention two months before an election in a top target seat was never a consideration,” Barrett spokesman Jason Roe said. “It has nothing to do with the optics and everything to do with where the voters are.”
Roe said voters already understand the basic political alignment between Barrett and Trump. “I think it’s pretty baked in with voters that Republican members of Congress support the Republican president, and vice versa,” he said, adding that Barrett is “running on his record of accomplishment for the 7th District.”
Natalie Baldassarre, a spokesperson for the Republican National Committee, said Republicans cannot escape being associated with Trump’s policies and that Democrats will make the link regardless.
“The Democrats are going to brand our candidates with the president no matter what, so it’s not beneficial for Republicans to run against his agenda and bleed from both sides of the political spectrum,” she said. “The president has cut taxes, lowered drug costs, secured our border — Republicans should be touting that in battleground races across the country.”
Rep. Jamie Raskin, (D-Maryland) has argued that Democrats should make Trump’s record inseparable from the Republicans running alongside him, portraying GOP candidates as enablers of what he calls the administration’s “illegal war” and “disastrous economic policies.” In a recent fundraising appeal, Raskin said Democrats could build a “Blue Wave” by tying Trump and “MAGA Republicans” together and making the election a judgment on their shared record.
So far Republicans have tiptoed around putting space between themselves and Trump. The campaign website for Ralph Alvarado, running with Trump’s endorsement for a Kentucky congressional seat in a district Trump won by 15 points, removed references to Trump from its website, replacing “America First Fighter” with “Independent Leadership.”
The political calculus varies by race, said Republican strategist Alex Conant. Some House Republicans, particularly those representing suburban swing districts, may be better able to court independent voters with distance from the president. But many of the Senate contests likely to determine control of the chamber are unfolding in Republican-leaning states, where Trump remains a potentially powerful turnout engine.
“So distancing yourself from Trump isn’t going to help you win a Republican state like Texas or Ohio,” Conant said.
Trump also may have little use for Republicans who seek to separate themselves from his actions. He has long prized loyalty, and said he expects his administration to face extreme pressure from Democrats if they retake either chamber.
“I think he views a disloyal Republican as just as useless as a Democrat,” Conant said. “And if he’s looking at what the next two years hold, it’s probably going to be impeachment fights and a lot of other big fights. He’s probably not looking to have anybody there who’s not loyal.”
In a polarized, heavily gerrymandered country, Trump is betting that turning out voters already inclined toward Republicans matters more than persuading those in the middle — and that he can summon voters who might otherwise stay home when his name is absent from the ballot, Troy said.
That distinguishes him from recent presidents who, when their popularity sagged, generally gave endangered members of their own party room to run away from them.
In 2006, Bush largely confined his late campaigning to places where Republicans believed he could still help, while vulnerable GOP candidates advertised their independence from him and avoided appearances with him. Eight years later, Barack Obama watched endangered Democrats criticize his policies, skip his visits and keep him out of some of the states where they faced the toughest races.
President Joe Biden made that accommodation almost a running joke. During the 2022 midterms, as some vulnerable Democrats kept their distance from an unpopular White House, Biden frequently told candidates: “I’ll come campaign for you or against you — whichever will help the most.”
Scott Clement contributed to this report.
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