Forty days before the midterm elections, a growing number of Republican candidates across the country are openly seeking to distance themselves from President Trump, breaking with a leader who has long held an iron grip on his party.
On Monday, the Republicans running for Senate in both Michigan and Iowa called on the president to end the war in Iran as a way to reverse the escalating price of gas. On Tuesday, G.O.P. candidates for governor in Wisconsin and Michigan, along with an embattled Republican senator in Ohio, followed.
“The war with Iran needs to end — and end quickly,” former Representative Mike Rogers, the Republican Senate nominee in Michigan, said in a video filmed in a grocery store. “When it does, energy costs will plummet.”
On Capitol Hill, three other Republican senators called for an investigation into the president’s son over his lavish wedding after-party paid for by a Russian businessman with ties to President Vladimir V. Putin.
And in Florida, one of Mr. Trump’s close allies, Representative Byron Donalds, the Republican nominee for governor, recently overhauled his website to make Mr. Trump’s endorsement far less prominent.
The dissent reflects growing unease about the party’s prospects in November, as Republicans struggle to overcome the unpopularity of the president and his signature policies.
Mr. Trump’s approval rating is languishing near record lows. On issues where he once was strong — like the economy, national security and immigration — he is now underwater. His approval rating on the economy hit an all-time low of 27 percent, according to a CNN poll released on Tuesday.
“It’s ‘Not great, Bob!’, as they say on Mad Men,” said Nachama Soloveichik, a Republican political strategist, of the darkening political environment for Republicans. “Trump’s approval numbers are down. That’s not good. They’re making strategic decisions based on polling numbers — that’s what happens in political races.”
A White House aide disputed the idea that there is any distance between the president and his party, passing along statements and photos from more than 60 Republican candidates praising and appearing alongside the president.
“President Trump is the unequivocal leader, best messenger, and unmatched motivator for the Republican Party,” said Davis Ingle, a White House spokesman, in a statement.
There’s a long tradition in American politics of vulnerable candidates running away from unpopular, second-term presidents in midterm elections.
In 2006, a midterm cycle that Democrats often compare to this one, Republicans distanced themselves from President George W. Bush amid backlash to the war in Iraq. Eight years later, Democrats running in red states criticized President Barack Obama, even skirting questions about whether they had voted for him.
But for Mr. Trump, the experience of Republicans publicly criticizing his agenda — and, perhaps most notably, targeting his family — is relatively new. The breadth of Republican opposition will be tested this week, when the Senate votes again on a Democratic-led war powers resolution.
Marc Short, who served as the White House legislative affairs director in Mr. Trump’s first term, said the distancing by Republican candidates in the final weeks of the midterm elections is more pronounced than what happened in 2018 and “does feel somewhat like desperation.”
“If you’ve been carrying the president’s water on all his legislation priorities and his issues, it’s hard now to distance yourself,” said Mr. Short, who also served as former Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff. “It appears now as if it’s just for political convenience.”
After facing the indignities of two years in Washington with virtually no power, Democrats can barely contain their glee.
“For the last 10 years, Republicans have been more afraid of Donald Trump than they have the voters they’re supposed to represent,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the minority leader, said in an interview. “It’s clear that Republicans are in full panic mode, because Donald Trump’s approval ratings are at extinction levels.”
In past elections, Republicans have struggled to turn out their base when Mr. Trump was not on the ticket. Now, the president and his aides are focused on motivating his most loyal supporters
by working to center the midterms around Mr. Trump himself. This month, he hosted a splashy gathering for his supporters in Dallas, where he spoke for nearly two hours.
“Pretend that I’m on the ballot,” Mr. Trump begged his supporters. “I’m on the ballot. I’m on. Just one more time.”
But at least a few candidates are trying to pretend he’s not even in the White House. Some vulnerable Republicans skipped the event in Dallas, a step widely interpreted as an effort to put distance between their campaigns and the unpopular president.
Many of those who attended offered a quick mention of the Trump administration’s policies before turning their focus on castigating their Democratic opponents as communist, socialist and un-American.
“The Republicans might be a little bit astray but the Democrats have lost their minds,” said John Catsimatidis, a New York based Republican donor, who hosted a fund-raiser last week for around 10 Senate Republicans.
“I think the American people may not like some of the things the president has been doing,” he acknowledged, before adding, “I support the president 110 percent.”
In the past, breaking with Mr. Trump has ended the careers of many Republicans, who lost primaries or retired from office to avoid an electoral defeat. The trend continued into this cycle, when Mr. Trump successfully backed challengers to Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, among others.
The decision now to openly criticize signature policies like the Iran war reflects the deep political peril perceived by many in the party.
“The president’s greatest power is his influence in Republican primaries and now all the primaries are behind him,” said Carlos Curbelo, a former Republican congressman from Miami who lost his seat in 2018. “This is survival mode time for Republicans.”
Last week, Representative María Elvira Salazar of Florida — who represents a district Mr. Trump won with 57 percent of the vote — released an ad breaking with Mr. Trump on immigration. It was seen as a sign both of Mr. Trump’s collapsing support in Hispanic communities and the degree to which districts he carried by 10 percentage points or more in 2024 have become swing districts in 2026.
Mr. Trump has sometimes cracked down on dissidents in his party. But on Friday the president said that while he “disagreed” with Ms. Salazar, he was not pulling his support — and took credit for her past victories.
Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas, whose re-election is getting fresh attention, also seemed to raise questions of the Trump administration’s immigration operations on Wednesday. “When ICE operates in Kansas, it needs to coordinate with our local law enforcement,” he wrote on X.
But Democrats say escaping the president’s pull may be difficult for candidates who marched in lock step with him for nearly a decade. Many are now running ads linking their Republican opponents directly to the president.
“He votes 100 percent for Trump,” Manny Rutinel, a Democrat running for Congress in Colorado, says of Representative Gabe Evans, the Republican incumbent, in one ad.
In Iowa, the decision by Representative Ashley Hinson, the Republican Senate candidate, to declare that “the war needs to be brought to a successful and immediate end” brought guffaws from Democrats who noted that she had voted multiple times — including last week — against a war powers resolution that would have constrained the president.
Two other Iowa Republicans running in swing districts — Representatives Zach Nunn and Mariannette Miller-Meeks — recently reversed their previous positions to help push through a Democratic measure directing Mr. Trump to halt the conflict.
Iowa, in some ways, is at the center of the pushback against the president as the state grapples with the impact of both tariffs and higher fuel costs. Senator Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa, delivered a speech on the Senate floor on Tuesday calling for a temporary embargo on diesel exports to drive down prices.
Senator Dan Sullivan, Republican of Alaska, who is facing a tough re-election fight, echoed Mr. Grassley’s call.
“The cost of diesel is just too damn high,” said Mr. Sullivan, long a staunch ally of the president, in a statement.
A day after Mr. Trump told reporters he was considering the idea, his energy secretary, Chris Wright, dismissed it.
“Nobody wants a full blanket ban or zero exports of diesel,” Mr. Wright said at the Climate Forward live event in Manhattan. “That’s not being discussed.”
The movement away from Mr. Trump has stretched into some of the most consistently Republican states in the country, where Republican candidates are trying to walk a careful line between distancing themselves from the president without alienating his supporters.
In Florida, the changes to Mr. Donald’s website — which included removing a “Trump-Endorsed” box at the top, a yellow banner featuring the endorsement and a photo depicting the president, Mr. Donalds and his wife — were notable coming from such an staunch Trump ally.
Gates McGavick, a spokesman for Mr. Donalds, said the congressman was “proud” to have Mr. Trump’s endorsement and disputed that there was meaning to be drawn from his revamped website, which was first reported by the Miami Herald. “Our campaign website reflects Byron’s focus on the issues that matter most to Floridians — affordability, insurance costs, and government transparency,” he said. “This angle of reporting is FAKE NEWS.”
In Texas, which has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1988, the leading super PAC helping Senate Republicans this week reserved another $35 million to help lift Ken Paxton, the state attorney general who toppled Senator John Cornyn in the Republican primary, over James Talarico, the Democratic nominee.
Mr. Cornyn, meanwhile, joined Senator Thom Tillis, the retiring senator from North Carolina, in backing a call from Senator John Curtis of Utah to subpoena the president’s son, saying he would support an investigation by the Judiciary Committee, of which he is still a senior member.
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