The White House wants to metaphorically put President Donald Trump on the ballot for next year’s midterm elections, but with the president’s approval rating creeping lower, that strategy is not without risks.
“Typically, in the midterms, it’s not about who’s sitting at the White House; you localize the election. And you keep the federal officials out of it. We’re actually going to turn that on its head and put him on the ballot,” White House chief of staff Susie Wiles told The Mom View this week. “I haven’t quite broken it to him yet, but he’s going to campaign like it’s 2024 again.”
TRUMP GOING TO ‘CAMPAIGN LIKE IT’S 2024’ FOR MIDTERM ELECTIONS: SUSIE WILES
Regardless of Wiles’s comments regarding Trump, elections have become increasingly nationalized, particularly because Democrats have used the president to campaign against Republican candidates.
That won’t change before the 2026 midterm elections, with Democrats already taking advantage of Trump’s return to the campaign trail this week in Pennsylvania.
“Despite his delusions that he is doing an ‘A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus’ job on the economy in the face of skyrocketing costs and inflation, the reality is that Donald Trump has no plans to address the affordability crisis he created,” Democratic National Committee chairman Ken Martin said on Tuesday. “The last thing families in Pennsylvania want to see is the man who’s responsible for pricing them out of their healthcare, winter heating bills, and food.”
Speaking with the Washington Examiner from Pennsylvania after Trump’s rally in Mount Pocono, Franklin & Marshall College Center for Opinion Research Director Berwood Yost described Republicans as being “in a bit of a quandary.”
“There are voters that are activated when President Trump is on the ballot, but not otherwise,” Yost said. “Getting him on the stump is one way of getting those voters interested and excited about voting in the midterms. The problem with that strategy is that the president is unpopular with persuadable voters largely because he’s failed to deliver on his campaign promises to improve their financial circumstances.”
For Yost, Trump’s rally demonstrated the president has “a hard time staying on message and communicating to voters that he understands their economic concerns.”
“There is a long time until the midterms, but at this point I’m not sure that having him at the center of the 2026 campaign is going to help Republican prospects, particularly in a competitive state like Pennsylvania,” he said.
Republicans are well-positioned regarding the Senate, considering their current majority, and Democrats next year are defending their seats in battleground states such as Georgia and Michigan.
The House, however, is different. Republicans are defending a dozen seats that the Cook Political Report has called “toss-up” races, with two seats each in Pennsylvania, explaining Trump’s rally, and California.
Claremont McKenna College politics professor and former Republican strategist John Pitney, who is based in California, agreed with Yost that Trump “might be able to rev up Republican enthusiasm in deep-red districts, “but if GOP members in those districts need outside help, then the party is in a lot of trouble.”
“Elsewhere, Trump appearances would backfire by stirring up Democratic opposition,” Pitney told the Washington Examiner. “With a 36% approval rating, the best thing he can do for Republican candidates is to lie low and raise money for the party.”
That number is lower than Trump’s average approval rating of 44%, according to RealClearPolitics, with his average disapproval rating being 53%. That is, in part, because of respondent sentiment regarding affordability — Trump’s average approval related to inflation is 35% approve, 62% disapprove.
Those numbers, in turn, have contributed to Democrats’ early polling advantage one year before next November’s midterm elections. The party has an average 4-percentage-point edge in generic congressional ballot polling, again, according to RealClearPolitics.
Those numbers are also causing consternation for Republicans, including GOP strategist John Feehery, who referred to himself as “panicked” after special elections throughout the year, in addition to last month’s off-year elections in New Jersey and Virginia and this week’s election in Miami.
“I mean, you need to be really, really concerned,” Feehery told the Washington Examiner. “Republicans need to take this extremely seriously, and they need to come with a plan. They can’t just kind of hope. Hope is not a good strategy. And riding the president’s coattails only works if the president has coattails, and that only works if the economy is really cruising.”
Trump needs ‘clear message’; country needs jobs explosion
To that end, Feehery underscored how the country has not experienced a “big explosion of jobs yet” before the Labor Department publishes November’s jobs report on Dec. 16.
The economy did add 119,000 new jobs in September, more than double the number expected by the market, though that month’s unemployment rate was 4.4%, an increase from August and July’s counterparts of 4.3% and 4.2%. At the same time, new jobless claims decreased during September’s reporting week by 8,000 to 220,000.
Nevertheless, for Feehery, Trump “needs to do everything he can to get people back to work and make sure that people feel that their wages are going up.”
“I think the problem you have with these stump speeches is the president doesn’t have a clear message,” he said. “I agree with him that affordability is a Democratic construct that has been made much worse by policies implemented by [former President] Joe Biden. That being said, I think what the president has to understand and what he’s always, in the past, been very good at is understanding the concerns of normal working-class Americans, and has always tried to find a way to mitigate those concerns or try to address those concerns. That’s what affordability is all about.”
During a roundtable with tech entrepreneurs on Wednesday, Trump did not repeat his complaints that the issue of affordability is a Democratic “hoax” or “con job,” but he did during his Mount Pocono rally.
“Democrats talking about affordability is like Bonnie and Clyde preaching about public safety, and they are really the, truly, the enemy of the working class when they do it,” he said Tuesday during his rally at Mount Airy Casino Resort.
Simultaneously, Trump was cognizant on Wednesday of what is at stake, given that historical trends indicate he is on the precipice of losing unilateral control of Congress.
“We’ve done a great job, but for whatever reason, and nobody’s been able to give me an answer, when you win the presidency, you seem to lose the midterms, even if you win the presidency by a lot and you do a great job as president,” he told reporters. “I want to win, and winning the midterms is important. People want us to win the midterms, and I think we have great spirit. We should win the midterms.”
IN FOCUS: TRUMP LOOKS TO LITERALLY BUILD HIS LEGACY. DOES IT SOUND AN AFFORDABILITY CLARION CALL?
Wiles’s interview this week is not the first time the White House has conceded that Republicans underperform when Trump is not on the ballot.
“They say that I wasn’t on the ballot was the biggest factor,” Trump told Republican lawmakers after Democrats trounced Republicans during last month’s off-year elections. “I don’t know about that, but I was honored that they said that.”
