The Republicans’ Remarkably Bad Midterm Campaigns
The midterm campaigns have been going badly enough for the Republicans that they have inspired in White House principals some rare candor. “You don’t turn the Titanic around overnight,” Vice-President J. D. Vance said on the trail earlier this year, in Toledo. He was speaking about the economy, but the same might be said now about the second term of Donald Trump, or, perhaps, about Vance’s own political prospects; on Tuesday, the President said that it was “very early” to endorse him as his preferred successor. Later that day, Trump was in North Carolina, a state that he won in the 2024 Presidential election, but where his handpicked Senate candidate, Michael Whatley, is trailing by so much that the G.O.P. has essentially stopped putting money into the race. On Wednesday afternoon, at a rally in Greenville, Trump said of Whatley’s Democratic opponent, Roy Cooper, “He’s going to become your senator. And it’s crazy.”
It is at least a little crazy how sharply politics have turned on the Republicans. Last week, prediction markets favored Democrats to win Senate races not just in North Carolina but in Ohio, which Trump won in 2024 by more than ten points, and in Alaska and Texas, each of which he won by thirteen points. Democrats are still underdogs in Kansas, which their party last represented in the Senate in 1939, and in Iowa, but they are drawing close. By Wednesday, when a headline on Axios read “Senate Republicans Fear Mississippi Is in Play,” things had started to feel a little surreal. The Republican predicament was summed up by an apparent A.I. prompt, mistakenly published on the website of Eric Pratt, a nominee for Congress in Minnesota: “The President is not popular, so all messaging should be focused on local politics and needs.”
On this point, most Republican candidates have seemed on message. A Times analysis found that more than ninety-nine per cent of G.O.P. ad spending is now going to spots that do not mention Trump. But even that strategy is backfiring. The campaign of Vivek Ramaswamy, who is running for governor in Vance’s home state of Ohio, paid for an ad in which the estranged mother of his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton, a doctor and the former director of the state health department, denounced her. The ad neglected to note that Acton had been removed from her mother’s care when she was twelve, after her stepfather was indicted on a charge of raping her. Several prominent Ohio Republicans, including Senator Jon Husted, who is up for reëlection, disavowed the ad; Vance dismissed their objections as “whining,” while Trump said that the ad had hit “pay dirt.”
A similar fissure has appeared in some Senate debates. In Minnesota, the G.O.P. nominee, Michele Tafoya, answered the opening question by referring to “a number of areas where I’m going to disagree with the President.” (She also called the killings in her state of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, by federal law-enforcement agents, “devastating.”) In Michigan, the Republican candidate, Mike Rogers, said, a bit testily, that the President’s high-profile tariffs on goods from Canada “were not well thought through.” In Maine, the longtime Republican incumbent, Susan Collins, bragged that she had voted against Trump more often than she’d voted against Joe Biden. Even the Alaska senator Dan Sullivan, who has been a reliable party-line vote for Trump, said that sometimes he will “forcefully oppose” things “in private.”
One policy choice that Republicans have started to oppose in public is, in retrospect, the pivotal decision of the midterms, and likely of Trump’s second term: the war in Iran. Trump’s approval ratings have never been especially high this term, but they began to drop below forty per cent around late March, a month after the war started, and have steadily declined since then. The elections analyst Nate Silver noted last week that Trump’s ratings were nearly as bad as George W. Bush’s were in his second term. The war has, as predicted, driven up both energy prices and inflation—a situation that has made it much harder for Republican candidates to convincingly claim that their businessman President is doing anything about affordability. It has also forced those same candidates to try to defend a war that few believe in. (The Atlantic reported that even Donald Trump, Jr., has taken issue with his father over it—in private.) During an Iowa Senate debate, the moderators displayed images of two soldiers, native Iowans, killed in action in the Middle East.
In Iowa and in other Midwestern states, the price of diesel, which has risen more sharply than other fuel prices, has become a potent political issue. In response, Trump waived U.S. policy and announced a deal in October with President Vladimir Putin to purchase hundreds of thousands of tons of Russian diesel. A week later, Trump suspended a sanctions package on Russia—named for Lindsey Graham, the late Republican senator from South Carolina, who made the war in Ukraine his signature fight—which the Senate had passed and the President himself signed in September. Meanwhile, Elon Musk, who has spent more than four hundred million dollars on Republican campaigns this election cycle, slowed Ukraine’s access to his Starshield satellite network, leaving that country more vulnerable to Russian attacks. For some Republicans, this was too much. On Wednesday, Ashley Hinson, a politically savvy congresswoman who is the Senate nominee in Iowa, said before a joint rally with the President that she would tell Trump to his face that the deal with Putin was “a bad idea.”
It is also a betrayal. On Wednesday night, Trump campaigned in South Carolina with Darline Graham, who was appointed, at Trump’s behest, to finish her brother’s Senate term, and who championed the Russian-sanctions bill. She has often said on the campaign trail, “I don’t trust Putin, and I don’t trust Russia.” But she is in a surprisingly competitive race in a deep-red state, and she needs Trump’s help to win there, even if it is largely his fault that she might lose. At the rally, she watched as the President casually told a story of calling Putin and asking for a favor, as if to make a show of how responsive the Russian leader is to him. War is horrific, but clarifying. It has exposed Trump, to at least a segment of the public that has long stood with him, as someone who stands not with them but with the oligarchs. And it has shown politicians like Graham and Hinson exactly the terms of the deal they have made. ♦