Economic pain and an unpopular Trump put GOP on its heels with three weeks to go
By PATRICIA MAZZEI and SHANE GOLDMACHER
Three weeks from Election Day, deep frustration over an economy that feels unworkable for Americans at most every level, from farmers to truckers to consumers, has expanded the map of competitive electoral contests into areas that seemed safely Republican just a couple of months ago.
Sustained high prices are putting at risk some of the constituencies, states and congressional districts that President Donald Trump and Republicans won decisively in 2024. The widespread discontent has prompted candidates, parties and major GOP fundraising groups to shift their messages and ad spending in crucial races to try to move voters in the final days of the midterm campaign.
With control of the House, Senate and the vast majority of the country’s governor’s offices and legislatures at stake, Republicans are examining their own deteriorating internal polling, along with their experiences with voters, and say they are reassessing their odds and triaging the map.
On Friday, for example, the leading Senate Republican super political action committee began to plunge another $30 million into advertising in Texas to try to save the state’s Senate seat for Ken Paxton, the Republican attorney general.
Several races that are likely to determine the overall outcome on Election Day — the Maine and Michigan Senate elections, for example — remain tight. Control of the chamber could easily boil down to one or two of these razor-thin contests.
Still, Republican baggage is piling up, regionally and nationally. Trump is facing backlash to mass deportations in South Texas and South Florida. His party is bracing for anger at expanding data centers in states, including Ohio and Michigan. In big farming states, record diesel prices have arrived just in time for harvest season. In colder northern states, spiking heating oil costs loom for families.
“When you’ve got a sitting president whose job approval rating is in the high 30s,” said Colin Reed, a veteran Republican strategist, “it makes it really difficult for any Republican candidate to compete and win.”
The White House is racing for stopgap solutions. Trump announced $90 payouts for millions of seniors on Medicare, and on Friday began sending $500 rebate checks he had promised for some Affordable Care Act customers. He has also promised a $5,000 check for every adult U.S. citizen if his party retains control of Congress. This past week, in Nebraska — a typically solidly Republican state — Trump announced an executive order to loosen restrictions on the use of tax-free diesel on the roads.
On Friday, Trump said he would allow Russian diesel imports after years of sanctions, in an attempt to lower prices.
Trump’s unpopularity over his handling of the economy — one of his biggest strengths when he ran two years ago — is driving Republican troubles in a nationalized political environment.
The party still holds structural advantages over Democrats, including a Senate map with more contests in states that Trump won in 2024; redrawn congressional maps that made more seats favorable to the GOP; and a wide financial lead, bolstered in part by Trump’s own powerful super PAC, MAGA Inc. In past elections, particularly when Trump has been on the ballot, some polls have underestimated his popularity.
Those advantages have provided little comfort to Republicans who see their candidates faltering in increasingly red corners of the nation.
The leading House Republican super PAC, the Congressional Leadership Fund, all but ceded the first Republican-held seat of the election this past week, moving money out of a district in Nebraska where Rep. Don Bacon is retiring. Bacon occupies the most Democratic-leaning seat of any Republican in the House.
In an interview, Bacon said he had urged party officials not to abandon the seat just yet.
“I wish they could have shown a little more patience,” he said. “The No. 1 issue is the president is not popular in the district.”
Republicans also recently pulled money from the Senate race in North Carolina, where Sen. Thom Tillis, a Republican, is retiring. They redirected cash to Kansas and South Carolina, which remain a stretch for Democrats but would have seemed out of reach earlier this year. The top super PAC backing Senate Democrats, Senate Majority PAC, is reserving $5 million in ad time in Kansas.
“There are states right now in play that I would not have imagined being in play,” former President Barack Obama said at a fundraiser for Democratic Senate nominees in Virginia on Wednesday, rattling off states such as Texas, Kansas and Nebraska.
“We could end up losing all of them by two points,” he added, according to excerpts released by his office, warning against Democratic complacency. “But we have a chance.”
Republicans, privately and publicly, are concerned about an enthusiasm gap. Culture war issues, such as transgender athletes’ rights, are still in heavy rotation in Republican ads. But polls show voters are focused squarely on their deep unhappiness with the direction of an economy that Trump had promised to fix.
Trump has traveled in red states, including three times to Texas over the past month, with another visit by Vice President JD Vance planned for the coming days. They hope to get Trump supporters who typically vote only in presidential elections to also vote in the midterms. The president has repeatedly urged them to act as though his name were on the ballot.
The challenge with that plan, said Paul Shumaker, a Republican strategist in North Carolina, is that many of those voters vote on the economy.
“The lower-income, blue-collar voters that Donald Trump brought to his winning coalition for Republicans is the demographic group of voters who are being impacted most by the higher energy costs,” Shumaker said.
Recent New York Times/Siena University polls of red states show Democrats also doing well with younger voters, older voters, independent voters and Latino voters who backed Trump in 2024.
Still, Republicans could flip the Kansas governorship, which Democrats have held for eight years. And Democrats face unexpectedly competitive statewide races in Minnesota, which has not elected a Republican in a statewide election since 2006, when Gov. Tim Pawlenty won reelection.
Pawlenty said the state has offset some of the tough national political environment for Republicans in part because voters there blame a spate of fraud scandals on Democrats.
“Democrats are trying to make the election a referendum on President Trump while the Republicans are trying to make it a referendum on fraud,” Pawlenty said in an email.
Democrats in states like North Carolina vividly remember past elections where they expected to win or win comfortably only to lose or win by razor-thin margins. Republicans remember them, too. Austin Barbour, a Republican strategist based in Mississippi, invoked a quote made famous by his uncle, Haley Barbour, a former Republican National Committee chairperson, to describe the political climate: “It’s never as bad as it seems or as good as it seems.”
The younger Barbour said he believed Republicans would ultimately prevail in states that are historically Republican, in part because of “the level of far-left candidates that the Democrats are nominating.”
But cries about looming socialism are proving a tough sell when voters are unhappy now.
Vince Bjorling, a retired doctor from Scottsbluff, Nebraska, said he planned to vote for the Democratic nominee for governor and independent candidates for House and Senate.
Bjorling, a former Republican who said he left the party early in the Trump era, said he had volunteered for a independent House campaign and had encountered “a lot of people out there who are very, very angry with the policies that the president has put forward, and also our representatives basically falling in line.”
“The tariffs were a big problem, because that created affordability problems,” he said. “The war in Iran was miscalculated and misguided, and now has led to even more affordability issues.”
Republicans “can’t run on the issues,” he said, “and they can’t run on their record.”
