Americans won’t cast their ballots in the midterm elections for another 14 months, but President Donald Trump is already ramping up efforts to maintain Republican control of Congress.
His strategy appears to be a more heavy-handed version of his approach to the 2018 elections, which sought to use crime and immigration to energize Republican voters while making the election a referendum on his presidency.
But while those midterms were held under normal political conditions, Trump has already taken the unprecedented steps of sending National Guard troops to two U.S. cities and pressuring Republican-led states to redraw their congressional districts. He’s also considering holding a first-of-its-kind, pre-midterm convention to gin up enthusiasm for Republican candidates.
With a slim seven-seat majority, House Republicans are on defense.
With a slim seven-seat majority, House Republicans are on defense. In the Senate, Democrats face more of a challenge in winning four seats to take control, which would mean winning races in Republican-leaning states such as North Carolina, Maine, Ohio and Iowa without losing any in states such as Michigan or New Hampshire.
That would suggest that a likely outcome might be similar to Trump’s first term, when Republicans expanded their Senate majority but lost the House, stalling Trump’s legislative agenda, expanding congressional investigations into political scandals and ultimately leading to a government shutdown and two impeachments.
Trump has made clear in recent remarks that the midterms are on his mind, and how he intends to win them.
“I think crime will be a big subject of the midterms and will be the big subject of the next election,” he said during a Cabinet meeting last week.
Republicans believe that crime is a strong issue for them. A recent AP-NORC poll showed that 53% of U.S. adults approve of Trump’s handling of crime, higher than his overall job performance and better than the majorities that disapproved of his handling of immigration, the economy and the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
But there are signs that may not be enough. In a Gallup poll in August, 34% of Americans named economic problems such as inflation and unemployment as their top concern, followed by “the government/poor leadership” at 24% and immigration at 14%. Only 3% named “crime/violence.”
Some of Trump’s recent actions appear to be designed to raise the prominence of crime as an issue. After deploying the National Guard to Los Angeles with the mission of protecting federal buildings from protests against his immigration policies, he shifted rationales to send troops to Washington, D.C., with the goal of assisting local law enforcement. He’s mulled sending the National Guard to Chicago, Baltimore and New York City on similar grounds.
The president has also sought to bolster the House Republican majority by pressuring Republican-led states to take the controversial step of redrawing their congressional districts before the midterms. Texas has already complied, with Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, signing off on a new map that could flip as many as five Democratic seats. He’s also lobbied Florida and Indiana officials.
In a wave election, that may not be enough, however. Democrats won 40 seats in the 2018 midterms. One day after it was reported that the Democratic National Committee was considering hosting a first-of-its-kind, pre-midterm convention to gin up enthusiasm for their candidates, President Donald Trump said that he, too, was weighing a convention-style gathering for his party in 2026. “It has never been done before. STAY TUNED!!!” he wrote on Truth Social. In the same social-media post, Trump touted Republicans’ fundraising numbers, which has far exceeded Democrats’ in House races this year. Democrats face an internal debate over the best way to respond to Trump’s second term. Democrats face their own problems. The party is still reeling from its losses in 2024, and, as a recent New York Times analysis showed, its party voter registration has lagged behind Republicans in recent years. Democrats also face an internal debate over the best way to respond to Trump’s second term, with some strategists recommending conceding on social issues such as transgender athletes, while the party’s grassroots is pushing for a more aggressive pushback on all fronts. Christopher Nicholas, a veteran Republican consultant in Pennsylvania, said the Democratic coalition, which now includes more higher-income and more educated voters, is more likely to turn out in a midterm election than the GOP’s growing base of less-frequent voters. “My message to fellow Republicans has been pretty much ignore those stories about Democrats being in low standing, because that doesn’t matter when you get to the polls,” he said. “They’re the only other game in town.”
Akayla Gardner is a White House correspondent for MS NOW. Recommended
