Inside Trump’s Midterm ‘dog Fight’ And The Scramble For His Attention

Republicans are competing for President Donald Trump’s time and attention in the final days of the midterms as they shore up red seats they never expected to defend.

They're jockeying for his support with a stream of hopeful updates, including encouraging early-vote numbers and optimistic assessments of challenging races. Good news, some White House allies say, makes a better sales pitch than you're-my-only-hope desperation.

Those pitches often flow to White House political director Matt Brasseaux and, on the outside, Trump's longtime political adviser James Blair, among other top aides responsible for allocating finite resources in the campaigns’ final stretch.

“Typically the underperforming squeaky wheel gets the grease,” said one veteran GOP operative working in midterm races across the country, who has shared early vote data with the president’s team. “But there's also a way to squeak, like, ‘Hey, things are going better than expected.’” The operative and others in this article were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive dynamics in the final stretch of the midterms.

White House aides are relying on the information to determine where to devote resources in the final weeks — be it a visit from Trump, a Cabinet member, robocall or social media post, according to six people familiar with communications between the White House and campaigns.

The White House, for instance, selected the location for the president’s Friday rally in Daytona Beach following conversations with campaigns in Florida, according to one of the six people, a White House official who is also familiar with the president’s campaign planning.

Trump will regularly ask staff about turnout and polling in the states he’s visiting, wondering how Republican efforts are “playing,” the official said.

Inside the West Wing, the midterms are still viewed as a “dog fight,” the official added, a sense of urgency reflected in the president’s recent travel schedule. Trump has held 19 rallies in the last 20 days, from Alaska to Mississippi.

This weekend, Trump pushed to add campaign appearances, including on Thursday in South Carolina, to an already busy closing schedule, the official said, after the president questioned why he had days off so close to the election. He’d already been once to South Carolina, which he won by double-digits in 2024 and where the Senate contest was not initially expected to be competitive.

“We understand the historic headwinds the party in power faced during midterm elections, and we know exactly what we’re up against,” the official said. “That’s what makes the urgency real. It is the catalyst behind conversations like, why are we taking Thursday off? Add it to the schedule. What are we doing? Let’s go.”

Still, the better-than-feared figures are offering Republicans hope that they will avoid a complete wipeout.

POLITICO spoke with 20 campaign advisers, officials and donors involved in competitive races across nine states, many of whom pointed to encouraging turnout patterns in states such as Iowa and Kansas. Public early vote data shows increased Republican participation in several states compared with 2022, while GOP strategists say their internal modeling also shows higher than expected turnout of the less reliable voters who helped put Trump back in the White House two years ago.

Alex deGrasse, a senior adviser to Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall, said the number of Republicans voting early has already exceeded the party's 2022 total by nearly 50 percent, while much of the Democratic early vote advantage is coming from voters who participate regularly.

“The GOP apparatus has put an unprecedented effort into pushing less likely voters out,” DeGrasse said. “Dems are cannibalizing their vote. We haven’t.”

Trump officials, feeling “bullish” about Kansas, canceled a planned Saturday rally in the state, a White House official said. Instead, the president will host more than 20 tele-rallies in the final days to expand his reach.

Tom Bonier, a veteran Democratic data analyst and senior adviser at TargetSmart, a political data firm that tracks early voting nationwide, said Republicans are correct about their increased early vote turnout compared to 2022 in states like Kansas. But he cautioned that they're drawing optimistic conclusions based on assumptions of what Election Day turnout will look like.

Kansas Democratic Senate nominee Adam Hamilton’s campaign referred requests for comment to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Asked about the early vote data, DSCC spokesperson Tommy Garcia said in a statement that “Democrats are in the strongest position yet to win a Senate majority.”

Republican National Committee spokesperson Natalie Baldassarre, in a statement, described Trump as “the greatest force for turnout in American politics” and said “the momentum is on our side.” White House spokesperson Olivia Wales said that the president will "continue crisscrossing the country with unmatched energy and enthusiasm" to deliver his message.

Trump, who has seen some of the encouraging data, has also sounded more optimistic.

“I think you're going to be pleasantly surprised on Tuesday. People are coming home. They're coming home,” he said at a Tuesday rally in Lubbock, Texas.

There is some real hope among Republican operatives, even in a forbidding environment: While the party expects to lose the House and faces a difficult fight to preserve its Senate majority, some strategists close to the toughest races believe Republicans can avoid a complete wipeout.

In Iowa, three GOP strategists working on campaigns in the state pointed to increasing early vote participation as another encouraging sign. Absentee ballot requests from registered Republicans were up nearly 40 percent compared with the same point in 2022, according to data from the Iowa Secretary of State’s office. Requests from Democrats were also up, though more modestly.

“I feel a lot better today than I did two weeks ago. Dems have spent an inordinate amount of money and In a lot of these races they're still not running away with this — look at the Iowa Senate,” said longtime Iowa GOP strategist Luke Martz.

The RNC also canceled a planned weekend rally in Iowa, saying Republicans are similarly in a "strong" position there.

The encouraging numbers are not universal. In Georgia, where there are key Senate and gubernatorial races, one Republican strategist who has reviewed internal campaign data described the early vote numbers as “really, really bad — wipeout bad,” pointing to weak turnout among less reliable GOP voters and in rural areas.

In Michigan, GOP strategist Jason Roe said early vote participation has steadily caught up with an initial surge of Democratic ballots in the congressional district where he’s working. But he cautioned that Republicans are still struggling with independent voters, a problem that could outweigh their gains in turnout.

“It felt like we hit rock bottom a couple weeks ago and the only direction to go from there is up,” said Roe, who is working on the reelection campaign of Michigan Rep. Tom Barrett. “But we might just be gaslighting ourselves.”

Alex Gangitano contributed to this report.