The Republican Party’s Midterm Nightmare Is Taking Shape

LEAWOOD, Kansas — The Senate map is less complicated than it appears. As with every modern presidential campaign, it runs through the Midwest.

If Democrats flip Republican-held seats in Ohio and Iowa while retaining Michigan, they will almost certainly net the four seats total needed to take control of the Senate for President Donald Trump’s final two years.

As the traditional start of the campaign season draws near, though, Republicans are increasingly worried they may be consumed by a worsening prairie fire.

“He’s in serious trouble in farm country,” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) told me. “He being Trump — and Trump is us. I’m not very optimistic.”

The triple-whammy of tariffs, expensive diesel and fertilizer and now imported beef has created a crisis for agriculture-state Republicans.

Over some brisket at Joe’s Kansas City Bar-B-Que earlier this month, the pastor of the country’s biggest Methodist congregation said Kansans are at a breaking point.

“Now some of those people are still not willing to say, ‘Hey, we don't like Trump,’ but they do expect their senator is going to speak up for them,” said Adam Hamilton, the pastor-turned-Democratic nominee against Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.). “What I'm hearing when I go across the state is people saying — and these are Republicans, not Democrats — we can't have six more years of this, or even two more years of this.”

Hamilton said the only question is: “How many farms are going to go bankrupt?”

Two hundred miles north up I-35, at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines, Josh Turek echoed Hamilton.

“We're going through a second farm crisis right now, Farmageddon,” said Turek, the Democratic state lawmaker running against Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-Iowa) for an open Senate seat.

It’s Iowa that’s more likely to flip — Kansas has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1932 — and I think the Hawkeye State is the bellwether in this year’s Senate battle.

Should Iowa turn back to Democrats after supporting Trump in all three of his elections, and not electing a Democratic senator since 2008, it would be an unmistakable tell about the sort of voters who also backed Barack Obama twice.

The alarm among Republicans, though, is that the contagion may spread beyond the heartland.

While GOP incumbents in Kansas and Nebraska are facing the fight of their careers, Republican lawmakers in the South are also seeing unusually adverse polling data, while states at opposite ends of the country, Maine and Alaska, are tilting left because of their fuel- and trade-dependent economies.

If Democrats can hold on to Michigan, a once-daunting Senate map for their party looks less intimidating: To find four seats, they’d capture North Carolina, the most likely state to change hands, Ohio, Iowa and then find one more from the quasi-nation-states that are Maine, Alaska and Texas (with help from third-party candidates on the ballot).

Every wave election brings a late surprise, and if conditions deteriorate, there’s a chance Nebraska, Kansas and even Mississippi could fall.

The culprits are obvious: the exorbitant cost of living, Trump’s deep unpopularity with the political center and the massive enthusiasm gap Democrats enjoy over Republicans.

The fear, GOP officials tell me, is that these sentiments are increasingly becoming locked in with voters; that the grim political environment — caused by spiking gas prices after the ceasefire with Iran collapsed last month — is close to irreversible. Or to borrow from Haley Barbour, that sage of Mississippi: In politics, good gets better and bad gets worse.

For months, the shorthand conversation among political professionals has not been if this will be a difficult election for Republicans but whether it will be 2018 or 2006.

Which is to say: Will 2026 bring a backlash against the party in power, but one largely confined to House losses because of polarization, limiting Democratic strength in Senate races? Or will there be a greater wave that grows high enough to sweep out Republicans thought to be safe, flipping both chambers of Congress in the process?

Once Iran hostilities restarted and it became clear that there would be no Supreme Court vacancy, as there crucially was in 2018, the answer became clear. Republicans would not be able to get off defense and lacked the court fight that would hand them their best opportunity to go on offense.

Absent a drastic shift in voter sentiment, this election is poised to mirror the last time a Republican was besieged by ornery voters upset with corruption, the price at the pump and an unpopular Middle Eastern war: complete Democratic takeover.

What gives GOP strategists some hope is that there are fewer red-state voters willing to vote for Democrats 20 years later, and the party’s shift left offers easy fodder for advertising, which could be critical given the hundreds of millions of dollars Republican groups are sitting on as Labor Day nears.

Much of that money is in Trump’s hands, though, and Republicans are privately furious he’s not agreed to spend more of it on his party’s candidates this fall.

Which gets to a deeper problem, something few in the party are in denial about any longer — the president is focused entirely on having fun, claiming a personal legacy and targeting personal rivals.

When Trump is not living the life of a 12-year-old boy — hosting UFC fights on the White House lawn and watching Indy cars go vroom through downtown D.C. — he’s fixated on naming things after himself, doing renovation work and seeking vengeance via the Department of Justice or by renaming Great Lakes.

It’s all so small. Yet it’s no laughing matter when the American voter is paying $4 for a gallon of regular. And while a war with Canada may sound like an old Second City comedy bit, the rising tensions with Ottawa could prove politically fatal to border-state Republicans in the two races they most need to win: Maine and Michigan.

"I would remind [Trump] that Canada is our friend, our closest ally and our biggest trading partner," Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) told me, adding: "And that our economies are so linked that if you try to hurt one, you end up hurting Maine and other border states."

Shortly before last year’s New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial elections, I wrote that Trump was leading the party to defeat and “the reason the seemingly esoteric matter of Argentine beef imports has penetrated the Republican psyche is because it’s a stand-in for: Hey, why is the president so focused on these other countries instead of bringing down costs here?”

Few farm-state Republicans would have believed at the time that, less than a year later and in an even more forbidding political moment, he would again be aiding foreign cattle growers to lessen tariffs on beef imports.

“The beef thing, are you kidding me?” Cramer said. “The one ag producer making money for a change and you shrink his revenue.”

The outsized backlash prompted by GOP senators who rarely criticize Trump can only be understood as not wholly over cattle but as a stand-in for their actual anger — at a president seemingly content to give away their majorities.

As one high-level party strategist involved in the midterms put it to me: What besides a more-than-a-year-old tax bill and Democratic excesses is there to run on?

As is the case with so many campaigns when they lack an affirmative message, Republican leaders are living off the land, grabbing whatever the news cycle hands them about Democratic infighting or similar.

The fundamental problem is that polls show voters don’t think Trump cares about them or their priorities, and there’s little Republican lawmakers or White House aides can do to make him act differently.

In fact, a recurring theme in conversations with Republicans is that the cabinet has been well deployed — they were ubiquitous at the Iowa State Fair and in other battleground states this summer — while Trump has been unhelpful.

It’s as if there are two administrations: the staff and appointees who chief of staff Susie Wiles can control in a conventional fashion, and the president himself who does and says what he wants.

Take the forthcoming mini-convention Republicans are staging next month in Dallas. The party will devise videos and speeches aimed at portraying Democrats as extreme. Yet as even one of Trump’s advisers told me, the actual message will be determined by “whatever crazy stuff the president says.”

Such despair reflects reality. There’s a throw-your-hands-up helplessness to it, one that reminds me of the fall of 2023 when it was Democrats who were coming out of their skin about their octogenarian president and his determination to run for reelection.

Approval for the war in Iran is in the low 30s, according to a recent Reuters survey, but there’s no obvious way out as long as Tehran has a vote in the matter.

Flipping pork burgers at the Iowa State Fair earlier this month, Hinson was glad to discuss her technique with the spatula, the importance of her race to the Senate map and her opponent missing votes in the legislature. But she went silent at repeated questions about whether it was time to end the war.

In Ohio, incumbent Republican Sen. Jon Husted has said he wanted the conflict to be “brief and successful,” but it is verging on neither.

And as long as the Strait of Hormuz is in dispute, oil prices won’t come down, and voters won’t feel any better. Sometimes politics isn’t complicated.

It’s the same sort of environment that propelled Sherrod Brown, Husted’s opponent, to his initial Senate win in 2006. That was also a year in which the Midwest proved vital, with Democrats besting incumbents in Ohio, Missouri and retaining Nebraska in what was Ben Nelson’s final race (his opponent: this year’s Republican incumbent, Pete Ricketts).

Former Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill told me she knew she’d win her 2006 race when she pulled her campaign RV into a gas station in rural Missouri, and her mom got out of the car to see “a couple of good ole boys in John Deere caps.”

McCaskill’s mom, alluding to the high price of fuel, remarked to the men that President George W. Bush “is an oil man,” and the two shot back: “He sure as hell is.”

It was obvious then, McCaskill said, that voters “had lost confidence in him and therefore the Republican Party.”

Back over his Z-Man sandwich in critical suburban Johnson County — one of the few large metros where Democrats did better in 2024 than 2020 and where the proportion of voters has risen to over a quarter of Kansas’ total electorate — Hamilton described his congregation.

“We have people from barely making ends meet to people who are very wealthy,” he said. “You have gas prices that are $1.40 a gallon more? And you're barely making it? That's a problem. And that's happening because of a decision in Washington that's hurting people in Kansas.”