Opinion
Updated ,first published
Of the $US1 billion spent by the Republican campaign apparatus since September 1 of this year, just $US11 million of that had gone towards ads promoting the candidate’s relationship with Donald Trump.
Candidates themselves are telling us exactly what they think their voters want to hear. The president’s unpopularity is changing the Republican Party.
In battleground seats, 41 of 62 Republican House and Senate candidates have distanced themselves from Trump in some way recently.
Trump held a midterm convention in Dallas last month where he expected all the battleground Senate candidates to speak or appear, but a third avoided the event.
In most midterm elections, the party that holds the White House hides away from the president. Midterms typically bring a shift to the opposition – such is the nature of America’s everlasting dissatisfaction with anyone in power.
But in Trump’s first midterm as president in 2018, candidates bucked the historical trend, with 27 per cent of their advertising demonstrating their loyalty to the party’s unquestioned leader. This time, there has been a clear shift – that figure has crawled to just 2.4 per cent.
For much of the past decade, one of the core facts of American politics was that Trump himself was the source of the Republican Party’s power, even in challenging national environments.
He still holds unilateral control over the party’s nominating contests, thanks to his singular status within conservative media. His idiosyncrasies have become Republican orthodoxy.
During the primary contests, 70 per cent of advertising dollars went toward ads tying candidates to Trump. By the time the general election arrived, and Trump’s unpopularity began to set in, Republican ads in the general election focused on the core policies of Trump’s Republican Party – without naming him explicitly.
They hammer on immigration, an obsession with transgender people, and tax cuts, core parts of Trump’s brand.
And they still rely on Trump to encourage Republican diehards to turn out. They accept his “Total and Complete Endorsement” and appear with him at rallies, though the opportunity looks different now.
At the weekend, Trump appeared in Georgia with local gubernatorial candidate Rick Jackson, who did not mention Trump’s name once in his five-minute speech introducing the president at the rally.
Conservative campaigners are trying to sell voters on a Republican government and hope that they’ll forgive or forget who leads that government.
Meanwhile, Democrats are using their war chest to lash Republican candidates to the sinking ship of a president whose approval rating is now lower than it was in the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection.
This is most apparent in the middle of the country, where the Senate battlefield has dramatically expanded. Agricultural states like Texas, Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa, longtime Republican strongholds, are showing signs of rejecting their Republican leadership in the face of soaring diesel prices and a global export market hampered by Trump’s tariff regime.
Trump’s victory in 2024 came on the back of a promise to Americans who felt that they had been neglected – that someone, somewhere was getting a better deal than them.
He then spent the next 18 months slapping his name on policy after policy despite many of them – including his tariffs, the war on Iran and changes to tax rates and food assistance – seeming to ensure that those same people would get an even worse deal.
In those new battlegrounds, Republicans are being forced to spend hundreds of millions of dollars, including Elon Musk’s recent injection of more than a quarter-billion US dollars ($395 million), mostly towards Texas.
Through these final two weeks, campaigns are now focusing their resources on turnout.
Conservative voters are not necessarily considering voting for a Democrat. They’re choosing between the voting booth and staying at home.
Republicans invested heavily in the idea that Trump’s 2024 coalition would become their destiny. His historic gains among young people, black men and Latinos seemed to be the beginning of a realignment.
That belief became the key bet they would make for the future. Their redistricting efforts in 2025 – in which they redrew electoral boundaries across many states – assumed that a midterm environment would still favour Trump’s party.
On that basis, they took conservative voters out of safe districts and dispersed them to eliminate battleground districts and spread the Democrats thin.
In Houston, a Republican boundary change was an attempt to starve black voters of the possibility of electing a Democratic Representative. The redrawn electorate would have led to a Trump victory in 2024 by 20 points. A recent poll shows the Republican candidate is just 6 points ahead.
To understand the scale of this problem for the Republicans, a 14-point swing nationwide would deliver Democrats a 93-seat majority in November. It’s wildly unlikely, but this is the problem that Republicans have created for themselves.
Danger comes when a map designed for one reality is implemented in a very different one. The House is now generally presumed to be a safe Democratic lock, with many of the redrawn seats shifting toward Democrats.
That redistricting effort came from the same assumption that Republican donors are now questioning: that Trump’s wave would last longer than two years.
Now, Republicans are pouring money into ads trying to create space between themselves and an unpopular president.
The persistent irony of an American midterm election is that it tests whether a political coalition can hold together without the leader who assembled it being on the ballot. This time around, it will also test if that coalition can hold together when the leader himself is now a reason for voters to refuse to show up.
No one can predict what will happen on the Tuesday after the first Monday of November. But Republicans are using their advertising budgets to say exactly what they think their voters want to hear.
Cory Alpert is a PhD researcher at the University of Melbourne looking at the impact of AI on democracy. He previously served the Biden-Harris administration.
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Cory Alpert is a PhD researcher at the University of Melbourne looking at the impact of AI on democracy. He previously served the Biden-Harris Administration for three years.