Trump has begged his MAGA fanbase to pretend he’s on the ballot, because in previous election turnout among ‘low propensity’ voters has been dramatically higher when he’s a candidate. But this time, that hasn’t helped. It may even have hurt.
Trump’s magic may be wearnig off(Image: JIM LO SCALZO/EPA/Shutterstock)
Donald Trump’s final public speech of the campaign was odd for a number of reasons.
He stood on the banks of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool on the eve of polls opening and talked, at length and in detail, about the refurbishment he’s undertaken of the landmark. He reportedly cancelled tentative plans to close out the campaign with a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, as he has in all three of his presidential campaigns, in order to give this speech.
And making most of your final message to voters about pool maintenance is unorthodox, to be sure. But there were other things.
There were a few dozen people there – just invited guests and media. It looked small, especially given the association the backdrop has with the huge crowds for Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech.
Stay up to date with the latest breaking news in our US midterms 2026 live coverage.
Trump delivered his remarks at the bottom of the steps that leading to the huge statue of Abraham Lincoln, forcing Trump to literally stand in the shadow of America’s greatest president and look up at his stern face. It was unusually submissive, and maybe that’s what caused a brief moment of self-reflection.
“For some reason, the sitting president doesn’t win the midterms,” Trump said. “But we gave this a very strong shot.”
He’s half right. The party controlling the White House almost always loses seats in the midterms – it’s just a matter of how many. And how many is often linked to the President’s approval rating.
Since Trump properly joined the campaign, starting a 30-day trail of rallies that would exhaust a man half his age, Trump has begged his MAGA fanbase to pretend he’s on the ballot, because in previous election turnout among ‘low propensity’ voters has been dramatically higher when he’s a candidate.
But this time, that hasn’t helped. It may even have hurt. Trump’s approval rating is historically bad. Some polls put it as low as 31%. The last President who went into a midterm election with approval numbers as bad as this was Truman in 1946, when his Democrats lost both houses to the Republicans, giving them control of congress for the first time in nearly two decades.
There has been no discernible “Trump bump” in the polls for candidates who have been blessed with a rally in their district. And the rallies themselves have been torrid.
Trump rallies are surprisingly camp affairs. The turnout is mostly pensioners, with a handful of chubby-faced young men. Everyone dresses up in novelty hats and tee shirts and waits in line for several hours, before being ushered in to listen to an elderly man tell jokes about men’s posteriors. Then they dance to the YMCA and head home.
If Trump had had the merest hint of message discipline in these rallies, it might have made a difference. But it was his indifference to the troubles of Americans, much of which was his doing, that sealed the deal.
Trump has shown his age in this campaign. He’s quicker to anger, gravelly in tone and he’s cursing a lot more than he used to. And the tangents he famously weaves off into have become the show, not the sideshow.
Instead of talking about the cost of living, he joked about cheeseburgers at his Florida resort costing $5,000. Instead of addressing the Iran war, and acknowledging his broken promise to stay out of international conflict, he bragged that America was making tonnes of money by siphoning oil out of Venezuela. And the ‘America’ he’s talking about is billionaires and oil firms, not the regular joes and jills in his audience who are struggling at the pump.
Instead of talking about issues that directly affect his base, he sank deep into the culture wars, invoking language so brazenly racist that Enoch Powell might have thought unwise to say in public.
If the result is as bad for Trump as the polls predict, it will be almost entirely his fault. Not only has he failed to deliver on the promises he made during the campaign, he’s actively, deliberately taken steps that have made things worse. And voters don’t like that.
It’s tempting to say that like the Tories in 2024, this is an election that Trump lost, not one that Democrats won.
But that doesn’t tell the whole story. National voter enthusiasm for Democrats is low. But this campaign has seen some genuine future stars of the party rise to the surface. Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff looks like a Kennedy and has a way of combining soaring rhetoric and meticulous dissections of the Trump administration’s corruption that I’m certain we’ll see more of in the 2028 presidential campaign.
In Michigan, Abdul El Sayed surprised many by being a raging lefty but also being fluent, confident and credible enough to overcome the racist attacks on his faith to connect with moderates. Not all of them, but enough.
And if fresh-faced James Talarico managed to flip Texas, becoming the first Democrat senator the state has elected since 1988, the year before he was born, he’ll have achieved what many people thought impossibel. Not least because the campaign of his opponent, Ken Paxton – who could not look and sound more like a vampire’s familiar – was propped up with $168 million of Elon Musk’s money.
As polls opened, Trump was said to be optimistic about the results, hoping Republicans might just hold on to the House. But Trump does not like to lose. Historically, when he’s had his back against the wall, the result has been ugly and violent. And with his temper shorter than ever, the coming days could prove a dangerous time for America.
