Donald Trump’s rally tour was built to save the Republican majority in the coming midterms. Five days before the election, it’s doing far more for Democrats than any ad buy they could afford.
The tour opened in Oklahoma on Oct. 1, and Trump’s pitch has been remarkably consistent at nearly every stop since: pretend I’m on the ballot. “We win when I’m on the ballot,” he told a high school stadium in Vandalia, Ohio. It makes sense if you’re prioritizing one voter profile. Low-propensity MAGA voters have typically skipped the midterms, so if you put the man they turn out for in front of them, you hope they remember to show up.
Unfortunately for Trump and Republicans, it seems like everybody else heard the same instruction. The final NPR/PBS News/Marist poll found likely voters saying that their ballot is a vote against Trump rather than for him, by a 2-to-1 margin. Only half of Republicans say their vote is about supporting him, and Democrats lead among the most enthusiastic voters, 71% to 61%. Trump got the referendum he was seeking and is learning the bad reviews in real time.
Four weeks in, almost every race he’s visited has moved the wrong way. Ohio got one of the first stops. Jon Husted trailed Sherrod Brown by a single point in an InsiderAdvantage poll taken days before the Vandalia rally. By mid-October, the Cook Political Report’s poll had Brown up 6, and last week’s Fox News poll had him up 5. This morning, Fox News Power Rankings moved the race from a toss-up to Lean D.
Deep red South Carolina was supposed to be safe. No Democrat has won a Senate race there this century, and Darline Graham, appointed to the seat after her brother Lindsey’s death in July, led Annie Andrews by 4 in Rasmussen’s early-October poll and by 3 in Trafalgar’s in mid-month. This week’s New York Times/Siena poll has them tied at 48%, with Andrews taking 57% of independents, and Fox News Power Rankings now calls it a toss-up, down from Lean R.
Trump returned to the Palmetto State for a second rally this week, raising as many questions as it answered. One doesn’t rally in South Carolina twice in two weeks because things are going well. Mississippi, where he also stopped to campaign, slid from Solid R to Likely R in the same update.
Republicans are trailing in three more Senate races, according to CNN’s most recent polls. Abdul El-Sayed’s lead over Mike Rogers is up to 7 points from 3 in CNN’s early-September survey. Kansas hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1932, but Democrat Adam Hamilton is ahead of Roger Marshall by 4. And in Texas, CNN puts James Talarico up 6 on Ken Paxton, a week after a Fox News poll had them tied. Trump has campaigned in Michigan, Kansas, and Texas multiple times this month. Is the polling dip a correlation or causation? Either way, it’s not good.
Trump called El-Sayed a “jihadist Muslim Brotherhood member” again and again during a Port Huron, Michigan, rally this weekend. He claimed the Democratic candidate would have to pass through a metal detector to get into the Senate, and told Jewish voters who back El-Sayed they should be ashamed of themselves. Bishara Bahbah, who founded Arab Americans for Trump and ran the outreach that won Trump real ground in Michigan two years ago, condemned the clearly Islamophobic comment. Rogers spent that same morning on Meet the Press explaining that he’s never called his opponent a terrorist.
Two days later in Corpus Christi, while stumping for Paxton, Trump spent a long stretch on his false claim that Talarico is a vegan who throws up after eating meat. He called him “Tala-Freak-O,” floated mental illness as an explanation for Talarico’s bout with the flu, and acted out Talarico at a barbecue with a hand-to-mouth pantomime (”I love the meat!”) that a good chunk of the internet took for a blowjob. Seriously.
Trump reminded the same rally crowd of his promise of $5,000 checks to every adult if Republicans hold both chambers. He then invited them to spend it at Mar-a-Lago as his guests, and said $5,000 would buy maybe a hamburger and a small dessert at his club. He wasn’t sure it would cover even that. “That’s not a good place if you’re price-conscious,” he added. The White House had spent the previous week calling Barack Obama a snob over a Cheesecake Factory joke. Only twenty-six percent of the country currently approves of how Trump is handling the economy.
Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini argued the Grand Old Party’s case this week when he noted that the people who get offended at a jihadist smear or wince at a blow job slash meat pantomime were never going to vote Republican anyway, so these rallies cost the Republicans nothing. Makes sense for its effect on Democratic voters, but the crucial independent vote is an entirely different matter. Annie Andrews is getting 57% of them in South Carolina, Sherrod Brown has a 15-point edge with them in Ohio, and James Talarico is winning them by anywhere from 28 to 38 points depending on the poll. None of those people are at the rally, but the clips still find them.
Somebody in Trump’s orbit seems to have noticed. On Thursday, after 25 rallies in 19 states, Trump scrapped his weekend stops in Salina, Kan., and Dubuque, Iowa, and swapped them for tele-rallies.
“I’m not going to Kansas because he’s doing very well,” he told reporters during a tarmac gaggle, while the senator he’s talking about is trailing by 4 in CNN’s latest poll. Asked whether he was feeling all right, Trump answered that the reporter was disgusting and looked like hell. Jamal Simmons offered a likelier reason for the scrapped rallies on CNN’s Outfront: the latest internal poll came back, and “Trump is not helping. In fact, probably he’s hurting,” and the campaigns are keeping him away.
“Pretend I’m on the ballot” is Trump’s open admission that the MAGA movement is his and his only. His most loyal voters still show up for him, but they don’t show up the same way for Darline Graham or Jon Husted. But the voters who absolutely can’t stand Trump turn out against whoever is sharing the rally stage with Trump. He might be able to deliver the hardcore MAGA set to Roger Marshall for one Saturday in Salina, but the net effect is getting more anti-Trump voters to turn out for Adam Hamilton.
Trump was convinced that he was the salve to GOP midterm woes, but it sure looks like he’s the poison.