Republicans to Trump: We need you on the campaign trail

Fresh off their staggering electoral losses this month, Republicans are urging President Donald Trump to start hitting the campaign trail for them next year with control of Congress on the line.

And in a sign of their rising anxiety over Democrats' renewed enthusiasm, the requests for rallies have started rolling in.

Wisconsin GOP Chair Brian Schimming said Trump’s team is “certainly aware” he wants to see the president visit the purple state next year, where he won by his thinnest margin in 2024 and his party is defending two competitive House seats and trying to win statewide races. Schimming plans to reup his ask when visiting Washington this week. In Tennessee, where Democrats are working to flip a House seat in a special election next month, Republican Matt Van Epps’ campaign requested the president hold an in-person rally in the deep-red district he won by 20 points last year. (Trump held a tele-rally for Van Epps last Thursday night.) Rep. Derrick Van Orden has told Trump he wants the president to campaign with him in his western Wisconsin swing district next year.

Depressed turnout is a persistent problem in non-presidential years. And Republicans acknowledge that Trump, whose approval ratings are underwater, can be a liability as well as an asset.

But he remains a singular motivator for the MAGA base, according to interviews with 11 Republican Party chairs, officials and operatives across the Rust and Sun Belt states. They said Republicans must step up their voter-outreach efforts heading into the midterms, when Democrats need only to net three House seats to regain control of the lower chamber. And they’re looking to Trump to be their triple threat — with his trademark rallies, endorsements and deep campaign coffers.

By comparison, Trump largely avoided campaigning for Republicans in this month’s off-cycle elections, later blaming poor candidate quality for the party’s withering defeats. He avoided showing up in New Jersey, where GOP gubernatorial contender Jack Ciattarelli was projected to lose by a slim margin and ended up getting routed by double digits. He never uttered the name of the Virginia Republican candidate for governor, who lost by nearly 16 points. And he lagged miles behind California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s fundraising juggernaut that helped propel a Democrat-backed redistricting measure to swift victory.

Now, even as the GOP descends into in-fighting over the release of files connected to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and state-level Republicans throughout the country buck Trump’s redistricting push, his party is clamoring for ever more of the president.

“Trump is the ace in the hole,” said Tom Eddy, the Republican chair in Erie County, Pa., a presidential bellwether Trump won in 2016 and 2024, but where Democrats swept key local races earlier this month. “It’s a matter of which party is more motivated. And right now, obviously, the Democrats are.”

A Republican strategist who works on North Carolina races, granted anonymity to speak candidly, painted a dire portrait of the party’s stakes as Democrat Roy Cooper makes the party’s best shot at flipping a Senate seat next year.

“Any Republican not preparing for a turnout challenge in 2026 is whistling by the graveyard,” the strategist said. “If Trump is on the ballot, Republican turnout is strong. And if he’s not, it craters. It collapses. There’s an entire group of people who are Trump voters, but Trump alone. There seems to be no way to get them to the ballot."

James Blair, Trump’s top political director, said on a post-election episode of POLITICO’s “The Conversation” that the president will be “far more involved in the midterms.” Trump has already endorsed the majority of House incumbents and across many Senate races, though he’s yet to clear the field in Texas, Georgia and New Hampshire, where fierce primaries are underway. Two of his top political operatives — Trump 2024 co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita and pollster Tony Fabrizio — are advising campaigns across the country.

“With a lot of campaigning next year, with a lot of resources in the right districts for the right candidates,” Republicans’ turnout woes are “an overcomeable problem,” Blair said on “The Conversation.”

Blair cautioned that victory shouldn’t be entirely Trump’s responsibility, adding, “The president will campaign a lot to get people out” but “candidates still have to connect with these voters, too.”

Blair, LaCivita and a White House spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

Republicans brushed aside Trump’s recent hands-off approach, noting the party lost in blue-leaning states where the president is unpopular. But they saw warning signs in the margins. Turnout data shows Republicans lost ground in the places that voted most for Trump last year, suggesting his voters were less likely to cast ballots outside of a presidential year.

Across Virginia, in precincts where Trump won at least 80 percent of the vote in 2024, turnout this year fell below 70 percent of last year’s levels, according to a POLITICO breakdown of the results. Statewide, that figure was 77 percent.

In southwest Virginia’s Buchanan County, where Trump won more than 85 percent of the vote, turnout for the gubernatorial election was less than 60 percent of the prior year. Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger received about 73 percent of former Vice President Kamala Harris’ vote total while GOP Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears got just 57 percent of the votes Trump had received.

Republicans shrugged off Earle-Sears as a weak candidate and attributed the results to typical swings toward the opposition party in off-year elections. But as Trump himself has suggested, it indicates Republicans have yet to figure out how to replicate his coalition when he’s not on the ballot.

Republican officials and operatives say Trump is still the “biggest base motivator” they have — a nod to his singularity and to the uncertainty of who else in the GOP has the gravitas to command his MAGA movement.

“We’ve got to make it clear what the stakes of it are — because they don’t want to go back to another Joe Biden,” Schimming said, acknowledging the party’s challenge in reaching irregular voters.

Republicans across battleground states are working to remind their voters of economic pain under the Biden administration — and warning that Democratic control of even one chamber of Congress could lead to investigations that could distract from, if not derail, Trump’s agenda.

They’re also pushing early voting as a way to reach lower-propensity voters and to keep them engaged outside presidential cycles, even as Trump tries to end the practice.

Republicans acknowledge some candidates would benefit from distancing themselves from the president on unpopular policies, like cutting health care benefits and imposing tariffs, in a midterm election that will serve as a referendum on his second term. Their concerns hark back to 2018, when Democrats picked up 40 House seats in a repudiation of Trump’s first term.

After Democrats rode affordability messaging to wins in last week’s elections, Republicans said they need to stay focused on cutting costs. To that end, the White House laid out in a Friday memo how the administration is working to lower prices.

Some Republicans also said Trump needs to focus less on his grievances, like putting millions of dollars from his political operation into primarying GOP Rep. Thomas Massie in a safe seat in Kentucky over the lawmaker’s opposition to Republicans’ megalaw and his push to release the Justice Department files on Epstein.

“Don’t waste your time going after Thomas Massie,” said Todd Gillman, a Republican Party district chair in Michigan, where the GOP is looking to snag the Senate seat being left open by retiring Democrat Gary Peters, hold the House seat Rep. John James is leaving to run for governor and wrest back control of statewide offices.

Instead, he said, “come to Michigan and fight for John James’ seat so we don’t lose it.”

Jessica Piper, Elena Schneider, Andrew Howard, Sam Benson and Liz Crampton contributed to this report.