With the midterms just over a week away, Donald Trump is pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into last-minute ads and rallies in close-fought Senate races in seven seats: Texas, Maine, Michigan, Ohio, Alaska, Iowa and Kansas.
Republican spending on Georgia and North Carolina has slowed in recent days, suggesting party strategists are losing faith in winning these races, though Trump has not given up and will be visiting both states.
If Democrats can hold the seats they have and flip four, they would gain control of the US Senate. Polling suggests that Democrats are favorites to win back the House of Representatives, where they need to flip three Republican seats to gain control. But as Trump’s popularity sinks – his approval rating is down to just 31 per cent in the latest Reuters poll – so the Senate map has looked increasingly competitive and Republicans are playing defence.
To be clear, it will be an uphill battle for Democrats to win the Senate. Opinion polls have a margin of error of 3 per cent, and if that margin favours Republicans, they could break Democrats’ hearts once again. And yet. Farmers have been walloped by rising diesel costs, which have soared because the US/Israeli strikes against Iran have led to less crude oil passing through the Strait of Hormuz. Fertiliser costs, tied to fuel, have also risen. Producing hay has become far more expensive and farmers, traditionally a bastion of support for Republicans, are financially stressed.
Trump declared at a rally in Kansas on Monday that his Agriculture Department would provide $8bn (£6bn) in economic aid to farmers across America hurt by high diesel prices – without saying why prices have increased.
Trump’s campaign schedule offers the biggest clues to what Republicans are trying to achieve in the final frantic days. Republicans close to the campaign strategy say the President is focusing on rural America because internal polling shows soft support from men 55 and younger in these areas – the very same bloc which was crucial to Trump’s 2024 victory. At 80 years old, the President is criss-crossing the country trying to shore up support, even though he personally is not on the ballot, desperate to avoid becoming a lame duck President facing hearings and investigations from a Democrat-controlled Congress.
His campaigning is nothing if not energetic. This week alone, he has visited Kansas, North Carolina, South Carolina and Iowa, with Georgia and Michigan this weekend to be followed by a return visit to Texas early next week.
Ah, Texas. This is the Senate race where Elon Musk is pouring tens of millions into trying to defeat Democratic candidate James Talarico, a young seminarian from the state legislature, who is in a toss-up race against Trump-backed controversial Republican state attorney-general Ken Paxton. The sprawling, oil rich state of more than 30 million people would be a prize indeed if Talarico could capture it.
A backlash amongst Hispanic voters against the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement policies could help Talarico. Yet Republican ads are hammering Talarico for his previous comments that God is non-binary, and that there are six genders. Talarico is focusing on rising prices and what he calls a corrupt system which separates the wealthy from the working people. Trump is leaning into Republican efforts to portray Talarico as weird and ultra-progressive.
In ruby-red Kansas, a state Trump won by 16 per cent in 2024, Trump spent Monday night in the closing stretch of the midterm campaign warning that the US will “burn” like France if Democrats win. Why? Because opinion polls suggest that incumbent Republican senator Roger Marshall, who won by 11 per cent in 2020, is in the fight of his political life. A Midwestern rural state, in the heart of the Bible Belt, Kansas has not elected a Democrat to the US Senate in 94 years. Yet Democratic candidate Adam Hamilton, the pastor of a Methodist megachurch, is making headway by campaigning against Trump’s tariffs, rising gas and diesel prices, and what he calls the President’s “erratic leadership”.
In 2004, the journalist Thomas Frank wrote a seminal book called Whatever Happened to Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, exploring why voters in his home state supported Republican candidates whose economic policies benefited the wealthy and not the working classes. Frank argued that Republicans used wedge issues like abortion and gun control to distract from their true agenda of tax cuts for the wealthy and corporate America.
In 2026, no amount of wedge issues can obscure the economic facts – Trump’s war with Iran and his tariffs have pushed up costs. Cultural issues still have resonance in conservative states, though. At the Kansas rally headlined by Trump, Marshall warned that his opponent Hamilton was “too woke” for the state because he supports gay pride marches – drawing boos from the crowd.
Can cultural issues, which worked so well for Republicans in 2024 – remember the famous “Kamala Harris is for they/them, Trump is for you” ad – resonate more strongly than financial facts when Americans vote?
“You’re really sort of – I hate to say it – you’re sort of trending toward the purple,” the President told his supporters in Kansas on Monday as he stumped for Marshall. The governor of the state is a Democrat, after all. Can Kansas make political history by electing a Democrat to the Senate on 3 November or are Democrats’ hopes of taking Kansas and the Senate vastly inflated by flawed polls which can’t accurately measure Trump voters?
Donald Trump is betting on the latter, and he’s defied the odds before.