Donald Trump has blown hot and cold on the midterm elections. Sometimes, the President doesn’t seem to care much about them at all: his name is not on the ballot, and his term will continue through to January 2029. But in the final weeks of the campaign, Trump finally seems to have become engaged with the elections – and he is suddenly facing a new, very embarrassing, problem.
In the month of October, Trump has rallied in Texas (twice), Oklahoma, Alabama, Ohio (twice), Nebraska, Tennessee, Alaska, Montana, New York and Kentucky. That is a punishing schedule for an 80-year-old man also responsible for running the government of the world’s largest superpower during wartime.
But there is something else notable about that list of states: Trump won every single one of them (bar New York) by double-digit margins in the presidential general election just two years ago. Most of these states are the Republican heartlands.
But in some of them, the Republicans are in trouble. Trump beat Kamala Harris in Kansas by a margin of 16 points, but as he heads there tonight its Senate race is now a toss-up. Even Nebraska – which Trump won by 20 points – has an outside chance of electing someone who isn’t a Republican. The Republican Party is not fighting to win, so much as it is trying to make sure that its loss is merely bad, rather than devastating.
The way it is using Donald Trump plays into this. Republican strategists know that Trump is deeply unpopular in the country at large – his approval is at 32 per cent – and is mostly keeping him out of the usual swing states. The theory is that Trump can do his thing in states that are usually safely Republican, that voted for him heavily just two years ago, and hopefully can energise the remaining faithful so that they turn out to the polls.
It is a strategy that makes sense on paper, not least because it feeds into the fragile ego of Trump – a man who loves to give long, rambling speeches at rallies, and who loves to boast about the size of the audience he can pull into them.
There is one major problem, though: even in the reddest of red states, Trump rallies in 2026 seem to have a problem with empty seats.
As the camera panned around the San Antonio’s Freeman Coliseum as Trump spoke earlier this month, anyone looking at the crowd would see the upper tier was sparsely populated. Trump himself noticed from the podium, blustering to explain away the gaps like a schoolchild claiming they really did have a girlfriend, only she goes to another school. In Canada.
“Look at this place. Every corner. They will say they spotted an empty seat,” Trump said. “You know, there are lines that are two miles long outside. They can’t get in.”
Even this was better than Trump’s rally in Kentucky, a state he won by 30 points, on Saturday, where the entire upper level of the arena was left completely empty, leading the New York Times to note a comment from an anonymous staffer, who “said they had expected a larger audience than was on hand”.
Rallies are not attended by floating voters or people who vote for the lesser of two evils – the people who go to these events know that they will be queuing up for hours, will have to go through security screening and then will have to wait again for Trump to start speaking. Given Trump’s meandering speaking style, that might take hours, too.
Previously, when Trump’s approval has fallen among his less committed voters, his Maga faithful have stuck with him. Now, though, his crowds seem to be thinning out. This isn’t Trump’s first inauguration, where the President desperately pretended to have got a record-breaking crowd in the left-wing, liberal city of Washington DC.
Instead, this is Trump failing to pack out relatively small venues in deep-red states. Trump’s base stuck with him through “grab ‘em by the pussy”, through Russiagate, through election denial and January 6. Now, they seem to be losing interest.
Few things will hit Trump harder than the idea that he can’t thrill a crowd of his supporters any more – but those who wish to succeed him as president will be taking notice: if Trump can’t pack out an arena any more, perhaps the Maga coalition won’t outlive the Trump presidency, after all.