History will be against President Donald Trump when he tries to hold on to his control of Congress after this year’s midterm elections.
From pressuring state Republicans to redraw their congressional districts to create more GOP-leaning seats in the House to underscoring his policy and political wins on the campaign trail and in prime-time TV addresses, Trump has been trying to defy history. The late Jimmy Carter was the most recent president to keep control of Congress after his first and only midterm elections in 1978.
“We’ve done a great job, but for whatever reason, and nobody’s been able to give me an answer, when you win the presidency, you seem to lose the midterms, even if you win the presidency by a lot and you do a great job as president,” Trump said this month at the White House. “I want to win, and winning the midterms is important. People want us to win the midterms, and I think we have great spirit. We should win the midterms.”
To that end, the “single most important thing” Trump can do to help Republicans before the 2026 midterm elections, according to former Republican National Committee Communications Director Doug Heye, is to demonstrate that he understands the “economic anxiety voters are feeling and is working to alleviate it.”
“Voters will give a politician some leniency on what potential solutions may be, but only if they sense the politician gets the underlying issue,” Heye told the Washington Examiner. “That’s it.”
However, Trump’s approval rating regarding his response to inflation and the cost of living is, on average, net negative 27 percentage points, compared to his overall average approval of net negative 10 points, according to RealClearPolitics.
At the same time, Democrats have a small advantage in early generic congressional ballot polling, averaging a three-point lead over Republicans a year before the midterm elections. Thirty-eight percent of respondents, on average, told pollsters the country is headed in the right direction, and 55% considered it to be on the wrong track.
Against that polling backdrop, the Trump administration has resumed disclosing economic data that were postponed due to October’s federal government shutdown, with the reports yielding mixed results. For example, last month’s consumer price index unexpectedly decreased by 2.7% in contrast to that of last November, but last month’s unemployment rate unexpectedly increased to a four-year high of 4.6%.
Fellow Republican strategist John Feehery agreed with Heye with respect to the importance of the economy to Trump and the midterm elections, arguing, “There’s a lot of economic uncertainty, and Trump has to ‘appreciate’ and respond to it.”
“The president needs to take a cold, hard look at his tariff policies and give people some economic certainty, especially business owners, so they can invest in the American economy, which they’re now not really doing,” Feehery told the Washington Examiner. “It’s not just about the rhetoric, it’s also about the policies. And while it’s important for the president to go out and talk to the American people, he also needs to listen to them too.”
With Trump expressing pride after last month’s off-year elections that Republicans underperform when he is not on the ballot, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles voiced confidence that the GOP can upend historical trends by metaphorically putting Trump on the 2026 ballot.
“Typically, in the midterms, it’s not about who’s sitting at the White House; you localize the election, and you keep the federal officials out of it,” Wiles told The Mom’s View last month. “We’re actually going to turn that on its head and put him on the ballot. I haven’t quite broken it to him yet, but he’s going to campaign like it’s 2024 again.”
Former President George W. Bush’s White House press secretary, Ari Fleischer, agreed that Trump “must nationalize the 2026 midterms” because, simultaneously, “Democratic turnout remains high because they will make 2026 a contest against Trump.”
“The president needs to campaign everywhere and convince especially ‘his’ voters that we won’t keep the White House in 2028 if people don’t show up to make their down payment in the 2026 midterm,” Fleischer told the Washington Examiner. “People must show up in person to vote and make a down payment next November so we can keep the White House in 2028.”
Feehery similarly agreed, but because, to him, the strategy is a do-or-die political necessity for the GOP.
“It’s very good that the White House is acknowledging that this election coming up is about the president, and they’re going all in on helping the Republicans because they have to mobilize those Trump voters,” he said. “Without mobilizing those strong voters, they’re dead.”
Regardless, Trump not only needs to appeal to Republicans but also counter voters’ policy concerns, including those related to healthcare, according to Feehery.
“It’s not enough to do the drug stuff. He’s got to talk about the insurance companies,” he said. “If the election is about healthcare, and we don’t have a healthcare plan, we’re going to lose. Healthcare is a huge part of affordability, and I think it’s important to blame the Democrats for what they did (regarding the Obamacare framework) because they deserve to be blamed. But it’s not just enough to blame the Democrats. We’ve got to come up with our own plan.”
This month, Trump announced that he would convene a meeting with healthcare insurance companies early in 2026 as Obamacare insurance enrollees experience premium rises because Republicans are poised to permit Obamacare pandemic-era tax credits to expire at the end of the year.
“I’m going to call a meeting of the big insurance companies that have gotten so rich,” he said. “I’m going to see if they get their price down, to put it very bluntly.”
In addition, Feehery cited immigration as another policy concern, contending, “if we scare off every immigrant, we’re not going to be able to get enough workers to get the economy really going again,” and that the Trump administration’s “enforcement actions are becoming politically disastrous for Republicans.”
“These tariff wars are hurting our voters,” he said. “Our farmers are getting killed. A lot of businesses, they have all these tax incentives to build factories here in the United States, but they don’t know what the tariff regime is.”
Although Trump is unlikely to accept Feehery’s advice, his administration has recognized the political problems instigated by his tariffs, announcing a $12 billion bailout this month to aid farmers during his trade war and in November, duty exemptions for some imported products, including coffee, bananas, and beef.
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Nevertheless, Trump has remained adamant that his economic policies are the right ones, saying this month that the unemployment rate is high because his administration is “reducing the government workforce by numbers that have never been seen before.”
“[One hundred percent] of new jobs are in the private sector, and I could reduce unemployment to 2%, 1%, or practically zero by just hiring people into the federal government, even though those jobs are not necessary, which is what we had before,” he said.