President Donald Trump is leaning into transactional politics in the final month of the 2026 midterm campaign, tying his administration directly to economic benefits in states that could determine control of Congress.
This week alone, Trump has promoted billions of dollars in proposed investments in Alaska and Iowa, redirected $20 million in Department of Homeland Security funding toward government-paid television advertising, and begun sending $500 checks to roughly 1 million people the administration says were overcharged for Affordable Care Act coverage under former President Joe Biden.
Trump is also taking the pitch on the road. The president traveled to Texas on Thursday to tour a Peterbilt Motors truck factory in Denton ahead of a campaign rally in neighboring Oklahoma. A White House official told Fox Business that Peterbilt’s parent company has seen a boom since Trump imposed tariffs on foreign trucks last November.
All of that comes on top of Trump’s promise last month that every American adult will get a $5,000 “dividend” if Republicans retain control of Congress.
The burst of activity amounts to an explicit effort to connect Trump and the Republican Party with material benefits for voters, just as early voting gets underway. It also comes as Trump has publicly acknowledged the White House is not doing a good job of promoting its accomplishments.
“We’ve done a great job and the thing I haven’t done a good job with is explaining it to people,” Trump told reporters at the White House before departing for Texas.
“I think the press isn’t covering us,” he said. “ We have the best economic numbers of any president in the history of our country, and yet people don’t know about it because the press won’t talk about it.”
Pollster David Paleologos said transactional politics can motivate voters when they believe they are receiving something concrete, but can backfire when an announcement looks like an election-season promise rather than a lasting benefit.
“What usually happens is a political party tries to earn the trust,” Paleologos told the Washington Examiner. “If you don’t earn trust during that campaign year, then you resort to what’s happening now, which is an announcement timed right before early voting in earnest starts.”
Paleologos, who runs the Suffolk University Political Research Center, added that “transactional politics can be effective or it can boomerang if voters feel that this is a lame promise.”
The White House pushed back against the idea that Trump’s recent activity represents a late campaign pivot. Instead, White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said that Trump started “carrying out an aggressive, pro-growth economic agenda on day one, which has been and will continue to deliver tangible wins for the American people.
“This president is delivering on his promise to stop Biden’s inflation crisis, drive economic growth, and create jobs, and there will be more to come in the next two years,” Rogers told the Washington Examiner.
Republican strategist John Feehery, a former aide to House Speaker Dennis Hastert, similarly argued that Trump should continue making the case through Election Day.
“This will be a close election and anything he can do to get his voters out will be positive,” Feehery said. “Every vote counts.”
But with Democrats holding an average 8-point advantage in generic congressional ballot polling, Paleologos said the question is whether voters believe they are actually “getting something” from Trump and Republicans.
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“If voters are getting a check in the mail signed by Donald Trump, that has some immediate gratification and benefit,” Paleologos said.
“A promise is a promise. … But voters are also going to have to weigh that and say, ‘Is this the same promise that the president made about lowering gas prices or presiding over no wars as president and bringing peace to so many regions of the world? Is that the promise that we’re getting here or is this a real promise that speaks to the voters in these particular areas.’”