THE LOGIC BEHIND TRUMP’S ‘PRETEND I’M ON THE BALLOT’ APPEAL. In the 2024 presidential election, President Donald Trump won each of Iowa’s four congressional districts. He won the 1st District by eight points, the 2nd District by ten points, the 3rd District (which includes Des Moines) by four points, and the 4th District, in the far western part of the state, by a landslide of 31 points.
That — the place where he won by 31 points — is where Trump went Thursday, flying from Washington nearly three hours each way to hold a rally in Sioux City for Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-IA), the Republican who is in a close race for the Senate, and Zach Lahn, the Republican who is in a close race for governor.
Which raised the question: Why go to the place where Republicans are guaranteed a solid win? Why not campaign in a part of Iowa where the GOP needs help, needs to improve its performance?
The answer is low-propensity voters. There are a lot of Republican-leaning voters in the 4th District of Iowa who don’t go to the polls for every election, but turned out in 2024 to vote for Donald Trump. They are the kind who probably wouldn’t turn out for a midterm election in 2026 with no Trump on the ballot. The GOP challenge is how to get their votes this time.
“MAGA low-propensity voters are a sizable part of our low-propensity voters,” Jeff Kaufmann, the longtime chairman of the Iowa Republican Party, told me. “There is no way to turn them out without Trump himself. They don’t get out to vote when Trump is not on the ballot.”
Kaufmann asked the president to visit those voters where they live. “I said to the president, there is no mailer, no commercial, that can turn out the MAGA portion of our low-propensity voters,” Kaufmann recalled. Only Trump in person.
Iowa Republicans know this because appealing to low-propensity voters is how they’ve won elections before. “They literally carried our current governor [Republican Kim Reynolds] over the line,” Kaufmann said. “She will tell you that her reelection was because of the 4th District. We don’t win statewide races, not just governor and Senate but attorney general and state auditor, without turnout in the 4th District — especially during a midterm.”
It’s not just in Iowa. On Friday, Trump traveled to Fort Myers, Florida, in a district he won by 31 points. On Saturday, he traveled to Perry, Georgia, in a district he also won by 31 points. And on Sunday, he traveled to Port Huron, Michigan, in a district he won by 32 points.
It’s not that Republicans are in trouble in those places. Far from it. It’s that Trump is aggressively trying to attract the voters who only come out when he is on the ballot — by asking them to vote like he is.
Trump has been widely mocked for asking voters to “pretend I’m on the ballot.” The New Yorker said it shows that “only one subject truly animates Donald Trump on the campaign trail, and it is, of course…himself.” The Daily Beast called it a “desperate plea.” And at his rally in Detroit Saturday with former President Barack Obama, Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul el Sayed ridiculed Trump’s visit to Port Huron and sarcastically asked voters, “Please make sure to vote like Donald Trump is on the ballot.”
Despite what he said, it’s probably safe to assume el Sayed does not really want the 9th Congressional District of Michigan, which includes Port Huron, to vote like Trump is on the ballot, since voters there gave the president that 32-point victory in 2024.
There is research showing that a low-propensity voter strategy makes sense in a lot of places. A 2025 report from Pew Research found that nationwide, voters who were eligible to vote in 2020 and 2022 but did not vote, and then did vote in 2024 — those voters leaned strongly toward Trump. He won the 2024-only voters by 55% to Kamala Harris’s 41%. And this was not just a tiny group of people. Pew found that 2024-only voters made up 12% of the entire electorate in the presidential race that year. It made a big difference for Trump.
Now the president is trying to do the same thing in the context of a midterm election. And if Republicans are trying to turn out low-propensity voters, it makes sense to ask them to pretend that Trump is on the ballot. It might not work, or it might not work everywhere. But it is probably the Republican Party’s best shot at the moment. Speaking the day after the Sioux City rally, Jeff Kaufmann said, “I think we accomplished our goal, which was to energize turnout in the 4th District.”