A growing number of congressional Republicans are keeping President Donald Trump at arm’s length, and at times rebuking him directly, as polls suggest a looming November blue wave.
From immigration to the Iran war, Republicans are signaling anxiety that the Trump administration’s policies could cost them with voters. The steps are often subtle and include several House GOP candidates removing mentions of the president from their websites.
In other cases, Republicans are looking to disagree loudly with Trump. This week, Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-FL) released a commercial in front of the White House warning the president that “some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far.”
“The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today,” Salazar said in the straight-to-camera ad. Salazar represents a Miami-area district in Florida that is three-quarters Latino.
Finding daylight with the president, particularly in a midterm year when approval ratings typically drop, is not unusual for either party.
Democrats found themselves in the same situation in 2024 with President Joe Biden as their nominee, and to this day, some won’t campaign with Vice President Kamala Harris, who replaced Biden on the ticket and lost.
But this cycle, Republicans are doing so with unique political headwinds, chief among them the war in Iran. On Tuesday, three new House Republicans broke with their party and voted to end the seven-month conflict.
Two of them, Reps. Zach Nunn and Mariannette Miller-Meeks, are from the agriculture-heavy state of Iowa, where farmers have expressed concern about the war’s impact on diesel and fertilizer prices.
Largely missing from that shift is direct criticism of the president. Instead, Republicans have framed a wind-down of the war as a matter of lowering prices or congressional oversight.
In the case of immigration, Salazar is an outlier in her outspokenness but hardly alone in suggesting discomfort with the aggressive tactics of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Last week, Rep. Monica De La Cruz (R-TX) began airing a commercial highlighting that she helped the wife of a detained DACA recipient.
DACA is the Obama-era program that allows immigrants who arrived in the United States illegally as children to receive protected status.
Other swing-state Republicans have stuck with Trump entirely or sought a middle ground. Rep. Ashley Hinson, the GOP nominee for Senate in Iowa, released an ad touting her work with Democrats on veteran care, before flashing Trump on the screen to tell voters that she’s helping him “take on health insurance companies to lower your costs.”
Notably, Hinson skipped a Friday rally with Vice President JD Vance in the state, citing a previously scheduled event.
In a play for the middle, some Republicans are also removing photos of Trump or “America First” messaging from their sites as part of their pivot to the general election. The redesigns often emphasize the GOP candidates as “independent” voices for their district or state.
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The balancing act is taking place as polls show an increasingly competitive map for Democrats, who are heavy favorites to take back the House in November. The Senate is more of a reach and would require Democrats to net four seats, including multiple on historically Republican terrain, but the war in Iran is raising GOP concern that even red states such as Kansas are newly in play.
The same is true of tariffs as Trump wages a trade war with Canada. Recently, Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) gently pushed back on the president after he threatened to stop doing business with Canadian aerospace company Bombardier, a major employer in Kansas.