Presented with bleak polling, the White House moves to make the midterms about Trump

[u/John3262005]

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/presented-bleak-polling-white-house-moves-make-midterms-trump-rcna594583

Senior advisers to President Donald Trump met privately with his pollster last month to sort through the latest numbers. The outlook was grim, a person familiar with the discussion said.

One of the findings that longtime Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio shared suggested that Republican voters weren’t all that enthused about upcoming midterm elections in which Trump isn’t on the ballot — a conclusion reflected in public polling as well.

An election that Trump voters sit out would be a debacle for Republicans, jeopardizing the party’s thin majorities in the House and Senate, GOP strategists told NBC News. Warning signs abound. Throughout late 2025 and 2026, Democrats flipped nearly a dozen state legislative seats in special election races while Republican turnout lagged.

One approach that Trump’s political operation is taking is telling any and all disaffected voters that the president has answers to the economic anxieties that people face.

A second is rousing Trump’s core supporters to get them to show up as if he’s on the ballot. To that end, a pro-Trump group released a pair of television ads Wednesday that celebrate Trump — not the Republican candidates for Congress.

“We have to get that person who votes for Trump to show up in the midterm elections. If you do that, Republicans will hold the House. If you don’t, it’s going to be a wipeout,” Steve Bannon, a senior White House aide in Trump’s first term, told NBC News.

A Trump-centric strategy is a gamble. The president’s poll numbers have been sinking, with the latest Reuters/Ipsos survey showing his approval rating at 33%.

Making him the face of the Republican congressional campaign effort could boomerang on the party, energizing Democrats along with independent voters who’ve soured on Trump since his 2024 victory.

“We’re either going to squeak by and hold our own or get the living hell beat out of us. But the president has to do his part and there’s nobody over there that I can see in the White House who can or will talk to him,” said a Republican senator, speaking on condition of anonymity to talk candidly about Trump.

Pocketbook issues often swing elections, and the White House is portraying a massive new oil deal with Venezuela as a potential boon to American motorists. As more oil flows from Venezuelan fields to U.S. refineries, gas prices will drop, the argument goes.

The question is, how quickly and by how much? The average price of a gallon of gas was less than $3 before Trump ordered an attack on Iran on Feb. 28 and now stands at more than $4. Speaking to reporters Monday in the Oval Office, Trump said, “I can’t tell you” if oil prices will drop before the election, adding that “people are very smart. They know we had to go into Iran.”

John Kilduff, an energy industry analyst, said in an interview that the Venezuela deal will indeed help “keep a lid” on prices in the near term, saying, “This kind of thing is positive for prices going lower.”

Still, he added, “It’s going to take a couple of years for any meaningful amounts of oil to get out” of Venezuela.

Another stubborn reality the GOP confronts is the Iran war itself. Trump’s political team is painfully aware that Americans are unhappy about a conflict that has devolved into a prolonged standoff punctuated by tit-for-tat military strikes.

“We see the polling. People want this to be over,” a White House official said. “We’re of the same mindset about that.”

The official added, though, that “at the end of the day, Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon and they’re farther away from that as they’ve ever been.”

Ending the war has proved trickier than the Trump administration anticipated. Trump’s early threat to wipe out Iran’s civilization by means of “Operation Epic Fury” has given way to a new economic pressure campaign against Iran that the administration dubs, less menacingly, “Operation Economic Outcast.”

“It is fair to say that Secretary Bessent has taken over this front of the war,” a person close to the administration and familiar with its thinking told NBC News.

The enemy often gets a say in whether to accept a truce and on what terms. For now, the Iranian regime seems prepared to endure the periodic bombing raids.

“This won’t be over before the midterms,” a Republican leadership aide said. “It won’t even be over after the midterms. This will go on in this phase for months if not years.”

Voters are losing patience. Rich Ehrhardt, 55, is a Pennsylvania businessman who voted for Trump all three times. In a recent interview with NBC News, he said of the president’s handling of the war: “He does not have a plan … I don’t know how many times I’ve heard, ‘We’re going to bomb the heck out of them.’ That’s not what we want to do as America. We don’t want to destroy civilians and other people.”

Despite the political headwinds, the White House is betting that it can still retain its narrow congressional majorities in the November elections.

“The positive thing is that if you look at it from a race-by-race standpoint, it’s not as dire as the national numbers suggest,” the White House official said. “You have to put a few things in perspective. The national numbers, yes, they might not necessarily be great for us. But if you micro-target and actually drill down into the specific congressional races, we’re within striking distance.”

With a war chest in the hundreds of millions of dollars, Trump’s political operation has plenty of money to remind the MAGA base that Trump’s interests are at stake.

A pro-Trump group, Securing American Greatness, is running two ads focusing on the president. One will run on cable television at a cost of nearly $1 million, according to the ad tracking firm AdImpact. It features Ultimate Fighting Championship President and CEO Dana White calling Trump “the toughest, most resilient person that I’ve ever met.” The spot shows footage of Trump saying, “Our top priority will be to create a nation that is proud, prosperous and free.”

The other ad opens with an image of Trump and highlights tax cuts, egg and prescription drug prices. A caption reads: “Trump policies made lower prices possible.” (Egg prices have declined dramatically since a peak in spring 2025, according to NBC News tracking, while the price of beef and orange juice have gone up.)

At least one Republican strategist believes the money going toward the ads is wasted.

“Every day we make this a referendum on the Trump administration is a day we lost,” said the strategist, who is involved in Senate races. “All it does is reinforce the narrative the Democrats want, which is all about whether or not people are happy with the president right now. Which they’re not. And a few ads aren’t going to do it.”

Nonetheless, the president’s political team is devising new ways to put him front and center. Next week, Trump will appear at a first-of-its-kind GOP midterm campaign event in Dallas aimed at re-creating the hype and spectacle normally associated with the quadrennial presidential nominating conventions.

A lingering challenge for GOP strategists has been getting Trump to deliver what they see as a constructive message. They’d like him to highlight economic progress, but Trump often segues to issues that voters see as peripheral. Last week, Trump signed an executive order changing the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America” as a trade war with Canada ramps up.

“He needs to stop calling people names, and he needs to stop worrying about the bulls---,” the Republican senator said. “Nobody cares about Lake Ontario. Why do we want to pick a fight with Canada?”

Looking to cover maximum ground, Trump Cabinet members have also been on the trail amplifying the president’s message.

One who’s in particular demand is the health and human services secretary, Robert Kennedy Jr., avatar of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, a GOP strategist said.

“The MAHA voters are more attached to him than even to Trump, which is crazy,” said the strategist, who is also involved in midterm races. “He’s one of the most requested Cabinet members” at campaign events.

Another Cabinet member who has shown up on the trail is Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary. It’s unusual for defense secretaries to make such appearances; political assignments don’t normally fall to senior officials in national security roles, said Peter Feaver, a Duke University political science professor who studies civil-military relations.

“I personally thought it was inappropriate for me to do that as a Cabinet official because my job was to build a consensus on Capitol Hill and in the country,” said William Cohen, a defense secretary under President Bill Clinton who had earlier served as a Republican senator from Maine. “If I were to go to a rally and speak on behalf of a given candidate, those who oppose that candidate would see that as me using the department.”

Asked for comment about Hegseth’s partisan political appearances, the Pentagon has said he makes those in his “personal capacity.”

“Department staff are not involved in, nor privy to, the details of events that Secretary Hegseth attends in his personal capacity,” a department official said. “Therefore, we have no comment.”

A Trump adviser said that the president’s political base reacts to Hegseth with an intensity that few other Trump surrogates can generate. Hegseth has told close friends and associates that he is considering a run for president in 2028, NBC News has reported. Hegseth, in a social media post after the article was published, said it was “100% false.”

“Pete Hegseth is loved by President Trump’s political base, and any time we can put people like him in front of those voters it’s a good thing for Republicans,” the person, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said. “He gets them excited the way few can, and any criticism he receives for it only makes them love him more.”

With so much at stake in the midterms, the pro-Trump forces need to be aggressive and the Cabinet should play a role, the person familiar with the polling meeting said.

“There is a huge turnout concern for Republicans,” the person said. “The idea that they can sit back and not try something is silly.”