President Donald Trump has barnstormed the campaign trail ahead of the midterm elections as Republicans look to drive the MAGA base to the ballot box.
In the past eight days alone, Trump has traveled to Texas twice, Oklahoma, Ohio, Nebraska, and Alabama. On Friday, he is slated to visit New York before heading to Tennessee on Saturday, and Ohio once again early next week, per reports.
Midterm elections, which will decide which party controls the two chambers of Congress into 2029, are a little over three weeks away, and the president is certainly leaving it all on the table. And he has not been shy about his strategy, even telling the Republican base to vote as if he were on the ballot.
Polls have often shown Republicans behind Democrats in various races, although a series of recent Co/Efficient polls show Republicans running for Senate slightly ahead in key battleground states they are defending, like Iowa, Alaska, Maine, and Ohio, while tied for seats currently held by Democrats in New Hampshire and Michigan.
But as Trump 2024 campaign co-manager Chris LaCivita told Breitbart News Saturday on SiriusXM a few weeks back, polls are oftentimes unreliable “because they’re contrived.”
“They will deliberately go in and survey a larger pool of Democrat voters, maybe voters who aren’t as likely to vote as well, as opposed to likely voters, and it’s for a predetermined outcome. And what they always do is they keep this going early in the process. And here’s what the news organizations and the universities do: the news organizations they literally will use their subscription call line operation to make the surveys to call and ask the questions about the surveys. Okay, it’s ridiculous,” he said.
“Some of the universities use interns. You know you have to have a professional calling houses. You have to have the modeling that goes in trying to determine what you think turnout is going to look like, or do you let it float? I mean, there’s all of these strategic assumptions that go into designing a survey, and then of course the way you ask a question,” he added.
One key word LaCivita used is “turnout.” He later argued that Republicans, particularly the MAGA sect, have a larger pool of voters they can possibly motivate to vote than Democrats, and that these voters oftentimes do not show up for midterm elections the way that they do for presidential elections when Trump is literally on the ballot.
“Well, you know, we have a much larger pool of available voters to turn out, right… The Democrats have decided, as they always do, because they literally have nothing to run on, they just want to make it about Trump. You know, it’s [Trump Derangement Syndrome]. It’s ‘Stop Trump, stop Trump,’ and of course the president leans into it and says, ‘Yeah, make it about Trump. I’m on the ballot,'” Lacivita told Breitbart News Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle. “And that’s good for us because it also turns out those casual voters, right, who don’t always vote… in midterm elections. And one of the keys to success in 2024 tactically on the ground was in the battleground states, us identifying these casual voters and then turning them out… and you know that’s our goal this time.”
Put simply, if Republicans can drive MAGA to the polls in anything resembling a presidential election year, they increase their prospects of overcoming Democrat turnout to defend their Senate and House majorities.
Republicans currently hold a 53-47 seat majority in the Senate. Democrats would need to defend all seats they currently hold in battleground states, like Michigan and New Hampshire, and then flip four Republican-held seats to secure a majority and overcome Vice President JD Vance’s tie-breaking vote. That means they would need to win four of any of the races in North Carolina, Maine, Iowa, Alaska, Texas, Nebraska, or Ohio.
Democrats face an easier road to a majority in the House of Representatives, where they need six more seats to reach the magic number of 218.
Sen. Darline Graham’s (R-SC) victory in the South Carolina Republican primary runoff suggests that Trump’s strategy of a campaign blitz in the home stretch of the season could pay dividends for GOP candidates. Trump visited South Carolina to hold a rally for Graham between the Republican primary election and the runoff, and turnout for the runoff actually increased from the primary. Total votes cast rose from 335,555 to 368,898, according to New York Times data.
LaCivita offered some critical advice to Republican candidates in his conversation with Boyle.
“If you’re a Republican candidate and you’re thinking or contemplating, you know, maybe not embracing the president, you’re making a horrible mistake because you’ve got to be able to maximize your turnout, you got to be able to maximize those Trump voters and get them to vote,” he said.
“So having the president hit the trail and then he’ll be doing these tele-rallies, which are crazily effective, there’s no better person from our standpoint that can turn out voters than President Trump,” he added.
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