Trump Wants Voters to Pretend He’s on the Ballot

The balance of commentary on the GOP’s midterm pep rally in Dallas has focused on President Donald Trump’s outlandish and unlikely scheme to bribe voters with a $5,000 payoff should the Republicans prevail in the midterms. That’s understandable, since Trump’s scheme is brazenly illegal—as was the case when Elon Musk promised a similarly sleazy $1 million “lottery” windfall to right-leaning voters in Wisconsin’s 2025 balloting for state Supreme Court justices. (The only material difference here is that Musk was in a position to deliver the promised bribe, while Trump very much is not.)

Yet such rank corruption is increasingly the Republican Party’s business model—which is why the mini-convention also featured blaring violations of the Hatch Act, with both Attorney General Todd Blanche and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent electioneering for the GOP in a register only marginally less corrupt than their boss’s spectacle of transactional grift. (In Bessent’s case, the bond markets reacted with an alacrity that our judicial system now conspicuously lacks.) Until we regain a viable system of genuine constitutional oversight, the most urgent question before our flailing political order is whether Trump’s pitch to voters is likely to work. By this, I don’t mean the president’s bribery ploy but the political appeal he also made in Dallas: “Pretend that I’m on the ballot” in November’s midterm elections. 

Sure, that’s a predictable come-on from a chief executive who sees all the basic operations of government as an extension of his own ego. At the same time, it’s a likely recipe to kill off any Republican prospects for keeping the party’s present governing trifecta intact. Trump is a stunningly unpopular president, reaching a nadir of approval in the low to mid 30s just last week. That’s why a strong contingent of vulnerable GOP candidates running in swing states were no shows to what Republicans were calling Dallas’s “Trump-a-palooza.” It’s also why a growing number of similarly situated Republican hopefuls have been scrubbing either the person of Trump or key elements of his governing agenda from their campaign websites. Pretending that Trump is on the ballot is pretty much the last thing they want to do. 

The strategy behind making the GOP midterms a referendum on Trump is a revival of the one that won him the 2024 election: target “low propensity” voters otherwise tuned out of politics with sops to their short-term self-interest. This is what yielded such pseudopopulist proposals as the cynically sunsetted “no tax on tips” revenue policy and deductions of interest on auto loans; it’s also the clear logic behind the $5,000 bribery scheme (which, like so many other gruesome features of our late-stage oligarchy, was previewed in Idiocracy). 

But the glaring problem with continuing to flog the low-propensity strategy is that midterm cycles simply don’t work that way: They run mostly on motivated base voters, who are paying very close attention to politics. (On top of which, of course, midterm balloting almost always favors the party that’s out of power in the Oval Office.) 

What’s more, there’s strong evidence that even the low-propensity voters whom the 2024 Trump campaign successfully recruited are experiencing serious buyer’s remorse. Pollster G. Elliott Morris has distilled the findings from eight months’ worth of surveys tracking the positions of voters on the issues most important to them with their support for a major-party presidential candidate in 2024. His key takeaway is very bad news for the promoters of the Dallas convention and the strategy behind it: “voters who are less likely to turn out to vote are actually much less approving of Trump overall and on key issues.” A University of Massachusetts Amherst poll released at the end of August found that 15 percent of respondents who voted for Trump in 2024 said that they might or would vote differently if given the choice again; 6 percent said they regretted voting altogether. Only 58 percent of Trump voters in the survey said they were very confident they’d make the right choice in 2024—a marked drop-off from the 74 percent saying as much in April 2025. (The segment of voters sorry that they’d voted at all, meanwhile, was just 1 percent back then.) 

These dynamics supply a whole bevy of reasons why the GOP should be urging voters to pay no attention to the bloated, bellicose orange man behind the curtain. Yet after spending the past decade transforming the Republican Party into an authoritarian cult of personality, there’s no other clear path before them. If party strategists were to plow ahead without trying to marshal a new model army of low-propensity voters, things would look considerably worse for them: Morris’s polls show a clear leftward shift in the likely 2026 electorate—together with nearly every midterm survey of the generic Republican and Democratic ballots. Indeed, a recent Gallup poll found that 49 percent of likely 2026 voters identify as Democrats, with just 39 percent aligning with the GOP—the largest such margin since 2008, when Democrats last secured a supermajority in Congress, along with the White House. Half of self-identified independent voters—the swing constituency in many past midterm cycles—now say they lean Democratic. 

Even the MAGA movement’s quasi-mythic hold on white working-class voters is eroding. Prior to the 2018 blue-wave midterms, voters in this prime Trump electoral stronghold supported his economic program by margins of 30 percent and more; now, they disapprove of his handling of the economy by a 14-to-30 percent margin. It’s far from clear how Republicans intend to reverse these trends in a two-month span, but one surefire way to make them worse is to continue acting like Donald Trump is on the ballot.