A Time-Honored Midterm Tradition That Almost Never Works

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With the midterm elections just 40 days away, Republicans are running hard—many of them away from President Trump.

Representative Maria Elvira Salazar, a Florida Republican whose district Trump won by 15 points in 2024, recently released an ad critiquing the administration’s immigration enforcement, saying that Hispanic voters feel “betrayed.” Byron Donalds, the GOP’s nominee for governor of Florida, scrubbed most references to Trump from his website—a notable move considering that the foundation of Donalds’s entire career has been fidelity to the Donald. The Senate contenders Mike Rogers of Michigan and Ashley Hinson of Iowa are both calling for an end to the Iran war. Tom Tiffany, the Republican candidate for governor of Wisconsin, has even suddenly changed his mind and now believes that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election.

The number of prominent Republicans distancing themselves from Trump has accelerated, or at least reached a critical mass, in the past 10 days. The shift is interesting—first, as an indication of what information GOP candidates are receiving privately about the president’s unpopularity and its drag on them, and second, because public critiques of Trump from Republicans have been vanishingly rare, no matter how unwise, outrageous, or unpopular his actions have been.

But the defections are perhaps better understood as a sign of normalcy, even in a deeply abnormal context. A president’s party almost always loses seats in a midterm, a result of the pendulum effect in elections. And the dynamics of this race are especially challenging for Republicans because Trump is historically unpopular, outpacing even his own poor ratings in 2018, when Democrats dominated the midterms. Trump is now presiding over persistent inflation, exacerbated by a failing war of choice in Iran. All of this predicts that GOP candidates would be wary of Trump.

News coverage about members of a president’s party trying to run away from him appears like a brood of cicadas, in this case popping up nearly every four years. You can easily find clips about Democrats trying to disassociate themselves from Bill Clinton in 1994, Republicans recoiling from George W. Bush in 2006, and Democrats avoiding Barack Obama four years after that, then again in 2014. (The 1998 and 2002 midterms were atypical because of the Clinton impeachment and a post-9/11 boost for Bush, respectively.) Though it’s mostly forgotten now, some Republicans tried to separate themselves from Trump in 2018, too, despite his effort to make the election about him. (“Pretend I’m on the ballot,” he told voters. After the voting, he blamed Republican losses on the defectors.)

Watching endangered officeholders try to run away from their party’s president every four years reminds me of a moment in Arrested Development in which a couple considers an open marriage. Lindsay asks whether it ever fixes a relationship. “No. It never does,” her husband, Tobias, replies. “These people somehow delude themselves into thinking it might, but … but it might work for us.” In a few isolated, marginal cases, a candidate successfully manages to separate themselves from the unpopular president and his party. In 2010, the Democratic Senate candidate Joe Manchin of West Virginia recorded an ad in which he fired a rifle at an Obama-backed carbon bill and won, but Manchin had years of credibility as a centrist governor to draw on.

In aggregate, however, these efforts don’t work: The usual pattern is that a president’s party loses seats. Because hard-core partisans are more likely to represent safe seats, they are also more likely to survive big midterm waves, whereas many moderates who distance themselves from the president lose because they are more likely to occupy contested seats. One reason that so few Republican officeholders have spoken out against Trump during the past eight years is that even the ones who were willing to criticize Trump lost their seats in 2018—their attempts at distancing weren’t enough to overcome the voter backlash against Trump.

Sometimes, the in-party loses seats for reasons largely beyond their control, such as big macroeconomic currents. But some of the specific cases where Republicans are breaking with Trump are on issues where the GOP as a whole is aligned with the president. If the party retains congressional control, a few scattered critics won’t be able to change the consensus. Hinson may be sincere in her desire to end the war in Iran—though her repeated votes against reining it in, including one just last week, raise doubts. Regardless, voters have no reason to believe that giving Republicans another two years of control of Congress would help end the war, given that the GOP House and Senate leaders have tried to sidestep resolutions calling for an end to the war and have opposed any actual restrictions on the White House.

Or consider Salazar’s shot across Trump’s bow on immigration. The idea that Trump is going to walk away from strict immigration enforcement, his signature issue for a decade and one dear to his base, is absurd, and House Republicans as a whole have shown no interest in restraining him. Salazar said on Face the Nation this past weekend that Trump was “very receptive” to her message, but Trump himself told reporters, “I’m very strong on the borders, and she isn’t.” The mystery is whether Salazar is gullible or just hopes that her voters are.

Many things about this moment in American history are unsettling and novel, and Trump’s threats to disrupt the elections themselves continue to cast a shadow over the midterms. But watching old patterns repeat is a reminder of how normal the dynamics of this campaign have been. Nearly every indication is that Democrats will win control of the House; the real questions are how large their victory will be and whether they can gain control of the Senate as well. In this environment, many Republicans can’t do much to save themselves. But because Trump is likely to blame losing candidates after the election anyway, rather than examine his own role, they don’t have many reasons to hold their criticism.

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

President Trump welcomed Chinese President Xi Jinping to the White House for a summit focused on matters including trade, artificial intelligence, and Taiwan. The visit began with an elaborate arrival ceremony and will include bilateral talks and a state dinner tonight.
CNN, MS NOW, and Politico regained access to the White House this morning after a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to temporarily restore their press credentials.
The Supreme Court of California unanimously ordered Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco to return the more than 600,000 ballots he seized while investigating allegations of fraud in a 2025 election. The court found that Bianco lacked the authority to seize and independently review the ballots.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: Shan Wang explores why female fans can’t win.

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Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Ryan McVay / Getty.

My Night at the Reindeer-Sausage Buffet

By Alexandra Petri

Food is like dance: a language, but not one you’d want to use in an emergency. Food can say I love you or Congratulations (it helps if you are able to use icing on top of the food to make its message clearer) or even something slightly more subtle: I am proud of the seafood offerings of my region. It cannot say Look out! There is a projectile flying at your head! or Please stop trying to invade Greenland. Or can it?

I went to “Taste of the Arctic” last week at the Danish ambassador’s residence to find out.

Read the full article.

A Time-Honored Midterm Tradition That Almost Never Works

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