WASHINGTON — With two days left before Tuesday's midterm elections, President Trump's closing campaign schedule has swung between cancellation and reversal, a sign of how unsettled the final stretch has become for a Republican Party trying to defend its House and Senate majorities against a double-digit Democratic lead in the national polling average.
Trump scrapped planned appearances in Kansas and Iowa for the final days of the race, with the Republican National Committee announcing he would instead hold a round of "tele-rallies" to reach voters virtually. A day later, according to a party source, that plan was reversed again, with the president now set to hold back-to-back in-person rallies in both states on Sunday. His only confirmed solo in-person stop remains a Friday rally at the Ocean Center in Daytona Beach, Florida; Saturday is instead built around six tele-rallies, including events aimed at Michigan and Florida voters, a format that lets the president maximize his reach into competitive districts without the logistics of travel — a trade-off that also underscores how thin the campaign's final bandwidth has become.
A double-digit gap heading into Tuesday
The scheduling chaos comes against a brutal polling backdrop for Republicans. The RealClearPolitics national generic-ballot average had Democrats ahead by roughly 8 points heading into the weekend — 51.4% to 43.2%, by one widely cited snapshot — with individual polls ranging from a 4-point Democratic edge in the Harvard-Harris survey to a 10-point lead in CNN's. Analysts there noted the margin, if it holds, would mark the party's best generic-ballot showing since Barack Obama's 2008 landslide.
Democratic candidates have leaned hard into voter frustration over the cost of living and the ongoing Iran war, themes that have proven more durable than any single news cycle. Republican strategists, for their part, are counting on the party's traditional midterm turnout advantage and a clutch of contested races — including a closely watched Texas Senate contest and Alaska's legally fraught Senate race — to blunt the national trend on election night.
Both parties agree on one thing: with early voting already surging in battleground states, Tuesday's result will turn less on any single rally than on which electorate actually shows up.
