Democrats enter the midterms looking to conquer red territory

By Patrick Svitek, CNN

(CNN) — On Friday, Sen. Roger Marshall took a rare step for a Republican incumbent running in Kansas: launching an attack ad against his Democratic rival.

When pastor Adam Hamilton launched his campaign for the seat four months ago, the odds seemed long. The state has not sent a Democrat to the Senate in nearly a century, and President Donald Trump has won it by at least 14 percentage points in all his campaigns.

But as the traditional post-Labor Day sprint to the midterms begins, Hamilton is optimistic.

“People are very frustrated,” Hamilton said in an interview, recalling a recent conversation with a 79-year-old man who handed him a receipt for diesel for his truck and told him, “This is why I’m voting for you.”

From the suburbs of Philadelphia to California’s Central Valley, such stories are fueling Democratic hopes that they can not only flip the House but also capture the majority in the Senate by running strong campaigns in GOP territory. If successful, Democrats would both provide a consequential check on President Donald Trump for his final two years in office and begin to repair their party’s tattered brand as they prepare for the next presidential election.

Republicans acknowledge they face historical headwinds as the party in power two years after winning the White House and capturing unified control of Washington. And Trump has not helped by starting a war with Iran that has exacerbated a cost-of-living crisis that was already on the top of voters’ minds.

But with November’s midterm matchups largely set, the GOP sees cause for optimism in their financial advantage, Trump’s increasing efforts to galvanize the party’s base and the rise of democratic socialists across the country, whom they hope to make a liability for Democrats writ large.

“The issues are going to be the same in my race and everybody else’s,” Rep. Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin said in an interview. “People are waking up to the fact that the Democratic Party is no longer the Democratic Party – it’s the Democratic Socialists of America party.”

The GOP push ramped up this weekend as the pro-Trump super PAC MAGA Inc. began tapping into its $400 million-plus war chest for the midterms, a highly anticipated moment for vulnerable Republicans.

Starting Wednesday, Republicans are set to gather in Dallas for an unusual midterm convention that is expected to be dominated by Trump. He is scheduled to speak on both nights, and the Republican National Committee chairman, Joe Gruters, has hyped the gathering as “Trumpapalooza.”

Democrats are not letting the Republican ramp-up go unanswered. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is sending a delegation of House Democrats to Dallas to counter the convention. And Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, a potential 2028 presidential candidate, is also heading to the city to help Texas Democrats push back, according to a Pritzker spokeswoman, Leah Hurwitz.

Building off the convention, Trump has promised to spend the final 30 days of the election crisscrossing the country for his party, targeting 35 races that he believes will determine control of Congress.

Trump’s emergence as a main character in the midterms, despite his unpopularity across the country, has excited Democrats and left Republicans in competitive districts weighing how closely to tie themselves to him.

“It’ll be spectacular,” California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom told reporters Saturday in North Carolina, sarcastically praising Trump’s midterm plans. “He’s an historic president – historically unpopular.”

“President Trump is not on the ballot,” GOP Rep. Tom Barrett of Michigan, who does not plan to attend the convention, said in an interview. “I’m on the ballot and my opponent is on the ballot, and that’s the choice people are going to be faced with.”

Democrats play offense on economy

Democrats need to flip a few seats in the House to win the majority, while their path to controlling the upper chamber is harder. They would need to net four seats, including some in Republican-leaning states, while defending a few competitive seats they already hold.

Democrats generally agree their best opportunities to pick up Senate seats are in Maine, North Carolina and Ohio, and then in tougher territory including Alaska, Iowa and Texas.

“Democrats have six core offensive opportunities and we are still expanding the map, forcing Republicans to scramble to defend deep red states as we head into November with multiple paths to win the majority,” Devan Barber, the executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said in a statement.

The map is not without its challenges for Democrats. In Michigan, Democrats nominated progressive Abdul El-Sayed over the opposition of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who saw Rep. Haley Stevens as more electable. And in New Hampshire, Democrats are playing defense against a strong and well-known GOP candidate in former Sen. John E. Sununu. And while Democrats are encouraged by the strength of Sen. Jon Ossoff’s reelection campaign in Georgia, he is still seeking another term in a state that Trump won by 2 percentage points in 2024.

In the fight for the House majority, Democrats continue to add redder and redder districts to their target list. But they still have to defend more seats won by President Donald Trump in 2024 than Republicans have to hold on to seats he lost.

“They’re operating on our turf,” said Mike Marinella, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee.

The nationwide redistricting effort that Trump spent months waging has also given Republicans hope they can stem their losses. But Democrats, seeing a political landscape that has revolted against Trump, believe even some of the redrawn seats are in play, such as those that Republicans reconfigured in predominantly Latino South Texas.

In a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, voters said they favored Democrats over Republicans on the generic congressional ballot by 5 percentage points. They disapproved of Trump’s job performance by a 25-point margin and his handling of the economy by even more.

For Democrats, the strategy for the midterms is simple: speak to the mounting economic frustrations of voters, including those who took a chance on Trump in 2024 but now feel betrayed.

“The word that I hear almost daily is ‘drowning,’” said Democratic Rep. Kristen McDonald Rivet of Michigan. “Families in my district are drowning, and it is so much worse for them now than it was two years ago.”

McDonald Rivet’s district in Central Michigan is a traditional battleground district, voting for Trump by just 2% in 2024. But Democrats are also finding opportunity in places such as Kentucky’s 6th Congressional District, which supported Trump by 15 points.

The Democratic nominee there, former federal prosecutor Zach Dembo, said the issue of affordability is “hyperfocused” in the Central Kentucky district. Kentucky raises the most cattle east of the Mississippi River, he noted, making it especially impacted by Trump’s recent decision to lower tariffs on foreign beef producers.

“Really this race is not a Democrat versus Republican,” Dembo said in an interview. “It’s about change versus the status quo.”

In many competitive races, Democrats know they need to separate themselves from a national party brand that often polls worse than the GOP and has now become equated, in part, with democratic socialists such as New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Hamilton, for example, said he is for “strong and secure borders,” calling former President Joe Biden a “disaster” on the issue.

“When people in Kansas think about national Democrats, they think about the DSA,” Hamilton said. “I’ve been asked, ‘Are you a socialist or communist?’ My answer is, ‘No, I’m an independent-minded Democrat.’”

The Democratic brand is especially under pressure in a handful of races where independents are running strong campaigns for Republican-held seats. In some of those contests, the Democratic nominees have stepped aside to give the independents a better shot.

Nebraska is a prominent example. During their first debate last week, GOP Sen. Pete Ricketts repeatedly labeled his independent opponent, Dan Osborn, as “Democrat Dan” as Osborn insisted he would not caucus with either party if elected.

The Republican strategy

The economy is a far more sensitive issue for Republicans, who have to sympathize with voters’ concerns while grappling with Trump’s insistence on continuing the war. Trump said Wednesday he was “not affected” by the midterms when considering an end to the war.

Republicans have mostly remained united behind Trump on the war, though their impatience has shown at times. House Speaker Mike Johnson recently said that it would be “great” if the war would end before the midterms, but if not, Republicans “can explain why that was necessary, why we had to complete the job.”

Van Orden, a retired Navy SEAL, said the consequences would be disastrous if Iran were to obtain a nuclear weapon.

“When I explain that to folks, they’re like, ‘Oh, I got it,’” said Van Orden, who is set to speak at the midterm convention. “And I also remind them, especially my Democratic colleagues and many people in the media, that we’re still not paying as much money for a gallon of gas as we did under Biden. We’re not.”

A few Republicans in competitive races have distanced themselves from the war by supporting resolutions to limit Trump’s war powers. Among them is Barrett, who said he is “very sensitive to the nature of prolonged war” as a 22-year Army veteran.

“I haven’t budged and this is something I feel very strongly about and I’m going to vote my conscience,” Barrett said.

Trump, who has a penchant for punishing intraparty critics, has largely held back as some Republicans in tough races have sought daylight with him. And Vice President JD Vance suggested Thursday that he understood if some candidates wanted to skip the convention to focus on “local” matters.

The White House would much rather make the midterms a referendum on Democrats who they say have lurched too far to the left.

In some key House races, Democratic voters picked nominees that national groups worry are too liberal to win in the general election. Barrett’s opponent, Will Lawrence, is one of those candidates – and CNN reported Friday about hundreds of deleted social media posts where he backed the abolition of police and prisons, among other things. Lawrence, a co-founder of the Sunrise Movement, said he no longer supports defunding the police and regretted some of his past remarks.

Republicans are also drawing optimism from a larger stockpile of money in their national committee accounts. The Republican National Committee ended July with $130 million cash on hand, while the Democratic National Committee had $16 million in the bank, along with $18 million in debt.

That money is more relevant than ever after a Supreme Court ruling in June that struck down limits on coordinated spending between party committees and campaigns. The National Republican Congressional Committee has already taken advantage of the ruling by reserving coordinated ads for at least 20 candidates, while the NRCC’s Democratic counterpart has been slower to capitalize.

Up until this weekend, however, it was unclear whether Republicans in battleground seats could also count on MAGA Inc. to come to the rescue. But the super PAC began answering that question Saturday when it disclosed $10 million in spending on the Texas Senate race where Democratic nominee James Talarico has vastly outraised Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton by nearly $60 million.

Trump suggested Friday he had almost $1 billion in outside money at his disposal and planned to spend as much as half of it on the midterms.

“We’re going to spend a lot of money because we don’t want to lose our country,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.

Republicans also hope Trump’s increased activity on the campaign trail reactivates his 2024 voters, even if it puts vulnerable incumbents in an awkward position.

At a recent meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition, the GOP nominee for Senate in North Carolina, Michael Whatley, estimated that his state had as many as 250,000 voters who have turned out for Trump in presidential elections but sat out the midterms. “That turnout is absolutely essential,” Whatley said.

One Republican strategist working on a battleground House race agreed that Republican turnout is a major issue but said the solution to the problem has to be “much deeper” than Trump hitting the road.

“I think there has to be more optimism that things are getting better” economically, the strategist said, adding that the White House lacks a “clear message” about when that will happen.

The closing message

The Trump factor is not the only major variable heading into the final two months before the election.

Both parties are scrambling to respond to voters’ rising anger at data centers and the resources they consume. In the blockbuster race for governor in Nevada, GOP incumbent Joe Lombardo and his Democratic opponent, Attorney General Aaron Ford, have traded TV ads accusing one another of being too cozy with the industry.

“Data centers are raising our costs, but Joe Lombardo doesn’t care,” Ford says in one ad that replays Lombardo saying in May that he is “wholeheartedly in support of data centers.”

(Lombardo, like many GOP governors confronting the issue, has demanded data centers take responsibility for not straining local resources.)

Candidates will also spend the coming weeks haggling over whether to debate — and if so, how much. While Sen. Susan Collins and Democratic challenger Troy Jackson appear set for four debates in October in their all-important race in Maine, there is more uncertainty in other contests, such as the contest for Ohio governor, where Democrat Amy Acton indicated Wednesday she was not interested in debating Republican Vivek Ramaswamy.

And, in another open question, while much of the recent speculation about outside spending has focused on pro-Trump groups, super PACs aligned with Israel supporters and the cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence industries are still sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars that could shape races.

Voters can also expect to see more of potential 2028 candidates in the coming weeks, especially Democrats, as they work to show their usefulness to the party and build new allies in Congress.

Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is scheduled to visit at least six states in September alone. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro is expected to continue campaigning heavily to flip four House seats in his state as he runs for reelection himself. And former Vice President Kamala Harris is expected to step up her travel for candidates, even as some in GOP-leaning territory have said they would not welcome her support.

Harris shrugged off their snubbing in a TV interview Thursday, telling MS NOW, “I support them in doing whatever they need to do to win.”

Addressing reporters Thursday, Vance, widely seen as the de facto frontrunner for the GOP nomination in 2028, urged all Republicans to focus on the midterms as some of them, such as Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, have stirred buzz about their White House ambitions.

McDonald Rivet said she was taking nothing for granted in the final stretch, even after Republicans in her district nominated a relatively unknown candidate, Tom Smith, over a Trump-backed rival.

“I think that this is going to be closer than most people think,” she said. “I think that we are going to have to work for every single vote and run hard all the way through November.”

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