Is the best shot Democrats have at defeating safe-seat Republican senators…not running candidates at all?

That’s the theory behind the party’s approach to several Senate races in deep red territory this year — races in which they hope independent candidates might manage to take down Republican incumbents, if only the Democratic Party would get out of the way.

In Nebraska, South Dakota, and Idaho, the candidate who won the Democratic primary has since quit the race — often with some “urging” from the party establishment — to pave the way for a two-way matchup between a Republican incumbent and an independent. (Democrats tried to similarly clear the way for an independent in Montana, but the party’s nominee refused to quit the race.)

The theory is that the Democratic brand is so toxic to so many voters in these states that it’s impossible for a Democrat to win there nowadays — but that there’s no great love for the Republican establishment either, and dissatisfaction with the political status quo more generally. So perhaps a fresh-faced independent could capture essentially all of a red state’s Democratic voters and peel away enough Republicans and independents to win.

It’s a bold bet and, most believe, unlikely to succeed — but polls do show surprisingly close races in some of these contests. And it’s not an entirely new strategy. In several red-state Senate contests dating back to 2014, Democrats concluded that the only way to win is not to play, even as all the independents they cleared the way for have lost.

But this year’s crop of independents stands out. For one, they’re running in a national environment that seems much more hostile to the GOP, making it more plausible that one or more makes it to Washington. For another, they’ve formed a loose alliance over group text, and they have something of a shared platform — a focus on economic populism and taking on corporate power, while downplaying cultural issues. 

Brian Bengs, the independent running in South Dakota, told me: “I think I can speak for the others when I say our collective efforts are based on the idea that the left-right social issues are what is being used to keep us at each other’s throats. The real fight that we need to have is big money versus little folks — the regular folks.”

They also have some specific plans for how, if elected, they’d get together to shake up how the Senate works.

“If a couple of us, maybe just as few as two independents, get across the line, we can deny a majority to either party. We can create a Fulcrum Caucus,” Todd Achilles, the independent in Idaho, told me. “Both parties would have to negotiate with us to get stuff done.”

Whether these candidates win or lose, their stronger-than-expected candidacies have made Republican incumbents take notice, and are an intriguing model of how to bring at least some competition to states that seem very solidly red — or even, potentially, very solidly blue. Should they perform well in November, their shared message could end up influencing candidates across the partisan spectrum. 

Furthermore, if they do reach critical mass in the Senate, it could mean the rise of an informal third party, one that can advance its own agenda in Washington. Yet it should also be noted that the more of them win, the harder the math for a Republican majority specifically gets, since they’d be knocking Republican incumbents — and only Republican incumbents — out of power.

Amidst rising dissatisfaction with both parties, there would seem to be an opening for a different approach. But busting up the two-party system is easier said than done — particularly when all these candidates have past ties or present coziness with Democrats that, their opponents argue, call their supposed independence into question.

The Dan Osborn model

Democrats have tried this strategy of clearing the field for independents in red-state Senate races before — in 2014, when entrepreneur Greg Orman (I) challenged Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS); in 2020, when orthopedic surgeon and commercial fisher Al Gross (I) challenged Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK); and in 2022, when former CIA officer Evan McMullin (I) challenged Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT). Yet all those independents lost by double digits.

But the current model of an independent challenger was inspired by a different candidate — Nebraska’s Dan Osborn, who came surprisingly close to unseating Sen. Deb Fischer (R) in 2024, and is now challenging the state’s other GOP senator, Pete Ricketts, this cycle.

Osborn has a background as an industrial mechanic, labor leader, and Navy veteran with a plain-spoken affect. He did not graduate from college, he’s said he didn’t own a suit, and he has forearm tattoos. He had led a strike at a Kellogg’s plant in 2021 that won concessions in the company, but he was later fired. 

Union figures helped recruit him to challenge Fischer; the consultant Daniel Moraff (who later coaxed Graham Platner to run for office in Maine) also became involved in Osborn’s campaign. Osborn’s admaker Tommy McDonald later co-founded the consulting firm Fight Agency, which is now semi-famous for challenging the Democratic Party establishment by backing Zohran Mamdani and Platner’s campaigns.

Dating back to his initial campaign launch, Osborn’s messaging focused heavily on criticizing “monopolistic corporations,” aligning him with a faction on the left that believes the Democratic Party doesn’t do enough to challenge big money and concentrated corporate power. Osborn also took moderate or conservative stances on some cultural issues, supporting gun rights and President Donald Trump’s border wall. (“If Trump needs help building a wall, well, I’m pretty handy,” he said in one ad.) The Democratic Party stood aside; no Democrats filed to run in the primary.

The result was that in 2024, when Trump won Nebraska by 20 points, Osborn lost his race by just 6.7 percentage points. That closer-than-expected outcome in a disappointing cycle for Democrats made many in the political world take notice, spurring polls and research projects about whether it could be replicated elsewhere — and whether, amidst more favorable national conditions, it could actually succeed.

A squad of independents?

So this cycle, in addition to Osborn himself running again, there are several other candidates trying their luck as independents with similar platforms. 

In South Dakota, Brian Bengs, a Navy and Air Force veteran, had previously run for Senate as a Democrat in 2022 and lost in a landslide. Working as a park ranger in 2025, Bengs told me that he became dispirited by DOGE cuts to the National Park Service, and got in touch with Osborn to discuss whether he should run again — this time as an independent against South Dakota’s other GOP senator, Mike Rounds. 

“Our economic system and our political system have the same problem, which is too much concentration of money and not enough competition,” Bengs told me. “And it is producing poor results for regular folks in both systems for the same reason.” 

The winner of South Dakota’s Democratic primary, Julian Beaudion, quit the race in August, saying he’d faced “intimidating threats to drop out,” setting up a two-way face-off between Bengs and Rounds.

In Idaho, meanwhile, Army veteran, former corporate executive, and former Democratic state legislator Todd Achilles is running as an independent against 83-year-old Sen. Jim Risch.

Before running for office, Achilles had written for the American Economic Liberties Project, the left’s leading anti-monopoly think tank. He told me that “toxic concentrated corporate power,” brought on by “wave after wave of mergers and consolidation,” was destroying free markets in the US, as well as corrupting the political system. 

“You can’t tell the difference between a corporatist Republican and a corporatist Democrat anymore,” Achilles said. “They’re both checks from the same organizations, the same special interests.” 

In the Idaho race, too, the winner of the Democratic primary dropped out after state party leaders withheld their support.

Finally, in Montana, Seth Bodnar, an army veteran and former president of the University of Montana, is running as an independent for an open seat contest against Republican Kurt Alme. But Democrats’ high hopes that Bodnar could take on Alme untrammeled went awry when the winner of the Democratic primary, Alani Bankhead, refused the entreaties of practically the entire state party establishment to drop out. As a result, polls suggest, Bodnar and Bankhead will split the anti-Republican vote and likely let Alme cruise to victory.

The independents’ big plans for exercising leverage in the Senate

These various independents running have a lot in common — they all have military backgrounds and roughly similar platforms. They’re also all on a group text, per the New York Times — and they’ve started to think about how they could shake up the Senate if they win.

The few independents elected to the Senate in recent decades — centrist Joe Lieberman in Connecticut (after he lost the 2006 Democratic primary), socialist Bernie Sanders in Vermont, and center-left Angus King in Maine — had little in common with each other, but all ended up deciding to caucus with the Democratic Party after they won, believing that’s the best way to score their preferred committee assignments and help advance their priorities.

But Bengs, Achilles, and Bodnar have vowed that they would not do this. They’ve all said they wouldn’t caucus with either party if they win, and that they’d instead caucus with any other independents, making what Achilles calls the “Fulcrum Caucus.”

Achilles told me that, if these independents stick together, they could demand major reforms to the political system such as term limits and age limits for members of Congress and Supreme Court justices, restrictions on dark money spending on elections, and bans on gerrymandering. “I think we’re all aligned on this,” he said. (Several of these ideas would likely be shot down by the current Supreme Court as unconstitutional.)

“The goal is to deny the majority,” Bengs told me. “So neither Team Red or Team Blue gets to impose their will on the other side, without either going through us or working together — which would be a win unto itself, if they would work together.”

With the Senate growing more fiercely partisan in recent years, many have wondered why centrists on both sides don’t get together and try to seize control of the agenda. 

Yet the unity of this hypothetical new independent bloc already seems a bit shaky — in part because Osborn hasn’t committed to this strategy. In fact, Osborn has recently begun offering a new answer to the “caucus question” that has dogged him throughout two campaign cycles.

“I’ve given that a lot of thought and completely done a 180 on that,” Osborn told me. “Caucusing with nobody, you wouldn’t get anything done. I’m gonna caucus with everybody.” 

That meant, he said, he’d try to caucus with both parties at once. When I asked him whether that was possible and how it would work in practice, he told me, “Nobody really knows, and nobody’s been able to tell me that I can or can’t.”

While Osborn is an underdog, he is generally believed to be the independent candidate with the best shot at winning — several recent polls have shown his race to be tight. Since he has a shot of actually being in the Senate and having to follow through on his promises, he may feel less eager to box himself in.

But are they actually just Democrats?

When I asked the independents why they weren’t Democrats, they offered varying answers. Osborn said that “Biden and Harris failed on our border,” and that “if we don’t have a border, we don’t have a country.” He also said Democrats weren’t fighting hard enough for guardrails on the artificial intelligence industry, and complained that “Chuck Schumer’s daughter just got a job at OpenAI.”

Bengs said “the open borders of Biden” were disastrous, called defunding the police and abolishing the police “stupid ideas,” and said he condemned socialism. Achilles criticized “the dangerous decision to put President Biden forward for a second term” and the “corporatist” lean of the party generally.

But the reality is that prominent Democrats have implicitly or explicitly backed all their candidacies — and some of the candidates themselves were registered Democrats very recently.

Bengs told me he was a registered independent for his entire life, until he wanted to run for Senate in the 2022 cycle, to prevent Sen. John Thune from winning reelection unopposed. When it was too difficult for him to get on the ballot as an independent, he sought the Democratic nomination instead. And when he learned that state law required a party nominee to be a member of that party, he registered as a Democrat. When he lost, he swiftly became an independent again.

“My biggest weakness in this race is the fact that I ran as a Democrat in 2022, and that I was a registered Democrat for 13 months,” Bengs said.

Achilles, for his part, said he was a registered Republican for most of his life — but that, in 2024, state Democrats wanted to appoint him to an open state legislature seat, so he joined the party.

Then, in June 2025, he resigned from the legislature, announced he had switched his party registration to unaffiliated, and launched his Senate campaign against Risch, saying “the two-party system is just fundamentally broken right now.”

“It makes it a lot easier to tag you as a secret Democrat if you’re a former Democratic officeholder or a former Democratic Senate candidate,” Jacob Rubashkin, the deputy editor of Inside Elections, told me.

Osborn’s version of the problem is a series of leaks that have come out in recent weeks, in which he addressed Democrats privately and struck a very different tone than he typically does in public.

The Trump border wall he’d publicly backed was “a symbol of racism,” Osborn privately told a group of Latino and Black Democrats last year. “It’s a joke,” he added. “It does nothing, you know.”

Another recording, from a private campaign-related event, featured Osborn discussing how “Billy Bob in fucking Red Cloud, Nebraska” waves the Trump flag because he wants to be “on the winning team.” He added: “That’s all they care about because their lives probably suck.” (Osborn apologized for those comments after they were leaked, and said: “My life sucks too.”)

“When you’re funded by Democrats, hold the same policies as Democrats, and let your campaigns be run by Democrat consultants with ties to Chuck Schumer and Zohran Mamdani, you’re a Democrat,” Bernadette Breslin, press secretary for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, told me in a statement.

That’s the message that Republicans will be broadcasting to voters in these red states. Whether it will work will depend on each particular state and matchup. In Montana, Bodnar has the additional problem of the Democratic candidate staying in the race to split the vote.

But Rubashkin, the deputy editor of Inside Elections, argued to me that Bengs and Achilles have the toughest road — in 2024 Trump won their states, South Dakota and Idaho, by the overwhelming margins of 30 and 36 points, respectively. “It is just hard to find the votes in those states,” he said. But he pointed out that Rounds is up on the airwaves in South Dakota, and said Risch appears to be “taking the race seriously” and “running a real campaign” — so, at the very least, these runs mean the incumbents won’t take another term totally for granted.

Osborn, in contrast, has “the proof point” of coming within 7 points of winning in 2024, Rubashkin said, and this is now a more unfavorable national environment for the GOP. The question is whether his own behavior and comments will have damaged his prior reputation for independence, particularly once they’re amplified by millions in spending from his opponent Pete Ricketts, the self-funding scion of a billionaire family, and the super PAC backing Ricketts.

Still, if Osborn pulls it off, it will be seismic — as the candidate himself mused on one leaked recording. 

“If I beat Pete Ricketts, if a shop floor mechanic — independent mechanic — beats an entrenched Republican billionaire in a state like Nebraska, I will be one of the most popular politicians overnight, right?” he said. “And people are going to want to listen to what I have to say.”

The Supreme Court ruled on Friday that Missouri may not use a newly drawn Republican gerrymander during the 2026 congressional election. This decision should surprise no one because, about two weeks ago, the Supreme Court ruled that Missouri may not use a newly drawn Republican gerrymander during the 2026 congressional election.

That second decision, moreover, followed an even earlier one by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, which ruled that Missouri may not use a newly drawn Republican gerrymander during the 2026 congressional election. In that matter, Kavanaugh acted alone under a process that allows a single justice to dispose of a case — a process that the justices rarely invoke unless they view a case as so one-sided that there’s no need to formally refer it to their colleagues.

So, for those keeping track at home, that’s three times that the Supreme Court needed to decide the same exact question in less than three weeks. 

This happened because of an extraordinary round of defiance by Republican judges in the lower courts. Just minutes after Kavanaugh determined (for the first time) that Missouri cannot use the Republican gerrymander, a Trump-appointed judge in Missouri tried to countermand Kavanaugh’s decision. Then, after the full Court reaffirmed Kavanaugh’s decision, a panel of three Republican appellate judges again tried to reinstate the new maps that the Supreme Court had already twice rejected.

These judges’ behavior is disturbing. But it is also potentially a window into the future of the Supreme Court — at least if Republicans keep winning elections that allow them to fill seats on the federal judiciary.

The lower federal courts are gravid with ambitious Republican judges who reach conclusions that are either too extreme or too partisan for the current Supreme Court — such as the ones they reached in this case. These courts are also full of plausible candidates for a Supreme Court nomination who have shown unwavering loyalty to Trump, the MAGA movement, or the Republican Party — regardless of whether there are legal arguments supporting the GOP’s preferred outcomes.

Indeed, one lower court, the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, now functions as a kind of think tank for MAGA legal theories that less partisan judges would scoff at in disgust. This is the same court, for example, that attempted to pull the abortion medication mifepristone from the market. It’s a court that declares entire federal agencies unconstitutional. Or that orders thousands of lawfully cast ballots thrown in the trash after the Republican Party asks them to do so. The Fifth Circuit is also frequently reversed from the left by the Supreme Court.

That means that, if Republicans hold onto the Senate after the upcoming 2026 midterm elections, Trump will be able to easily identify and confirm Supreme Court nominees who make Justice Samuel Alito, the most partisan member of the current Court, look like an icon of disinterested fairness. And many of these ultra-partisan judges are young enough that they will remain viable Supreme Court candidates in future Republican administrations.

Eliminating judicial filibusters transformed who gets nominated to federal judgeships

About 13 years ago, the Senate fundamentally changed how federal judges are confirmed. Prior to late 2013, senators in the minority party could use the filibuster to block any judicial nominee who couldn’t find 60 senators who would support their confirmation. But the Senate voted in November of 2013 to allow judges to be confirmed by a simple majority vote.

Both parties have their own narratives blaming the other for this development. Republicans often claim that Democrats’ decision to filibuster a handful of President George W. Bush’s lower court nominees — before the second Bush administration, judicial filibusters were rare — was a major escalation in the partisan war over judicial confirmations. Democrats, meanwhile, blame Republicans for a significant uptick in judicial filibusters under President Barack Obama.

In any event, Senate Democrats eventually decided to allow judges to be confirmed by a majority vote after Republicans filibustered all of Obama’s nominees to three vacant seats on the powerful US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit. That broke a logjam that otherwise would have prevented Obama from filling any of these seats, but it also created a new world where lawyers who wished to become federal judges or justices no longer needed to worry about winning votes from senators in the other party.

This new world was apparent immediately after Trump took office the first time in 2017. There was a vacant seat on the Supreme Court, largely because Senate Republicans had held it open for a year until Trump could fill it. 

During his first term, Trump largely delegated the task of picking judges to the Federalist Society, a kind of bar association for right-wing lawyers. And the Federalist Society was obsessively focused on weakening the power of federal agencies to regulate private business. 

Trump’s eventual nominee for the open seat, now-Justice Neil Gorsuch, secured his new job by advertising his eagerness to advance the conservative legal movement’s top priority. Shortly before his nomination, Gorsuch wrote a pair of opinions laying out his plan to make federal agencies subservient to the judges. And one of these opinions, according to the journalist David Kaplan, “proved decisive in clinching” the nomination for Gorsuch.

In the pre-2013 world, judges with Supreme Court ambitions often avoided making their most controversial views public out of fear that doing so would antagonize other-party senators who they might need to support their confirmation to a higher court. In 2011, for example, Kavanaugh, then a judge, was assigned to a panel considering the constitutionality of Obamacare. But he dodged the key issue in the case, instead claiming that he lacked jurisdiction to rule on whether Obamacare is lawful.

After Gorsuch’s anti-regulatory opinions scored him a Supreme Court seat, however, lower court judges took notice. And the most ambitious Republican judges started looking for opportunities to prove their conservative bona fides to the Trump White House. Before 2017, for example, Kavanaugh had avoided taking a public position on abortion. Months after Gorsuch’s confirmation, however, Kavanaugh gave a speech to a conservative think tank signaling that he would be a vote to overrule Roe v. Wade if he were given a promotion.

The confirmation process, in other words, now favors candidates who audition for judicial jobs by demonstrating that they are dependable votes on issues that drive their political party. This is especially true for Republican judicial candidates, because the Trump White House has shown such favor toward candidates who are personally loyal to Trump. But Democrats who want a judicial appointment also have similar incentives. 

Gorsuch got his seat because Republicans, who controlled the Senate in 2016 when Justice Antonin Scalia’s death opened a vacancy on the Supreme Court, refused to confirm anyone that Obama nominated to fill this seat. It now appears, in other words, that no Democrat can get confirmed to the Supreme Court unless their party controls the Senate. So Democrats with Supreme Court ambitions also have no incentive to make nice with Republicans.

The way to get a high-powered judgeship is to convince your own political party that you will use that judgeship to advance its goals.

Republican judges are openly auditioning for the Supreme Court

Gorsuch and Kavanaugh are hardly the only judges who started advertising their ideological and partisan loyalty in an apparent effort to get ahead. The lower courts are now full of judges who write extreme and often needlessly provocative opinions that seem designed to catch the eye of someone in the White House.

The Ninth Circuit’s Lawrence VanDyke, for example, is a particularly vulgar judge who was reportedly on Trump’s short list for the Supreme Court during his first term. He’s best known for opinions mocking his colleagues and left-leaning litigants in a tone more often found on MAGA podcasts than in judicial opinions. VanDyke began an opinion about transgender women last March, for example, with the line “this is a case about swinging dicks.”

Or consider Andrew Oldham, a Fifth Circuit judge known for his opinions undercutting the First Amendment, attacking voting by mail, and standing up for vaping companies’ ability to sell bubblegum-flavored nicotine products — among other things. Oldham’s chambers is a factory pumping out decisions that even cause many of the Supreme Court’s Republicans to cringe — his vaping opinion was tossed out in a unanimous decision by Alito — but that also align perfectly with the Trump administration’s preferred policy outcomes.

The federal judiciary has become a partisan institution. And that means that the future of the courts is on the ballot every two years.

Or take Judge James Ho, Oldham’s colleague on the Fifth Circuit, who is also known for his trolly opinions attacking liberal shibboleths. Rather than attempt to summarize Ho’s jurisprudence, I will simply refer readers to my 2023 profile of him: “The edgelord of the federal judiciary.”

I could name more judges who behave similarly — I bring up these three largely because they’ve been discussed in the national media as potential Supreme Court candidates if Trump gets to appoint another justice. But there’s no need to belabor the point. The bottom line is that, if a vacancy does open up on the Supreme Court, Trump will have no shortage of judges who appear to have spent their judicial careers looking for opportunities to demonstrate just how eager they are to advance a MAGA agenda, even when that means moving several steps to the right of a Supreme Court dominated by conservative Republicans.

Indeed, the Missouri incident reveals just how widespread these sorts of judicial partisans are within the lower courts. None of the Republican judges who tried to reinstate the Missouri gerrymander after it was rejected by the Supreme Court, for example, have received the same attention that VanDyke, Oldham, and Ho have received as possible Supreme Court candidates. One of them, Judge James Loken, is an 86-year-old George H.W. Bush nominee with no prospects whatsoever of getting promoted.

But the culture in the lower courts has grown so open to partisan decisionmaking that he, along with two younger colleagues, literally tried to give the Republican Party an extra US House seat after the Supreme Court had told them not to do it twice.

Which isn’t to say that every Republican federal judge, or even every Trump appointee, is a partisan hack. One of the most pointed opinions rejecting Trump’s attempt to overthrow former President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, for example, was authored by Judge Stephanos Bibas, a Trump appointee. But, while Bibas’s opinion in Donald J. Trump for President v. Secretary (2020) was excellent, it also almost certainly guaranteed that he will never become a justice. And it absolutely guaranteed that he will never be nominated by Trump.

There’s no good solution to this problem

The biggest reason why America is stuck in this mess is that its two major parties have polarized on the proper role of judges. Even setting aside the youngest generation of hyperpartisan judges, it’s long been the case that any Republican nominated to the Supreme Court will be a reliable vote against causes like abortion rights, affirmative action, and the Voting Rights Act, and an equally reliable vote in favor of the “unitary executive” and for religious conservatives who seek exemptions from state and federal laws. Any Democrat, meanwhile, will take the opposite position on these, and a whole array of other issues where the two parties have consistent positions.

This is why restoring the old filibuster rules that existed prior to 2013 will not succeed in moderating the judiciary. If anything, allowing the minority party to filibuster judges again would mean that no one would ever be confirmed to the Supreme Court, because any nominee who is acceptable to one party would be radioactive in the other party.

Ultimately, the only effective way to keep people like Oldham, Ho, or VanDyke off the Supreme Court is to elect senators and presidents who do not want them on the Supreme Court. The federal judiciary has become a partisan institution. And that means that the future of the courts is on the ballot every two years.

With the midterms just under six weeks away, more Republican candidates are coming to the belated realization that, if they want to save their seats, they could perhaps use some distance from the very unpopular president whose approval is reaching new lows.

Now, after a decade in which President Donald Trump has demanded — and increasingly received — near-total loyalty from his parties’ candidates and congressional delegation, and used his bully pulpit to launch harsh personal attacks on Republicans who don’t provide it, such distancing attempts remain cautious and limited.

But they are growing more common. And this isn’t just in the toughest blue territory — even Republicans in states or districts Trump won overwhelmingly are now rushing to emphasize how they don’t agree with the president on some of his most controversial and unpopular agenda items. 

“It’s only natural that candidates would seek to create distance from Trump, especially on issues — like the Iran war — that are unpopular,” GOP strategist Douglas Heye told me. “That doesn’t guarantee success, and can be a hard needle to thread, but it’s the natural play.”

For now, the primary motivator is political. But today’s election-year cracks could be signs of larger breaks later, especially as Republicans look toward life without the singular figure who’s dominated the last decade-plus of party politics. 

A party running away from major parts of the lame-duck president’s agenda today might be repudiating parts of his legacy tomorrow — with potentially major implications for governance. And if Trump’s record is truly deemed a failure by Republicans, the GOP’s future will be wide open.

Where the general election cracks are starting to show

The boldest break in recent weeks has been from Rep. María Elvira Salazar of Florida, who represents a heavily Hispanic Miami-Dade County district that Trump won solidly in 2024. 

Last week, Salazar released a campaign ad in which she spoke directly to the camera and addressed Trump, saying: “Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far.” She added: “The same Hispanics that helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today.”

The ad was the most dramatic sign yet that Trump’s ongoing polling collapse with Latino voters — a critical component of his 2024 coalition — is showing up for Republican campaigns as well. As Salazar’s ad suggested, many swing voters interpreted Trump’s “mass deportation” talk as a promise to clamp down on border crossings and remove dangerous criminals — not to patrol the streets with militarized operations going after otherwise law-abiding migrants, many of whom have established ties to the community. If the backlash proves real in places like Florida and Texas, it could affect how future Republicans approach the issue.

That same week, two incumbent House members in Iowa in tough races decided to let their votes tell the tale. Reps. Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Zach Nunn both voted for a resolution to end Trump’s war in Iran, and each posted on social media that they opposed an “open-ended war.”  

Vice President JD Vance, who reports suggest was privately opposed to the decision to launch the military operation, mentioned at the Republican convention in Dallas that slain conservative activists Charlie Kirk “hated war,” but stuck with Trump even when he disagreed — an apparent plea to wavering Trump voters to do the same.

Polls show strong opposition to the war among the public, and if it continues to be a drag on GOP candidates, that could strengthen the currently embattled faction of the GOP that urges caution about foreign entanglements. On Tuesday, two more Republicans — Rep. Tom Tiffany, running for governor of Wisconsin, and Sen. Jon Husted, running for Senate in Ohio — publicly said it was time to bring the war to an end. (Husted caveated this by saying that ending the conflict would require a deal with Iran, and that he wouldn’t vote for the congressional resolution to end the war.)

Wisconsin GOP candidate for governor Rep. Tom Tiffany today on rising gas prices and Iran: "I just believe we should be exiting Iran, that it's time to move on … Time to come home, take care of business here in America." pic.twitter.com/oHo1QjiGDr

— Matt Smith (@mattsmith_news) September 22, 2026

Rep. Ashley Hinson, who is the GOP’s Senate nominee in Iowa, has also been cautiously seeking a bit more distance from Trump by, for instance, opposing his plan to cut tariffs on foreign beef imports since it would increase competition for local cattle ranchers, the New York Times recently reported.

Sen. Roger Marshall in Kansas, facing a reelection race that polls suggest is surprisingly competitive, has publicly criticized Trump’s tariffs on aluminum and steel, saying they hurt businesses in his state.

Even two members of the right-wing House Freedom Caucus who are both running for governor — Tiffany in Wisconsin and Rep. Byron Donalds in Florida — are making similar rhetorical adjustments. 

Tiffany disagreed with Trump renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America,” an action taken as part of Trump’s overwhelmingly unpopular trade war with Canada. And Donalds removed many mentions and pictures of the president from his website this week, the Miami Herald reported (replacing a pledge to “Enact the Trump Agenda” with one to focus on “affordability”).

This isn’t entirely a new phenomenon. Some Republicans in blue states or districts — like Sen. Susan Collins of Maine and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania — have long tried to play up their disagreements with Trump, to position themselves as independent voices. 

But many other candidates are still clinging tightly to Trump. “I am still with that guy,” Michael Whatley, the GOP Senate nominee in North Carolina, said at a rally with Trump last week. Ken Paxton, running for Senate in Texas, is similarly sticking by Trump (despite Trump’s constant digs at how Paxton dresses). It doesn’t hurt that Trump’s super PAC could be a critical player in theirs, and others’, races.

And when GOP candidates do try to stress their independence, it typically comes in the form of saying they disagree with the president on a particular issue that’s going over poorly in their state or district — most often either tariffs, the Iran war, or immigration.

The GOP candidates’ double bind

Through much of the Trump era, Republicans have faced a powerful incentive to minimize openly breaking with the president — because they feared Trump would be vindictive enough to use his bully pulpit against them, as he has against his GOP critics in the past.

Strategically, candidates face a double bind, as stressing their independence from Trump can theoretically help with swing voters who have soured on the president, but it also could hurt turnout among the Trump-loyal base.

“It’s a fine line to walk,” GOP pollster Whit Ayres told me. “You don’t want to look like you’re being disloyal to a Republican president, because you could end up with a Truth Social tweet that would destroy the support of Republicans who like Donald Trump for your campaign.”

For Republicans in redder states or districts, Trump’s engagement could still be their candidates’ greatest asset — he could help spur them to go to the polls and help frame the midterm contest in purely partisan terms.

“Motivation in midterm cycles matters a lot,” Patrick Ruffini, a pollster at Echelon Insights, recently posted on X. Ruffini’s argument is that, due to the Senate map and gerrymandering in the House, many more competitive seats this cycle are in states Trump won big. So, he argued, “raising Republicans’ motivation to vote will go further than it did in 2018 because of the political terrain this election is being fought on.”

But if Trump’s approval is reaching new lows, that calculus could change — even in redder areas. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released Monday found Trump’s approval at 32 percent, the worst result in that poll since Trump entered politics.

That could explain the new round of distancing we’ve been seeing in recent weeks. And if the polling bears out and the party does end up suffering substantial losses, it could potentially hasten that trend, as Republicans grow more wary of tying themselves tightly to an 80-year-old who won’t be on the ballot again. 

Should Democrats regain control of the House, Senate, or both, there would be no shortage of votes they could call to test just how far Republicans are willing to break with Trump on issues like immigration, tariffs, and the war. It could also create a difficult position for the next Republican presidential nominee — especially if it’s Trump’s own vice president — as they seek to incorporate lessons from the backlash without offending Trump.

For his part, Trump has been relatively restrained in response to all this, perhaps recognizing what a difficult political situation his party is in. Asked by reporters about Salazar’s ad Friday, he called her “a nice person” but “a little bit softer on the border.” 

But he couldn’t resist adding: “Without me, she wouldn’t have gotten elected.”