By Jeffrey A. Rendall
Time for talk is over. The president’s MAGA-or-bust strategy will pass or fail
Have you ever watched a sports event and, if you’re familiar with the particular teams and scenario, wondered why the coach’s gameplan didn’t match your notions on how to win?
If so, you might have wondered about the political campaigns this year, which culminate tomorrow on Election Day. We’ll know the results of most states by the end of the evening but there invariably will be close races where only a few votes separate the winners from the losers.
Then there’s California where the tabulators take weeks to sort everything out, kicking open the door for fraud and shenanigans. Let’s just hope the severest anomalies are limited to the west coast.
For better or worse, President Donald Trump has conducted a very different kind of campaign for his fellow Republican candidates, betting and banking on his core Make America Great Again supporters to maintain presidential year-like enthusiasm to fuel the GOP’s get-out-the-vote efforts in 2026.
Will it work? In a newsletter post titled, “Trump and the MAGA enthusiasm strategy”, Byron York wrote at the Washington Examiner recently:
“…Trump sometimes views his Republican base as if it is the electorate as a whole. He draws impressive crowds made up of supporters who love him. He spends much of his time among people who revere him. Viewed from that perspective, a job approval rating of 38.8% just doesn’t make any sense.
“If you start with Trump’s belief that economic indicators are strong for coming growth, and add his skepticism of polls, and then throw in his confidence in his sky-high, rock-solid approval ratings among his MAGA base — together, they add up to Trump’s belief that Republicans can win not just the Senate, which many observers see as too close to call right now, but the House, too, which those observers believe is lost to the GOP.
“Trump knows the polls, of course. He is a close and discriminating reader of news stories. And he has certainly heard advisers, consultants, and others describe the adverse conditions Republicans face in races across the country. But what should he do? Tell his party that they’re going to lose? Trump knows how many Republicans look to him for leadership. If he appears to lose hope, they will, too. So he keeps at it as he nears the end of an extraordinary 32-day cross-country campaign tour. And he has a case to make.”
Yes, he does. And he’s made it, for sure. That’s Trump story, and he’s stuck to it.
I’ll be the first to admit I’ve been skeptical of President Trump’s messaging strategy for 2026, finding it somewhat tone deaf in practice with a decided lack of empathy for many Americans who aren’t enjoying the fruits of what the president says is the “greatest economy ever.”
I don’t claim things are terrible. The president’s policies, for the most part, have been solid and beneficial. The country is on the right track. But it will take time for everything to fall into place, and time, in November, 2026, is of the essence.
If Republicans do indeed pull off a highly unanticipated good result tomorrow, I believe the largest factor will have been that “undecided” or independent voters – the small slice of persuadable ones – finally had a sit-down with themselves and assessed the true nature of the Democrat Party and figured, in a hold-your-nose type capacity, that the Republicans staying in power was a better alternative for the nation.
Though I also think the Trump campaign blitz will have made some difference in places he visited in the sense he reenergized the MAGA voters there. It’s a gamble, but Trump seems to have abandoned any semblance of recruiting independent voters or new recruits to the cause.
Win with your people or go home. That’s the thinking.
Voters – again, the persuadable ones who weren’t already in the Republicans’ camp come heck or high water – don’t punch their ballots based on numbers and statistics they might find on Fox Business or through a monologue from Larry Kudlow. The very notion of a bright economic future in a few months or otherwise won’t supersede the sick feeling they just experienced after viewing the digital total on the gas pump they just put to good use.
The rhetoric coming from the upper echelons of the Republican Party was a little like the major league baseball commentators who recently predicted the Los Angeles Dodgers would easily win their third straight World Series title because the team had all the stars, right? The Dodgers had Shohei Otani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Tarik Skubal – how could they lose?
“This is the greatest economy in the history of this country.” Trump has claimed something similar on numerous occasions and demands message discipline from his administration underlings as well. After a while, when the words don’t match experience, the speakers’ voices get tuned out.
That’s my thought. It’s not me, personally, but I think the average American tends to view politics through a “What have you done for me lately?” lens, and they’re not close followers of the back-and-forth of the pundits and spinmeisters. They don’t watch Fox Business and they don’t read Stephen Moore’s Committee to Unleash Prosperity newsletter to hear the secular gospel of how great the economy is really doing and adjust their outlook accordingly.
It seems evident that political viewpoints are largely determined by practical considerations and incremental changes citizens can see and understand. Opening up a new steel plant in Iowa is a terrific development, but the average person in a state a thousand miles away who doesn’t know anything about the improvement won’t care how great the Iowans have it – or will have it.
The tax cuts enacted through the Trump-pushed “Great Big Beautiful Bill” were another area where Republicans delivered on promises, but they failed to follow-up the first-year (of Trump’s second term) achievement with other legislative triumphs that were readily visible. This is the reason why it was such a grave error for Republicans to capitulate to Democrats’ obstruction on the SAVE America Act.
Americans have notoriously short memories, especially when it comes to politics. The excitement/hoopla of the quadrennial presidential race dies down quickly when the president becomes mired in the details of month-to-month governing. There’re foreign policy considerations as well, particularly when significant world events have occurred since Trump reassumed the White House.
This is where Trump’s messaging snafus have contributed to his approval ratings decline whether the president believes the polls’ accuracy or not. It’s the primary reason why federal midterm contests have not gone well for most presidents, including Ronald Reagan in 1986.
The establishment media doesn’t attract viewers and readers by relentlessly reporting good tidings, which explains why the news is so consistently negative. Americans are eternally skeptical about their government and attitudes don’t improve after elections. It’s why congressional leaders’ positive/negative ratings usually are pathetic.
Presidents typically enjoy a post-presidency honeymoon period because it’s human nature to remember things more fondly as time goes on. “Gee, that George H.W. Bush wasn’t such a bad guy after all… and Big Bubba Bill Clinton, he was a moderate and the budget was balanced during his presidency. Who is Monica Lewinsky again?”
Close politics watchers know differently.
Donald Trump has always suggested that there’s much more enthusiasm “out there” for his presidency because of what he experiences when he gives a political speech. The crowd reaction is unmistakable. Everyone who attends a rally goes all-in on the Trump-ian performance.
The question is whether there are enough MAGA folks to carry the Republican Party through this election. The polls indicate otherwise. President Trump’s optimism defies the data, in many respects.
I’m not a believer in the “The polls are fake news” line of thinking. The polls very well may end up being wrong this year, but it wouldn’t be because the figures themselves were faulty or intentionally biased. It would be the turnout models the pollsters used to crunch the data were flawed. The feeling is there, one way or another.
Trump’s MAGA strategy could rouse the low-propensity non-traditional midterm voter and caused him or her to participate when they otherwise wouldn’t have been bothered. That’s it in a nutshell.
There’s a time at the end of every campaign cycle where doubt creeps in and a, “Could I have done more?” dread invades your consciousness. This year, the feeling is particularly strong. Tomorrow’s elections are important for all the reasons stated over the past year or so. The rest is up to the voters to decide.
Jeff Rendall is editor and publisher of GolfintheUSA.com and has written about golf and politics for over a quarter of a century. A non-practicing attorney from California, he moved to the east coast three decades ago to pursue and combine his interests in all things American history and culture. Jeff has worked as an intern on Capitol Hill and in various capacities in grassroots organizing and conservative organizations and publications, including a nearly two-decade stint at ConservativeHQ.com. Column republishing or other inquiries: Rendall@msn.com .