By Robert Russel | Guest Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice
Donald Trump’s impressive electoral victory is indeed a mandate for the man and his agenda.
For Republicans in Congress, it was an underwhelming fizzle. With 10 or more House races slipping through their fingers, atop four senate races yet again blown by Mitch McConnell’s epic incompetence, one almost wonders how Republicans even got a majority at all.
The answer is Donald Trump.
It was Trump, not Mike Johnson, who rescued hapless Republicans from the odor of Project 2025 by linking Democrats to the Harris-Biden record, and by providing a 20-point electoral platform of positive action to solve real problems.
And but for Trump, and a grassroots army of both underpaid and volunteer ballot chasers who worked to register and turnout low-propensity voters, Republicans would have certainly lost.
Trump won the popular vote and 312 electors; Republicans ran a crucial 1-2 points behind him! A dozen House and Senate seats hinged on these margins, and another dozen only got through because they clung to the top of the ticket.
Well? It worked, didn’t it? Nixon and Reagan never won the House at all, even with 49-state landslides. Why quibble then?
Because in 2026 Trump will not be on the ballot. Democrats now have a high-turnout base, and Republicans a low-turnout base, so unless Republicans can both motivate their voters to vote and have a turnout machine to get it done, the midterms will be a blue wave,
Motivating Trump voters may be relatively simple. If Trump gets things moving in a positive direction again, and if his majority can get him at least two good reconciliation packages with a lot of his agenda in them this year (as Republicans epically failed to do in 2017!), then he and the GOP should enter the midterms with decent approval ratings. This will be especially true if they avoid major blunders like trying to cut Social Security or defense, or have another Russia hoax type setback.
The other part is that they need to resume the offensive by keeping their grassroots army in the field! Expand funding for early vote and messaging operations, and have thousands of paid operatives doing voter registration and mail-in applications, as well as lit dropping to remind voters what Republicans are accomplishing and how Democrats are opposing it.
Based on 2018 and 2022 numbers (roughly 113 and 104 million voting in those midterms), Republicans will likely need around 55-60 million Trump voters to turnout. If 5-10 million more Trump voters can be turned out early (thus boosting total turnout significantly!), and if Republicans dampen Blue turnout by things like reducing inflation and gas prices, fixing the border, refunding the military, de-woking education and government, restoring work requirements, and cleaning house at government agencies (without stupid things like attacking Social Security) then they can certainly achieve this!
A strong early vote and a winning record can give Team Trump and congressional Republicans an historic off-year victory on par with 2002, 1998 and 1934. If they don’t invest now though, and if they don’t deliver on what they actually ran on, then they will lose their majority, and Trump’s second term will go off the rails as his first did.
The stakes are too high to risk the latter option.
Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in commentary pieces are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the management of the Rocky Mountain Voice, but even so we support the constitutional right of the author to express those opinions.