{"id":1074,"date":"2026-09-11T19:13:27","date_gmt":"2026-09-11T19:13:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=1074"},"modified":"2026-09-11T19:13:27","modified_gmt":"2026-09-11T19:13:27","slug":"trump-wants-voters-to-pretend-hes-on-the-ballot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=1074","title":{"rendered":"Trump Wants Voters to Pretend He\u2019s on the Ballot"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

The balance of commentary on the GOP\u2019s midterm pep rally in Dallas has focused on President Donald Trump\u2019s outlandish and unlikely scheme to bribe voters with a $5,000 payoff should the Republicans prevail in the midterms. That\u2019s understandable, since Trump\u2019s scheme is brazenly illegal\u2014as was the case when Elon Musk promised a similarly sleazy $1 million \u201clottery\u201d windfall to right-leaning voters in Wisconsin\u2019s 2025 balloting for state Supreme Court justices. (The only material difference here is that Musk was in a position to deliver the promised bribe, while Trump very much is not.)<\/p>\n

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Yet such rank corruption is increasingly the Republican Party\u2019s business model\u2014which is why the mini-convention also featured blaring violations of the Hatch Act, with both Attorney General Todd Blanche and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent electioneering for the GOP in a register only marginally less corrupt than their boss\u2019s spectacle of transactional grift. (In Bessent\u2019s case, the bond markets reacted with an alacrity that our judicial system now conspicuously lacks.) Until we regain a viable system of genuine constitutional oversight, the most urgent question before our flailing political order is whether Trump\u2019s pitch to voters is likely to work. By this, I don\u2019t mean the president\u2019s bribery ploy but the political appeal he also made in Dallas: \u201cPretend that I\u2019m on the ballot\u201d in November\u2019s midterm elections.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sure, that\u2019s a predictable come-on from a chief executive who sees all the basic operations of government as an extension of his own ego. At the same time, it\u2019s a likely recipe to kill off any Republican prospects for keeping the party\u2019s present governing trifecta intact. Trump is a stunningly unpopular president, reaching a nadir of approval in the low to mid 30s just last week. That\u2019s why a strong contingent of vulnerable GOP candidates running in swing states were no shows to what Republicans were calling Dallas\u2019s \u201cTrump-a-palooza.\u201d It\u2019s also why a growing number of similarly situated Republican hopefuls have been scrubbing either the person of Trump or key elements of his governing agenda from their campaign websites. Pretending that Trump is on the ballot is pretty much the last thing they want to do.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The strategy behind making the GOP midterms a referendum on Trump is a revival of the one that won him the 2024 election: target \u201clow propensity\u201d voters otherwise tuned out of politics with sops to their short-term self-interest. This is what yielded such pseudopopulist proposals as the cynically sunsetted \u201cno tax on tips\u201d revenue policy and deductions of interest on auto loans; it\u2019s also the clear logic behind the $5,000 bribery scheme (which, like so many other gruesome features of our late-stage oligarchy, was previewed in Idiocracy<\/em>).\u00a0<\/p>\n

But the glaring problem with continuing to flog the low-propensity strategy is that midterm cycles simply don\u2019t work that way: They run mostly on motivated base voters, who are paying very close attention to politics. (On top of which, of course, midterm balloting almost always favors the party that\u2019s out of power in the Oval Office.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

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What\u2019s more, there\u2019s strong evidence that even the low-propensity voters whom the 2024 Trump campaign successfully recruited are experiencing serious buyer\u2019s remorse. Pollster G. Elliott Morris has distilled the findings from eight months\u2019 worth of surveys tracking the positions of voters on the issues most important to them with their support for a major-party presidential candidate in 2024. His key takeaway is very bad news for the promoters of the Dallas convention and the strategy behind it: \u201cvoters who are less likely to turn out to vote are actually much less approving<\/em> of Trump overall and on key issues.\u201d A University of Massachusetts Amherst poll released at the end of August found that 15 percent of respondents who voted for Trump in 2024 said that they might or would vote differently if given the choice again; 6 percent said they regretted voting altogether. Only 58 percent of Trump voters in the survey said they were very confident they\u2019d make the right choice in 2024\u2014a marked drop off from the 74 percent saying as much in April 2025. (The segment of voters sorry that they\u2019d voted at all, meanwhile, was just 1 percent back then.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

These dynamics supply a whole bevy of reasons why the GOP should be urging voters to pay no attention to the bloated, bellicose orange man behind the curtain. Yet after spending the past decade transforming the Republican Party into an authoritarian cult of personality, there\u2019s no other clear path before them. If party strategists were to plow ahead without trying to marshal a new model army of low-propensity voters, things would look considerably worse for them: Morris\u2019s polls show a clear leftward shift in the likely 2026 electorate\u2014together with nearly every midterm survey of the generic Republican and Democratic ballots. Indeed, a recent Gallup poll found that 49 percent of likely 2026 voters identify as Democrats, with just 39 percent aligning with the GOP\u2014the largest such margin since 2008, when Democrats last secured a supermajority in Congress, along with the White House. Half of self-identified independent voters\u2014the swing constituency in many past midterm cycles\u2014now say they lean Democratic.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Even the MAGA movement\u2019s quasi-mythic hold on white working-class voters is eroding. Prior to the 2018 blue-wave midterms, voters in this prime Trump electoral stronghold supported his economic program by margins of 30 percent and more; now, they disapprove of his handling of the economy by a 14-to-30 percent margin. It\u2019s far from clear how Republicans intend to reverse these trends in a two-month span, but one surefire way to make them worse is to continue acting like Donald Trump is on the ballot.<\/p>\n

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The Nation Magazine<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1073,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1074","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"yoast_head":"\nTrump Wants Voters to Pretend He\u2019s on the Ballot - Atlas Living Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=1074\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Trump Wants Voters to Pretend He\u2019s on the Ballot - Atlas Living Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Nation Magazine\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=1074\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Atlas Living Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-09-11T19:13:27+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=1074#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=1074\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/f6233854b1f92a6d21147fe5d5e58abc\"},\"headline\":\"Trump Wants Voters to Pretend He\u2019s on the Ballot\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-09-11T19:13:27+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=1074\"},\"wordCount\":990,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=1074#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/2217a6c3a71f7bfea9ba4848a59db42d.jpg\",\"articleSection\":[\"Politics\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=1074#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=1074\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=1074\",\"name\":\"Trump Wants Voters to Pretend He\u2019s on the Ballot - 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