President Donald Trump is very popular in Oklahoma — and that explains why it’s so ominous for Republicans that he recently campaigned there.
“President Donald Trump’s unusual decision to hold a midterm rally in a rural part of Oklahoma, a state long considered a Republican stronghold, signals GOP panic that voters may sit out the election as the president’s popularity wanes,” reported News from the States’ Emma Murphy on Monday. “Political scientists said Thursday’s campaign rally in Durant, a city of about 21,500 people located about 2.5 hours southeast of Oklahoma City, also underscores GOP concerns that a Trump endorsement has decreased in value.”
Murphy added, “Trump’s first official appearance in the state in six years also comes as a state party leader said Democrats nationally are putting resources into flipping an Oklahoma City-area congressional seat that has been held by Republican incumbent U.S. Rep. Stephanie Bice since 2021.”
Seth McKee, a political science professor at Oklahoma State University, told Murphy that “I think it’s a signal of how bad things have gotten for the Republicans under Trump.” Describing Trump as “toxic” to Republicans seeking office, he continued that “he doesn’t hurt in Durant, Oklahoma, but he might be a net negative if he went down to Dallas and campaigned for Ken Paxton… So that’s what we’re dealing with here, which is a real problem. I mean, he’s so unpopular that if you put him in any context where a race is super close, he’s not going to help it, he’s going to hurt it.”
Trump is facing headwinds going into the 2026 midterm elections for a constellation of reasons involving both his own unpopular policies and historical precedent that works against the incumbent party in such contests.
Speaking with AlterNet earlier in September, Sabato’s Crystal Ball editor and polling expert Kyle Kondik explained all of these issues.
“It’s primarily the president’s weak approval rating combined with the usual difficulty that the presidential party has in a midterm,” Kondik explained to AlterNet. “I also think there may be even more for voters to react to in 2026 compared to even 2018, because Trump has acted as more of an imperial president and there is more dissatisfaction both with the economy as well as the president’s foreign policy choices.”
He continued, “Generally speaking, a president who is this unpopular should see his party lose a lot of ground in Congress. That said, Joe Biden also had poor approval in 2022, but Republicans didn’t do all that well—they flipped the House but not the Senate. However, the Republican lead in the generic ballot was not as large as the Democratic lead is now.”