Inside Republicans’ Plan To Win the Midterms

Donald Trump won the presidency in 2024 by turning out multitudes of people who usually don’t vote, in no small part because his campaign built an entire strategy around aggressively courting their support.

Republicans, including some involved in Trump’s campaign, now think they can use the same strategy to save the GOP’s control of Congress.

From almost the moment the 2024 campaign ended, Republicans have dedicated themselves to building a turnout operation with the sole focus of identifying, engaging and ultimately persuading “low propensity” voters — those who maybe cast a ballot two years ago but often skip midterm elections.

It’s a program aimed at solving a traditional problem for parties in power during midterm elections, when their voters become more complacent and turn out in lower numbers than their opposition’s. And the years of dedicated work is an overlooked reason Republicans think they have a chance to defy widespread predictions of their electoral doom.

“There has never been an operation like this before,” Theresa Vaccaro, political director for the National Republican Congressional Committee, told NOTUS.

She, like others interviewed for this story, emphasized that the entire GOP political ecosystem — from political committees like hers to allied super PACs, the Republican National Committee and the White House itself — is working closely together to achieve the same goal.

The NRCC has more than 30 so-called “battlestations” in key House districts: offices available to serve as a hub of voter outreach efforts for the whole party. Vaccaro said her committee held its first meeting about the program before Trump was inaugurated and built on efforts that started in 2024.

Undergirding the whole operation is a dataset of the voters Republicans are trying to target, one that party strategists say they’ve spent most of this decade building and fine-tuning. That didn’t exist in the failed 2018 midterms campaign, they say, when the notion of a Trump turnout voter was still new.

Republicans involved in the turnout effort acknowledge that what they’re trying to do won’t be easy. The political environment is hostile for Republicans this year, with Trump facing a sharp drop in approval and a continued deep and widespread public discontent with the economy.

But the GOP also has some novel advantages in this year’s election, including a more Republican-friendly map with fewer battleground races, loads of cash, data-rich models of the voters they’re targeting and new and refined outreach tactics.

They also have many of the same people who propelled Trump’s turnout operation, trying to adapt what they learned in that campaign to this year’s midterms.

“What we’re doing in ‘26 is mostly a continuation and refinement of what we did in ‘24 and had a lot of success with,” said Michael Ambrosini, the RNC’s chief of staff. “If we can reassemble that part of the president’s coalition in marginal swing House districts, you’re in a great spot.”

Tim Saler, the chief data consultant for Trump’s 2024 campaign now at Maga Inc., the well-funded Trump-aligned super PAC, added: “None of us are overconfident at all. We all respect the challenges we face and understand how difficult it is going to be to overcome history. But we know what we’re doing.”

The effort is, at its core, an attempt to transform the coalition of voters who support Trump into one that uniformly backs Republicans across the board, even in elections when Trump isn’t on the ballot. That’s been a challenge for the GOP in the past, most glaringly in 2018 — an electoral blowout that saw Republicans lose the House — and in 2022 — when the GOP badly underperformed despite then-President Joe Biden’s mediocre approval rating.

Part of the party’s issue has been the nature of the voters whom Trump has won over since 2016: a multiracial working-class coalition that was especially key to his 2024 victory. As a group, however, their participation in midterm elections historically drops off at a greater rate than voters with a higher educational level (a college-educated cohort that now disproportionately backs Democrats).

Those are the voters — which Republicans interviewed by NOTUS characterized as mostly male, blue-collar and Hispanic — the party is targeting.

“These dudes have two jobs,” Saler said. “They’re not lazy, sitting around doing nothing. They’re working their asses off.”

Specialized efforts to boost turnout in midterm elections aren’t new. In 2014, for instance, officials with the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee launched what was called the “Bannock Street Project,” a 10-state, multimillion-dollar investment in boosting turnout for the party’s Senate candidates.

Four years later, during Trump’s first midterm, the Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with Republicans in the House, launched its own ambitious turnout operation aimed at an array of battleground House seats, predicated on a robust field operation meant to aggressively find and turn out voters who might otherwise sit out the election.

Both efforts fell short — Democrats lost the Senate majority in 2014 and Republicans lost the House in 2018, undone by difficult political environments that ultimately mattered more to the outcome.

The Republicans’ tools for engaging low-propensity voters this year aren’t, in a broad sense, different from in recent cycles. The party is running a tailored digital ad campaign targeting those voters, will launch a robust mail program, and has spent almost the entire cycle building a voter canvassing program, led by the NRCC’s battlestation program.

The difference, Republicans say, is in how they plan to execute the strategy, drawing heavily on lessons learned from their prior failures and successes.

“No one believes us when I say this. I feel like they’re all like, ‘You guys are blowing smoke,’” said one senior GOP official, granted anonymity to speak candidly. “But it truly is night and day compared to prior cycles.”

Republicans involved in the effort emphasize how improved they think it is compared to what the party did in 2018, when tensions simmered between CLF and the NRCC and the party was still struggling to embrace Trump’s leadership. Now, they say, there’s no question who’s in charge, and there’s a seamless level of coordination and communication among all the committees, super PACs and the White House.

“We kind of compare notes on everything, making sure that we’re all seeing the world the same way. Which we do,” said Joe Pileggi, CLF’s political director. “There’s no fragmentation in our thinking.”

Party strategists said they have already started to redo their door-to-door voter canvassing efforts, no longer fixating on the total number of doors but instead emphasizing longer one-on-one conversations that stand a better chance of having an impact.

“In 2018, it was about quantity over quality,” Vaccaro said. “I would rather have a staffer out there for an hour and talk to 15 voters than you tell me you knocked on 40 doors in that hour and dropped a bunch of literature.”

Trump, of course, sits in the center of the party’s efforts. Voters who backed the president in 2024 despite a thin voting history are at the center of the GOP’s turnout efforts now. And Republicans say their candidates are prepared to align themselves closely with Trump, no matter what district or state they’re running in.

“In the first Trump admin, to be very frank, the other committees would be very comfortable telling people, ‘Run away from the president,’” said the senior GOP official. “Everyone’s bought in this time around. It’s just completely different.”

Trump’s ability to motivate voters at the same level he did in 2024 is an open question. He’s not on the ballot, for one, and in recent months he’s shown a rising disdain for some congressional Republicans, threatening the party’s unity.

Embracing him unapologetically also risks alienating some moderate voters, especially if his approval rating remains stuck in the 30s by November. And maybe most alarmingly for Republicans, he might not have the same appeal to some of his old supporters, given that many of them backed him for economic reasons but remain anxious about the state of their finances a year and a half into his term.

In 2024, for instance, the Nevada Republican Party targeted low-propensity voters with a mailer blaming Kamala Harris for high gas prices and vowing that Trump would bring them down. But gas prices spiked after the Iran war and could remain elevated through to November.

Republican strategists said the party’s candidates will need to aggressively make an economic case to voters if they want them to turn out, something the party hasn’t always done since 2024.

Saler, in fact, singled out 2025 ads from Virginia gubernatorial nominee Winsome Earle-Sears that focused on transgender issues as what not to do, saying they did little to address voters’ top concerns. He said he and others involved in Trump’s campaign plan to make that clear to all Republican candidates in 2026.

“We can’t just skip to step 9 or 10 and say there’s an election, go vote,” he said. “That’s not how this works. We have to earn their vote.”

Democrats, for their part, have started their own earliest-ever voter contact program, helping train and connect volunteers with battleground campaigns. Their voters are also more motivated to turn out, according to most polls of the midterm election.

Some Democrats dismiss the GOP’s efforts as an overhyped non-factor that can’t overcome the party’s unpopularity, including over Republican-led cuts to health care and Trump’s tariffs.

“The GOP’s ground game is a consulting revenue stream dressed up as a turnout program,” said Yasmin Radjy, executive director of the liberal group Swing Left, which is helping Democrats with their own turnout efforts this year.

Republicans concede that even a well-run turnout operation can, at best, affect races at the margins. But they say they’ve seen evidence of it working already, including in a special election in Tennessee last year where party operatives believe they were able to boost turnout late.

Some Republicans also point to a surprisingly close vote in the Virginia redistricting referendum this year as evidence of the potency of their turnout operations. And others say their internal data indicates that ongoing efforts to engage with the Hispanic community, which swung toward Trump in 2024, continues to pay dividends.

An internal poll from CLF of a dozen Hispanic-heavy House districts, for instance, found Democrats only slightly ahead on the generic ballot, 47% to 45%.

“People believing that Hispanic voters, especially in Texas and in Florida and others, have left the president, that’s just not true,” Pileggi said.

Other public surveys show Republicans in a weaker position with Latino voters.

But Republicans think that in an election in which they are brimming with cash, on a battleground map that has shrunk in size amid a gradual decline in swing seats, they can channel their efforts like never before.

“We’re talking about a much smaller map than we’ve ever had, and that gives us a smaller universe of people, which gives us more time to talk to them,” Vaccaro said.

Said Saler: “We’re not silly enough to think we control the universe. But we do think we can make a real difference in the races we care about.”