More than 52 million votes are already cast, and the most powerful man in the country is still asking people to pretend he's on the ballot. Donald Trump spent this Sunday, November 1, 2026, working the crowd in Dubuque, Iowa, with a second stop planned in Salina, Kansas, two days before Election Day. "Please pretend I'm on the ballot cause in a way I am on the ballot," he told a rally last week in Greenville, N.C., "because they want to do away with all of the tremendous things we've done. The tax cuts, the border."
He isn't on the ballot. Farmers, fuel buyers and everyone else paying the bills are.
Who Gets Crushed
Elevated gasoline, diesel and fertilizer prices, driven up by the Iran war, have rattled the agriculture-heavy economies of Iowa and Kansas. Both states went to Trump by double digits in 2024, and both are now battlegrounds. That's what a war and a tariff regime do to people who never got a vote on either. Outgoing Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., put it plainly on CNN's "State of the Union": "Tariffs are not popular here in the Midwest. I tried telling the president that." Even the man's own party can't get through to him.
The decisions came from the top. The bill for them landed on people filling tractors and trucks.
What They're Calling "Order"
The campaign's logistics read like a case study in who matters to the apparatus. On Thursday, the Republican National Committee announced the Iowa and Kansas rallies were cancelled in favor of tele-rallies, a way to reach "the party faithful more efficiently." Less than 24 hours later the in-person events were back on. A source familiar with the scheduling change, who wasn't authorized to speak on the record, said: "President Trump loves his supporters, and in addition to nearly 20 tele-rallies, he will hold back-to-back rallies in Kansas and Iowa on Sunday."
The crowd, in other words, is a prop that gets scheduled and descheduled.
Trump spent Saturday night at his Mar-a-Lago resort at a jungle-themed Halloween party, where he bragged about the wealth of his guests and said "the country's has never done better." He called the controversy over two candidates named Dan Sullivan in Alaska a "total Democrat con job." Joking about costumes, he said: "I came as Donald Trump." Meanwhile he has promised a $5,000 "Trump dividend" to all American adults if Republicans win the House and the Senate, a payout dangled in front of voters with the election days away.
The Election Trap
The whole season has been a machine for converting anger into a seat count. Tim Scott, chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, admitted the premise on NBC's "Meet the Press": "There's no doubt that President Trump has said himself that the midterm election is about him. His agenda, without any question, is on the ballot." A referendum on one man, in other words, with 52 million ballots already in.
The opposition offers the same menu. Democrats, per Decision Desk HQ, hold an 83 percent chance of taking the House and 63 percent for the Senate. In Kansas, the Rev. Adam Hamilton, described as a centrist Democrat, is chasing Sen. Roger Marshall for a seat no Kansas Democrat has won in 94 years. In Michigan, Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed is in a public feud with Rep. Haley Stevens. The fight is over who gets to administer the same machinery. Bacon predicted "there will be a debate in the party" about its future if the losses pile up, a debate among those who run it, not those who live under it.
Trump himself seemed tired of the show. "I thought this was it. I thought I could relax. 28 days in a row of this crap is a lot," he said Friday in Daytona Beach. "My voice is operating at about 49.2%." Sen. John Barrasso, set to join him in Iowa, said on "The Sunday Briefing" that "the crowd is always very energized and they are huge crowds."
The war keeps going. The prices keep climbing. The rallies keep selling the idea that the next election fixes it.
- donald trump
- midterm elections
- iowa
- kansas
- republican party
- senate race
- dubuque
- salina