Donald Trump spent the last weekend before the midterm elections rallying Republicans in Florida, Iowa and Kansas, while also holding tele-rallies for candidates in Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania. The answer to Is Trump Republican Or Democrat was not in dispute on the trail: he campaigned as the party's president and chief vote-getter for Congress.
Trump told supporters Democrats would "open the border", "bankrupt your family", "take away your guns" and "mutilate your children" if they won. He also said Democrats had left the US in a "dark age" and that under his command, "we quickly turned it into the golden age of America".
Florida and Iowa rallies
The Florida and Iowa events gave Trump a direct audience in states that had been treated as more reliable for Republicans than the competitive battlegrounds further north. His pitch stayed fixed on keeping Republicans in control of Congress, with family finances, immigration and guns at the center of his remarks.
That message ran against the numbers circulating at the same time. A Harvard University forecasting tool gave Democrats a 96% chance of taking the House and a 76% chance of taking the Senate, while a national NBC News poll showed registered voters preferred a Democrat-controlled Congress by a 7-point margin, 52% to 45%.
Hakeem Jeffries and Congress
Hakeem Jeffries said this weekend that his party was "very confident" it was on course to win control of the House of Representatives. That put Trump's final weekend push into sharper relief: he was campaigning to preserve Republican control, while the public polling and forecasting pointed the other way.
The immediate test came on Tuesday, when voters were set to decide the midterm elections. The size of the Democratic margin in the polling suggested the fight was not only over Congress as a whole, but also over whether Republicans could hold either chamber.
Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania
Trump's tele-rallies for candidates in Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania extended the effort beyond his in-person appearances and let him support Republicans in states where the party needed turnout. The broader strategy was simple: use his final weekend to drive turnout in states that could determine the balance of power in Congress.
Whether those rallies changed enough votes to alter the outcome was the open question left by the weekend. The polling showed Democrats with the edge going into Tuesday, and Trump spent his final hours before the vote trying to reverse it.
