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EXCLUSIVE: President-elect Trump won’t be at the polls in the 2026 midterms, however Republican National Committee President Michael Whatley says Trump will play a “major” role in supporting Republican candidates.
Republicans enjoyed big wins in last month’s election, with Trump defeating Vice President Kamala Harris won the White House, the GOP relinquished control of the Senate to Democrats and kept its razor-thin majority in the House.
Whatley argued that “as we move forward in this next election cycle, the fundamentals will remain the same” during an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital.
“We have to make sure that we’re building our state parties, that we’re building our ground game, we’re building our electoral integrity apparatus to be in place to make sure that when we get these candidates in the primaries the 26. , that we will be able to take them to the finish line”, he stressed.
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Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley delivers and calls the convention to order on the first day of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum on July 15, 2024 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
But the party in power traditionally suffers setbacks in the following mid-term elections. And Trump, who was a turnout mogul, won’t be on the ballot in 2026.
Whatley said that while he won’t be a candidate, “President Trump will be a very important part of this because at the end of the day what we have to do is keep the House, keep the Senate so we can finish his term and his agenda.”
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And Whatley predicted that “Donald Trump will be very active in the Republican campaign. And his agenda is the agenda we’re going to deal with.”
President Donald Trump arrives to speak during an election night event at the Palm Beach Convention Center on November 6, 2024 in West Palm Beach, Florida. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
The Harris campaign and the Democratic National Committee angered the Trump campaign and the RNC this past cycle, but Whatley is confident that with the party soon to control the White House, Republicans will be even more competitive in the race for cash from the mid-term campaign.
“We’re very excited about where we are in terms of the fundraising we’ve done throughout this cycle and what we’re going to do going forward,” he said.
Whatley said his message to donors will be “we were successful in putting Donald Trump in the White House and we need to push his agenda forward by keeping those House and Senate majorities.”
He also rejected persistent questioning of the RNC and Trump campaign’s ground game efforts during the general election.
“We focused a lot on low-propensity voters. This was a whole new system that we put in place over the course of this election cycle. It worked very, very well,” he said.
And looking ahead, he said that “in a midterm election cycle, low-propensity voters are going to be, again, very, very important to us. So we’re going to continue to focus on building that kind of program.” .
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Whatley emphasized that “we also focused on outreach to communities that the Republican Party traditionally hasn’t reached out to: black voters, Hispanic voters, Asian-American voters.” That’s why we were able to see these seismic shifts toward Donald Trump compared to where these blocs had been in 2016 and 2020. We also saw seismic shifts among young voters and women because we were talking to all northern voters. – Americans Our ground game was very important.”
Whatley was interviewed a week after Trump asked him to stay on as chairman of the RNC moving forward.
In March, when he clinched the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, Trump nominated Whatley to succeed. Ronna McDaniel as chairman of the RNC. Whatley, an ally of the former president and a strong supporter of Trump’s election integrity efforts, had served as RNC general counsel and chairman of the North Carolina Republican Party.
Trump is term-limited and will not be able to seek re-election in 2028. Vice President-elect Sen. JD Vance will likely be considered the front-runner for the 2028 GOP nomination.
Vice President-elect Sen. JD Vance of Ohio (L) and President-elect Donald Trump during an election night event at the Palm Beach Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida, U.S., Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2024. (Eva Marie Uzcategui/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
But asked if the RNC will maintain its traditional role of staying neutral in an open and contested presidential primary, Whatley said “we will.”
And he added that “I am very excited about the bench that we have now in the Republican Party. You think about all the Republican governors, you think about all the Republican senators, the members of the House that we have, the leaders. around the country who have participated in this campaign will be part of the president’s cabinet.”
Whatley argued that “the president-elect’s America First movement is bigger than Donald Trump. He’s the tip of the spear. He’s the vanguard of that movement. But. It’s a very big movement right now.”
The president also emphasized that “Donald Trump has completely remade the Republican Party. We are now the party of the working class. We are now a party that communicates and works with every voter, talking to every voter about the issues that they care about, so , as we go into 2028, we are in a great position to be able to continue the momentum of this agenda and this movement.”
The sign outside New Hampshire’s capitol in Concord honors the state’s beloved, century-old tradition of holding the nation’s first presidential primary in the race for the White House. (Fox News)
Unlike the DNC, that the 2024 cycle turned the traditional one upside down calendar of presidential nominations, the RNC made no major changes to its primary lineup, keeping the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primaries as its first two contests.
Asked about the 2028 calendar, Whatley said, “I haven’t had any conversations with anybody who wants to change the calendar on our side. I know the Democrats did that during the course of this election cycle, I’m not sure they really this has helped a lot.”
“We’re very comfortable with the schedule as it is. But as we move toward 2028, we’ll have those conversations,” he added.
