Trump will be ‘very active on the campaign trail’ in 2026 midterms, GOP chairman predicts

As President-elect Trump begins his second term in the White House, his days as a candidate are numbered.

But even though he is term-limited and his name will no longer appear on the ballot, Republican National Committee President Michael Whatley says Trump will play a “major” role in supporting Republican candidates in the 2026 midterm elections.

“President Trump is going to be a very important part of this because at the end of the day, what we have to do is hold on to the House, to the Senate so that we can finish his term and his agenda.” Whatley made the point in a recent interview with Fox News Digital at RNC headquarters in the nation’s capital.

Republicans enjoyed big wins in last month’s election, with Trump defeating Vice President Kamala Harris to retake the White House, the GOP left control of the Senate to Democrats and Republicans kept their razor-thin majority in the House.

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Whatley argued that “as we move forward in this next election cycle, the fundamentals will remain the same.”

“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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But the party in power traditionally suffers setbacks in the aftermath mid-term elections. And Trump, who was a turnout magnet in this year’s election, won’t be on the ballot in 2026.

Whatley predicted: “Donald Trump is going to be very active on the Republican campaign trail. And his agenda is the agenda we’re going to run with.”

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.

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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, “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.” .

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 to Donald Trump compared to those blocs in 2016 and 2020. We also saw seismic shifts among young voters and women, because we were talking to all the Americans. Our ground game was very significant.”

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Whatley was interviewed earlier this month, a week after Trump asked him to stay on as RNC chairman.

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.