Trump will ‘barnstorm the country’ to help juice low-propensity GOP voters, Gruters tells NR.
First-term Republican National Committee Chairman Joe Gruters knows that if history is any guide, voters will take their frustrations out on his party in the upcoming midterms.
The headwinds facing Republicans are varied and impact all corners of the coalition Trump has cobbled together: The entire middle class is upset with the state of prices; the MAGA early adopters are frustrated that Trump has become too involved in overseas conflicts while dismissing their Epstein conspiracy theorizing; Hispanics, who turned out for Trump in record numbers in 2024, are shifting back to the left, partially in response to the breadth of the ongoing mass-deportation operation.
Gruters has a solution in mind to shift the narrative away from these discontents and disrupt historic trends going into 2026: More Trump.
“What we’re facing is a situation which is of no surprise to anybody, where the party in power normally gets absolutely annihilated,” he says. Only a handful of presidents have been able to buck that trend over the past 15o years. “And so, the question is, how do we reverse that trend? Well, it’s not easy.”
“But we have a secret weapon that nobody else has ever had, and that’s the president.”
Critics will naturally point out that Republicans had this “secret weapon” in office in 2018, the same Trump-focused midterm cycle when Democrats obliterated the GOP at the ballot box. The argument from MAGA world is that this time around, Trump will “barnstorm the country” to help juice low-propensity GOP voters who don’t turn out for Republican candidates when Trump isn’t on the ballot. While Trump also hit the trail hard in 2018, the White House looks poised to deploy him earlier — and even more often — this time around.
The message is clear: yes, the president is quickly approaching the one-year mark in his second term, but this is still Trump’s GOP. Even the building’s Christmas decorations are in character. In the lobby of the RNC’s D.C. headquarters, there sits a Christmas tree topped with a MAGA hat in place of a star.
And yet it’s not clear that Trump is the man to assuage concerns about affordability. He responded to Democrats elevating the issue earlier this year by repeatedly dismissing it as a “hoax,” and his approval rating on the economy has duly suffered, falling to 36 percent in the most recent Marist poll, the lowest number recorded since the pollster began asking the question six years ago. Seeking to reclaim the narrative, Trump delivered a prime-time address Wednesday night in which he touted the price reductions he’s achieved since costs spiraled out of control under Biden.
Republicans are also struggling to effectively sell the sprawling reconciliation package they passed over the summer, which extended the 2017 tax cuts and created new breaks for tipped wages and overtime pay.
“We have a communications problem, and we got to let people know all the good the president’s doing,” Gruters says.
Admitting the existence of a messaging problem is an unenviable position for any national party chairman, let alone president. Conventional wisdom in politics holds that if you’re explaining, you’re losing. And after all, it wasn’t all that long ago when former President Joe Biden’s team constantly complained to the press that voters weren’t appreciating the legislation he had muscled through Congress.
Pressed about these dynamics, and the likelihood that the out-of-power party will spend the 2026 cycle running ads with Trump dismissing the affordability “hoax” as a scam Democratic narrative, Gruters insists that the president has been focused on bringing down prices since day one of his second term, from the tax bill to trillions in overseas investments in America. Egg prices are down, gas prices are down, and even mortgage prices are down, he says, thanks to lower interest rates.
But yes, he concedes, the affordability question is a challenge. “It’s hard to turn the ship” because “the Democrats put us in such a deep ditch we’ve been digging out every day,” he says. The positive results of Trump’s economic policies “aren’t going to be felt overnight.”
“By the time we get to the election, I think that we’ll be able to even have a better pitch, because I think people will feel a difference in their wallets,” he predicts.
‘I’ve Always Been Loyal.’
Gruters’s “more Trump” strategy seems like a natural outgrowth of his personal admiration for the president. He’s been on the Trump train since well before it left the station: When Gruters was chairman of the Sarasota Republican Party in 2012, he came up with the idea of bestowing Trump with that year’s “Statesman of the Year Award” one day before the 2012 national GOP convention in Tampa. At the time, Trump had “wanted to speak at the convention, and I don’t think that Romney gave him permission,” Gruters recalls. He then worked alongside Susie Wiles as a Florida co-chairman for Trump’s 2016 campaign and, years later, became the first member of the Florida state legislature to endorse Trump’s 2024 run.
“I have always been on the president’s side. I’ve never wavered. I’ve always been loyal, and I’ve been loyal” not only because Trump has been loyal, but also because “he’s been nice,” he says. “I think he saved the world when he won in 2016, I think he was cheated out of the race in 2020, and I think that he’s saving the world once again. I think what happened in Butler, Pennsylvania, when he moved his head, I think God saved him. And I think he saved him to save the world. And I think he’s doing exactly that.”
Gruters takes the reins from Michael Whatley, the former North Carolina GOP chairman who is now running for Senate in what’s expected to be one of the most expensive and competitive contests in the upcoming cycle. That Trump tapped a Sunshine State native to lead the party’s national apparatus is not surprising. His inner circle is chock-full of Floridians: from Susie Wiles to deputy chief of staff James Blair and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
The challenge for this first-term chairman is whether he can rise to the occasion during a cycle that will be extremely difficult for Republicans.
Beyond mobilizing Trump on the campaign trail, he thinks a number of factors will give Republicans a strong start to the 2026 cycle: the RNC’s “seamless” coordination with the president’s inner circle, strong candidates, a midterm convention, and tons of cash in the bank ($91 million on hand as of November 1 compared with the Democratic National Committee’s $18 million.)
Vice President JD Vance is also serving as the national party’s finance chairman, a gig that makes Gruters’s life “one thousand times easier” on the fundraising front. He’s hopeful that the Supreme Court will decide in a case challenging a federal limit on how much political parties can financially coordinate with candidates. And he’s pleased that the well-funded Trump-aligned spending group, MAGA Inc., has pledged to help the party’s 2026 finances.
He also touted the GOP’s redistricting efforts, telling National Review last week that Republicans across the country “need to wear their big boy pants and do the right thing and vote through these maps to make sure that the president doesn’t get sideswiped.” Unfortunately for Gruters, one day after his sit-down with National Review, Indiana Republican state legislators dealt a major blow to Trump by joining Democrats in voting down the White House’s preferred 2026 map, which would have eliminated every Democratic congressional seat in the state.
Looking ahead to next year, details remain sparse on what, exactly, a midterm convention might look like. As he awaits further direction from the president, Gruters says he envisions a “Trump-a-palooza-type event” in the spirit of a typical Republican presidential convention, where Republicans pair GOP policy wins with “personal stories and real-life examples” from everyday Americans, “to tell the story of all the good that the president has done.”
The key, he maintains, is keeping Trump front and center to Republicans’ 2026 pitch while brainstorming creative ways to buck the electoral winds blowing in the minority party’s favor.
“If we do the exact same thing that we’ve been doing over the last couple of decades, we will lose like every other incumbent party,” he says. “We have to be different, we have to be bold. We have to think outside the box. And that’s why everything you’re seeing from redistricting to superior finances to the convention to the candidates to our coordination with all of our friends, it will all lead, hopefully to victory.”