Midterm Elections 2026: GOP Closes With Personal Attacks
Meta description: Republicans close the 2026 midterms with personal attacks on Democratic Senate nominees in Kansas, Texas and Michigan as polls point to a tough night for the GOP.
With three days left before Americans vote in the midterm elections 2026, the closing message from President Donald Trump and Republican candidates across the country has become strikingly personal. Rather than running chiefly on the economy, immigration or the record of the administration, Republicans in the final stretch have aimed a series of false, inflammatory and deeply personal attacks at their Democratic opponents, according to a New York Times report published on the last weekend of the campaign. The targets span the Senate map: in Kansas, in Texas, in Michigan and in the governor’s race in Ohio, Democratic candidates have faced accusations and insults that go well beyond ordinary policy disagreement, and the pattern has drawn criticism from within the Republican Party itself.
The shift in tone is not accidental. Republicans enter the final days of the campaign facing a backlash over rising prices and a president whose popularity has fallen sharply. A Reuters/Ipsos poll completed on October 26 put Trump’s approval rating at 32 percent, one point above a record low set a week earlier. With voters telling pollsters they are struggling to afford fuel, groceries, housing and health care, and with early voting already surging, Republican strategists have leaned into the kind of attacks that defined Trump’s own campaigns, betting that cultural and personal assaults on opponents will motivate their base more than a debate about the cost of living. The result, in the judgment of the Times report, is a closing stretch in which Republican attacks stand out for their viciousness even by the standards of a rancorous political era.
2026 Midterms: The Closing Message Turns Personal
In Kansas, Senator Roger Marshall, a Republican fighting for a seat his party has held for nearly a century, has attacked his Democratic opponent in terms that have shocked even seasoned campaign watchers. Marshall has baselessly said his opponent “probably is grooming” children, an accusation with no evidence behind it that ties into the culture-war themes Republicans have pushed throughout the campaign. The Kansas race has become one of the most expensive Senate contests in the state’s history, with Marshall and Republican groups committing around $32 million to television and digital advertising and his Democratic opponent and Democratic groups committing more than $38 million, according to AdImpact data cited by the Associated Press. Surveys show the race neck and neck, a remarkable position for Democrats in a state where Republicans have held the Senate seat since 1932.
Trump campaigned in Kansas on October 19, appearing alongside Marshall at a rally in Park City, and Vice President JD Vance was scheduled to follow him into the state. Yet the personal attacks have not closed the gap. Marshall’s campaign has leaned on the charge that his opponent is too liberal for Kansas, and at Trump’s rally he called his opponent the most radical liberal Democrat ever to get through a Senate primary in the state’s history. The “grooming” claim goes further, and it has become a symbol of how far the closing argument has travelled from jobs, prices and public services into the politics of personal destruction.
In Texas, the attacks on James Talarico, the Democratic Senate nominee, have taken a different but equally personal form. Republicans have cast Talarico as a “freak” and insinuated that he is gay, secretly a vegan and obsessed with transgender children because he made statements supporting transgender people in the past. Talarico has faced a barrage of personal attack ads, many of them generated with artificial intelligence, including one featuring an AI version of the candidate wearing a dress and singing about transgender children. The Texas race pits Talarico against Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton, and polls put the two neck and neck. Billionaire businessman Elon Musk has donated $158 million to the super PAC supporting Paxton, a measure of how much money is now flowing into races that were once considered safe for Republicans.
In Michigan, Republicans have targeted the Democratic Senate nominee, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, with attacks that his supporters describe as Islamophobic. Trump himself has described Dr. El-Sayed as a “vicious, violent jihadist,” language that bears no relation to the candidate’s record as a physician and former public health official. A spokeswoman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee defended the party’s approach, claiming that Dr. El-Sayed had “pledged support” for a terrorist regime and arguing that “if Talarico didn’t want to be called anti-meat, he shouldn’t have announced his campaign would go vegan.” The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the attacks.
Election Polls and the Battle for the Senate
The personal turn in the campaign has dismayed some prominent Republicans. Former Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona, a longtime critic of Trump who is backing candidates in both parties in these midterms, said the coarseness of the attacks reflected both desperation in the party and imitation of the president. “It’s awful,” Flake said. “We’ve gotten progressively more crass and crude and vulgar. But this seems to be a new level.” Flake argued that the attacks stemmed from a mix of desperation as Republicans face the prospect of losing control of Congress and a mimicking of Trump, who has repeatedly rewritten the rules of acceptable discourse in American politics.
The stakes on November 3 are enormous. Roughly 210 million registered voters will decide all 435 House seats, 35 Senate seats and 36 governorships, and the outcome will determine how much power Trump keeps for the final two years of his term. Election polls have pointed for weeks toward a difficult night for Republicans, with Democrats leading in surveys and early voting surging. The battle for the Senate is particularly tight: Republicans are defending seats in states where Trump’s unpopularity and the rising cost of living have given Democrats openings that would have seemed unthinkable two years ago, while Democrats are defending their own vulnerable seats in states Trump won comfortably in 2024.
Money is pouring into the fight at a record pace. Republicans are outspending Democrats, with AdImpact reporting that the GOP spent 50 percent, or $200 million, more on ads than the Democratic Party last month. Much of that money is being funnelled into personal attack ads, particularly in the close races. Ford O’Connell, a political strategist who has worked on numerous Republican campaigns, described the mood bluntly: with races so close that nobody knows what will put a candidate over the top, campaigns are throwing everything at the wall, whether in Ohio, Michigan, Texas or Kansas. That logic explains the volume of the attacks, but it does not answer whether voters will reward them.
Swing States: Kansas, Texas, Michigan and Ohio
Ohio has produced the single most controversial advertisement of the campaign. The Republican nominee for governor, Vivek Ramaswamy, ran a commercial featuring the estranged mother of his Democratic opponent, Dr. Amy Acton, who has said she has not spoken to her mother since she was 12, after her stepfather was charged with raping her. Acton was removed from her mother’s custody when she was 12, but the Ramaswamy campaign nevertheless ran an ad in which her biological mother accused Acton of being a “liar” and urged people not to vote for her. Even in the rancorous political environment of pre-midterm America, the ad was considered by many a step too far, and it drew criticism from Republicans as well as Democrats.
Vance, however, showed no patience for those sensitivities. “Politics is a tough business, and my message to my fellow elected Republicans is if you actually believe in the things you say you believe in, stop whining about an advertisement and go win the race in 13 days,” he told reporters. His comments reflected the combative mood inside the party as the United States entered the final stretch of campaigning, with Republican donors throwing huge amounts of money at closely contested races and high-profile surrogates deployed across the swing states. Ramaswamy, who trails Acton in the most recent polls, has said he will spend $4 million promoting the ad featuring Acton’s mother, and billionaire Jeff Yass gave $10 million to his campaign this month.
The pattern across these swing states is consistent: where Republicans are struggling, the campaign has turned personal. In Kansas, the attack is about children and values. In Texas, it is about identity and diet and gender. In Michigan, it is about religion and loyalty. In Ohio, it is about family trauma. What links them is not policy but the attempt to make the Democratic candidate unacceptable as a person, rather than wrong on the issues. Democrats, for their part, have focused their closing argument on the cost of living, arguing that Republicans have failed to bring down prices despite Trump’s 2024 promise to do so rapidly. The contrast between the two closing messages may be the defining feature of the final weekend.
What Happens Next
What happens next will be decided by voters on Tuesday, and by the early voters who have already cast ballots in record numbers. If the personal attacks work, Republicans may hold the Senate and limit their losses in the House, and the strategy will be vindicated as a model for future campaigns. If they fail, and Democrats take one or both chambers, the closing stretch of 2026 will be remembered as the moment when a party facing an unpopular president and an affordability crisis chose personal destruction over persuasion, and lost anyway. Either way, the tone of the campaign has already changed what American elections look like: the attacks of this final weekend will be cited for years as evidence of how far the boundaries of acceptable campaigning have moved.
The immediate aftermath will also test the Republican Party itself. Figures like Flake have warned that the party has gone down a darker road, and the question of whether mainstream Republicans accept or reject that road will shape the party’s direction after the votes are counted. For Trump, the midterms are a referendum on his second term, on the war in Iran, on tariffs and on the cost of living, and his closing rallies have been a parade of put-downs, boasts and warnings about what Democrats would do in power. He has branded journalists “fake news,” his opponents “Dummocrats” and “radical left lunatics,” and promised that prices will fall once the Iran war ends. Whether voters hear that message or the personal attacks more clearly is the question on which November 3 will turn.
Source: The New York Times