Politics
The parking-lot poobahs who ruled over the World Cup
From the moment the United States launched its bid to co-host the 2026 World Cup, the games were pitched as a way to elevate and promote North America’s most distinctive and glamorous cities.
There was Miami, with its fabulous beachfront hotels, described in the so-called bid book as the United States’ “gateway to the world.” San Francisco put forth a vision of fans flooding Mission Dolores Park, reveling in the city’s “iconic skyline” and its mythical bridge on the edge of the continent. Boston, one of America’s “most historic” cities, would greet the World Cup with an “elegant simplicity with distinctive New England flair.”
The members of soccer governing body FIFA bought it, and in 2018 chose the United States, Mexico and Canada. But the tournament itself was never intended to be played in many of the cities lovingly described by the bid book. Instead, in a quirk of political geography distinctive to the United States, matches would often land instead in much smaller, less wealthy outlying municipalities known to sports fans and illegible to everyone else.
“When I tell people I’m the mayor of East Rutherford, they’re like, where’s that?” said Jeffrey Lahullier, the elected leader of a New Jersey town of 10,000 hosting this weekend’s final match. “I say, do you know where the World Cup’s being played?”
It’s an inversion of American political power laid bare by the World Cup, where global events are often staged in municipalities with sometimes only a few thousand residents, forcing local officials to negotiate with billion-dollar franchises, international governing bodies and visiting heads of state.
For decades, such suburban stadium cities — often considered little more than a landing pad for enormous, polygonal sports spaceships — have existed in a strange political limbo. They find themselves alternatingly privileged and bullied from the athletic behemoths in their backyards, which come with promising financial impact but deliver it only inconsistently. With the World Cup, what was often a source of local friction between local politicians and their most famous corporate citizens moved onto the global stage.
Santa Clara, California, Mayor Lisa Gillmor welcomed Jordan’s King Abdullah II upon his arrival at the nearby airport, and Arlington, Texas, Mayor Jim Ross greeted Japan’s Princess Takamado. In Foxborough, Massachusetts, the five part-time members of a town’s select board found themselves in a staredown with what might be the world’s most famous nonprofit. In Inglewood, abutting Los Angeles, Mayor James Butts saw a labor fight with a stadium-workers union become intertwined with federal immigration debates after workers said they were fearful of being “kidnapped by ICE” agents assigned to games.
As presidents, prime ministers and kings from across at least three continents meet in East Rutherford, Lahullier’s mind will be focused less on the World Cup final taking place than on how to find room in a $34 million municipal budget to cover a $100,000-plus police overtime bill.
“It was described to me like I’m hosting eight Super Bowls,” Lahullier said of the challenges posed by the World Cup. “But it’s not a money-maker — you’re laying out money you hope you’re going to recoup.”
Long before they were massive monuments to American sports culture, the sites of suburban stadiums were racetracks, swamps, low-income neighborhoods and sandy expanses of land where locals took weekend dirtbike joyrides and came to dump their trash.
Through much of the 20th century, sports were synonymous with the hub and thrum of the city itself. Fans would walk from workplaces and homes to arenas that were centers of civic pride, their cheers and roars knit into the urban soundscape, players and coaches an extension of a city’s character.
That started to change in the 1960s, and teams began to move away from the places and names they bore on the front of their jerseys. Although the rise of the automobile and a population shift into the suburbs guided their destinations, departure was usually precipitated by conflict with local political leadership. In 1971, the Boston Patriots left their hometown after struggling to find space for a permanent stadium that could house the National Football League franchise. They found the land about an hour’s drive away along Route 1, in a small town that would not fund the stadium, but welcomed the project. In recognition of their new Foxborough home — much closer to Rhode Island than Boston’s city hall — the team renamed itself the New England Patriots.
Wellington Mara, the owner of the New York Giants, announced that same year that he would move his team from Yankee Stadium to a swampy New Jersey tideland after growing discontented with the city’s unwillingness to build them their own stadium. (“Every family dreams of moving into its own house and to get away from its in‐laws,” Mara said at the time.) After the announcement, then-New York Mayor John Lindsay called Mara “selfish, callous and ungrateful,” threatening to sue in an effort to force the team to drop New York from its name.
The Miami Dolphins decided to leave the Orange Bowl, in the city’s Little Havana neighborhood, in 1984 after Miami demanded a rent increase. Team owner Joe Robbie signed a 99-year lease with Dade County for a site in a low-income, rural, and then-unincorporated patch of land about 15 miles northwest of downtown Miami.
At the time, the populace of what was then called Lake Lucerne was little enthused about making room for a $100 million professional sports stadium. Local homeowners, many of them Black, mounted lawsuits on both land-use and civil-rights grounds to block development, but found themselves thwarted by maneuvering from the county and state agencies. Even the discovery of a Native American burial ground on the site was not enough to stop Joe Robbie Stadium from opening to the public in 1987.
Similar scenes played out across the country in the decades that followed. The Dallas Cowboys left downtown Dallas for Irving in 1971, then moved deeper into the suburbs to Arlington in 2009, having failed to convince either of its previous two homes to build a taxpayer-funded stadium. The 49ers left San Francisco’s Candlestick Point in 2013 for the warmer, less windy and more financially welcoming city of Santa Clara 40 miles down the San Francisco Bay Peninsula. In Southern California, Inglewood won out over competing sites as the home for the Rams when the football team returned to the city in 2020.
Each transformed a small municipality into a development and entertainment destination whose population could balloon by more than 800 percent on game days or concert nights. That offered an appealing new tax base along with vexing new public-safety and transportation challenges, and tricky politics surrounding it all.
As Foxborough transformed from isolated farm town into a regional destination surrounded by malls, the city wrangled with the Patriots over fan behavior, traffic concerns and their understaffed local police. In Inglewood, the arrival of a stadium led to luxury mixed-use housing developments and new hotels with yoga decks, but also significant displacement of an overwhelmingly non-white community.
Rutherford, New Jersey, is a charming borough whose compact, “20th century quaint” walkable center Forbes once described as fit for a Norman Rockwell painting. The town to its east, however, is little more than a farrago of parking lots surrounding MetLife Stadium (home to football’s Jets and Giants), Meadowlands Racetrack (thoroughbreds, harness horses) and the American Dream mega-mall (Abercrombie & Fitch, Cinnabon). It has since become the smallest city ever to host a Super Bowl.
Leaving San Francisco, the 49ers in 2010 asked voters in Santa Clara — a quiet Silicon valley suburb then best known as the home of Intel and Nvidia — to contribute to $937 million in total spending on a new stadium. Under the terms of the arrangement, a public authority would own the building and the 49ers would act as the manager of day-to-day operations, sharing revenue from non-NFL events with the city.
“The economy wasn’t great, the team was losing, there was a lot of distrust in politics at the time,” said Lisa Gillmor, a former city council member who helped run the pro-stadium ballot campaign. “We worked really hard and convinced our community that it wasn’t going to cost the city any money to build the stadium.”
By the time Gillmor returned to city government in 2016, she said Santa Clara’s relationship with the team had begun to deteriorate. A nearby youth soccer park became a flashpoint as the 49ers considered turning into parking lots, and a popular multi-use trail was diverted on game days. (A 49ers spokesperson said that the field was untouched and that the franchise now provides funding for youth teams that use it.) Most significantly, Gillmor said that money that the city was expected to receive from stadium concert revenues soon fell to near-zero, as the team claimed its security costs had increased, although the team maintains that total revenue from the general fund has outpaced initial projects.
Things turned adversarial enough that Gillmor and the city voted to remove the 49ers as managers of the stadium in 2019, prompting a lawsuit from the team. The 49ers later launched a campaign to unseat her, and in 2022, a team-backed challenger came just 700 votes short of doing so. (The city and the team later settled their lawsuit, leaving the 49ers with management of the stadium.)
Ellie Caple, the 49ers vice president of corporate communications and public affairs, said that the World Cup has been a “tremendous success with no financial risk to the city” and that the 49ers remain committed to investing in the community. Gillmor, for her part, has gone from ally of a San Francisco-based team to a leading antagonist of Santa Clara’s most famous resident.
“They were very hospitable during the election,” said Gillmor. “Then after the votes, things changed, they rolled back up the red carpet.”
A global mega-event like the World Cup is always framed in the bright terms of shared humanity and common purpose, a chance to “embrace the concept of global unity” and “the power of football to meaningfully impact the world,” as the United States’ pitch deck once put it. Still, the relationship between a host city and FIFA is also decidedly transactional in nature.
FIFA, soccer’s governing body, requires locales to sign a hosting agreement requiring cities to cover significant operational costs of matches like security and expanded transportation services, which can run to up to$150 million per city. In return, the host city is promised publicity and an economic infusion from the games, plus reimbursements from state host committees. In the United States, many cities recoiled at those terms, including Chicago, Minneapolis and Detroit, which removed themselves from host consideration in the run-up to the World Cup, citing FIFA’s demands and financial expectations.
“The big problem I had was, they wanted to treat taxpayers as dumb money at the table, and I was not gonna let that happen,” former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said in an interview with POLITICO in June, looking back on Chicago’s decision not to host World Cup matches. “I know a bad deal when I see one.”
For the cities that did end up with the games, the welcome wasn’t particularly warm. New York and New Jersey politicians have engaged in a bruising, very public argument with FIFA over its unwillingness to help pay for fan transportation, which World Cup host countries have been on the hook for in the past. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, meanwhile, successfully negotiated with FIFA for $50 tickets and free transportation for 1,000 New Yorkers, and pushed the soccer giant to retreat from a ban on spectators bringing water bottles into stadiums. (FIFA President Gianni Infantino also arranged a call between Mamdani and Arsène Wenger, the legendary manager of Mamdani’s beloved club Arsenal, in an effort to build goodwill.)
Outrage from New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill over FIFA’s plans to sell stadium grass as a collectible drove the organization to reverse itself and agree to return some proceeds to local organizers. (FIFA did not respond to a request for comment.)
But small-town mayors were not always able to capture the same public attention when pushing back against the Zurich-based nonprofit, and were forced to seek leverage elsewhere. The select board of 19,000-person Foxborough withheld a basic event permit for the seven World Cup matches scheduled for Gillette Stadium to extract reimbursement for an estimated $7.8 million in security costs. Less than three months before the World Cup was scheduled to begin, Patriots owner Robert Kraft delivered the money.
“The concessions are small and meaningless, they can say they’ve extracted this, but it doesn’t really matter,” said J.C. Bradbury, a sports business professor at Kennesaw State University and the author of a forthcoming book about how stadiums transformed into “billion-dollar play-palaces for the rich-built increasingly on the backs of taxpayers.”
The settlement between Foxborough and Kraft’s companies allowed the World Cup to proceed in Massachusetts even as the two entities moved their battle to court. In mid-June, Kraft Sports & Entertainment sued the town for “repeatedly misusing its state-granted licensing authority unlawfully to extract funds.” In early July, even before the final match was played there, Foxborough filed a counterclaim that asked a judge to dismiss Kraft’s suit.
“While the plaintiffs, a collection of multibillion-dollar corporations, would prefer to have Foxborough taxpayers bear these expenses, they are contractually bound to pay for the public safety services that are necessary to ensure safe and efficient events at their private venue,” the town wrote in a brief.
Kraft’s New England Revolution professional soccer franchise plays its next match in Foxborough on Thursday.
When the summer Olympics concluded in August 2024, it was Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass who inherited the games’ flame, which she passed to a motorcycling Tom Cruise for an action hero’s escape to California. But the bulk of the ceremony that opens the Olympics in July 2028 will not take place within the city that Bass governs.
Instead it will occur at Inglewood’s SoFi Stadium, which had not been built when the World Cup and Olympic bids were formulated but is now regarded as one of the world’s preeminent sporting arenas and will be converted into a swimming venue in 2028.
Mayor James Butts credits his city’s dramatic change in financial fortunes over the last few decades to the arrival of sports teams and stadiums, along with related businesses like the National Football League, which set its West Coast headquarters and media center there. Once the home of the Los Angeles Lakers, the city’s team bucked the suburban trend by leaving Inglewood’s Great Western Forum for a stadium in downtown Los Angeles in 1999. In the decade that followed, the city struggled with crime, high unemployment rates and a $17 million budget deficit. But its fortunes began to change when the Forum reopened and sports investor Stan Kroenke bought the city’s old racetrack, which later became the site of SoFi stadium and the home of the Rams.
Butts estimates that his city now hosts 400 events a year and welcomes a half-million people, requiring “very robust” traffic management and safety resources, insisting that the city-stadium dynamic is “very healthy.”
But that relationship has also been tested by numerous disputes, including a long running legal dispute between the city and Kroenke, who owns both SoFi and the Rams. Inglewood receives millions each year from an admission tax on ticket events, amounting to nearly 10 percent of the city’s general fund revenues.
“We went from BBB- bond ratings to AA+. Median value for a home was $225,000 when I took office, it’s $850,000 now,” said Butts. “Right now we have more in reserves than any city in the county.”
Butts is not alone among local politicians to believe that having one’s city defined by a stadium is worth the hassle and financial burden, and that being too easily confused with its much bigger neighbor can bring its own benefits. In a promotional video for the World Cup, Mayor Rodney Harris of Miami Gardens — where today’s third-place match between France and England will be played — said that the tournament gives “an opportunity to sell our story” in a way that could help lure future businesses.
Ultimately, for these mayors, the moments of pageantry are few and far between. Lahullier attended the tournament’s first match at MetLife, between Morocco and Brazil, in a luxury-box row of government officials. “I wish I could tell you that I follow soccer, but I do not,” he said.
But when broadcasters grabbed shots of local politicians, it was always Mamdani — the camera cutting out the actual mayor sitting to his right. Even when the world is looking on, a small-city mayor can recede into the backdrop.
“I’ve been mayor now for seven years,” Lahullier said. “If I twisted arms I could probably get a signed football or a signed jersey.”
GIRDWOOD, Alaska — Dan Sullivan isn’t running away from President Donald Trump like so many other vulnerable Republicans. He’s betting that walking the line instead will help him reap reelection in November.
During a candidate debate, speaking at an economic forum and in an interview with Playbook this week, Sullivan repeatedly denied chances to put distance between himself and Trump’s most unpopular policies and positions.
Has the economic pain from the war with Iran been worth it for Alaskans? “The real economic pain is when Democrats get control,” Sullivan told Blue Light News, sitting in the shadow of a well-antlered taxidermy moose head, next to a roaring fire, at a ski resort tucked up in the mountains off the Turnagain Arm southeast of Anchorage.
What about the $5,000 dividends Trump has promised voters if Republicans hold control of Congress, as he did at a rally for Sullivan in Wasilla on Tuesday? “I’ve got to look at the legislation. I don’t know,” Sullivan said. “That was the first time I heard it from him, and I would just evaluate that if and when it happens.”
Does he want to see data centers — which Trump has pushed for further development despite some pushback from local communities — pop up on Alaska’s undeveloped land? He’s not putting his foot down. “They definitely got to pay their own way in terms of energy,” Sullivan said. “They have to have local input and approval, and we’ll see.”
Still, Sullivan bristled on some issues that touch closer to home.
In light of Trump’s decision to import Russian diesel, did Sullivan think the Trump administration was being too friendly with Russia? “I thought you were asking me campaign stuff,” Sullivan replied. “Is this like a hit piece or what?”
Though his office put out a statement decrying the move, Sullivan didn’t sign a bipartisan letter calling on the president to reverse the decision, instead taking his concerns straight to the White House. “I speak to the administration all the time on the issues of high energy costs,” Sullivan said.
Art Hackney, a veteran Republican strategist in Alaska who runs a pro-Sullivan super PAC called “We Stand with Dan,” said in an interview that another part of the calculus is that Murkowski has provided a straightforward example of how Trump treats Republicans who publicly disagree with him.
“If Dan did something considered a disrespectful trigger or something, what do you think would happen? It could well have implications for things that affect Alaska’s economy.”
But Trump, for better or worse, is a centerpiece of races like Sullivan’s. The president has pleaded with voters at rallies to “pretend I’m on the ballot” — just as he did alongside Sullivan on Tuesday.
And Alaska’s tighter-than-expected Senate race is poised to be a linchpin for deciding which party holds control of the chamber. Alaska, Ohio and Iowa are the races that Trump officials view as increasingly critical to keep their majority, according to three GOP officials familiar with the Trump-aligned super PAC MAGA Inc.’s strategy, granted anonymity to candidly assess the midterms.
Sullivan only sees Trump’s presence as a boon. “I think the rally certainly helps in terms of energizing the base,” Sullivan said.
He’s proud to have the president campaign alongside him, plus Vice President JD Vance, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).
“I’m bringing up my people,” Sullivan said. “I’m not afraid of that.”
Polls show Sullivan tied with or trailing former Rep. Mary Peltola, one of Democrats’ top hopes to help flip the Senate. On paper, this contest shouldn’t be close: Peltola lost her House seat after just one term.
“It was Trump plus-13 two years ago, so it is not the position we’d love to be in, but we’re doing what we do to help get him across the finish line,” said Kevin Greene, the state director for Americans for Prosperity-Alaska, which has knocked on tens of thousands of doors for Sullivan.
On one such door-to-door trip with Greene in Anchorage on Thursday morning, voters across approximately a dozen houses were about evenly split between supporting Sullivan or Peltola. Only one agreed to speak on the record to Blue Light News: John Baker, a 67-year-old retiree who said he used to be a Republican but would be supporting Peltola this year.
What happened? “Donald Trump happened,” Baker said. He added that his support for Peltola was 70% because he wanted to see Democrats take the Senate and 30% because he liked her as a candidate.
Peltola, the first Alaska Native to represent the state in Congress, has centered her campaign around “fish, family, and freedom” while capitalizing on voters’ frustrations with the high cost of energy and goods, particularly in remote communities. She has focused on outreach to villages in the Alaskan bush and has largely shied away from national attention, including from the media.
The former congresswoman has some major liabilities that Sullivan often slams. Just two years ago, she lost her reelection bid after only one full term. She has sought to distance herself from the Biden administration, which remains unpopular in the state. She has a reputation for missing meetings and votes. And a New York Times report last month alleged that she created a hostile work environment and regularly used slurs and other offensive language.
Even those close to her campaign, though optimistic, acknowledge it’s still an uphill battle.
“It’s always been long odds,” said John-Henry Heckendorn, a Democratic strategist in Alaska whose firm is supporting Peltola outside of her official campaign. Peltola, he said, would have to do about twice as well as the Democratic Senate challengers in the past four cycles in order to win.
At the debate on Thursday, Peltola said she “prided” herself on being “available to Alaskan press” — though she acknowledged she has “really demurred from national attention, from national outlets.”
After the debate, Blue Light News asked Peltola: “You said you’re accessible to the press. Will you take some questions?” She smiled, then walked away quickly, with an aide saying she had a dinner to attend. “She’s hoping that the Joe Biden bunker mentality will win, and you know, maybe it will,” Sullivan told Blue Light News on Friday. “I don’t think it will. I think Alaskans can see through it.”
Peltola’s campaign declined several interview requests for this story. In an email to Blue Light News, the campaign noted that Sullivan was in the top quarter of most-absent senators, and that Peltola had to miss congressional votes when both her husband and mother died. The email also noted that Peltola helped secure the Willow oil-drilling project and has a record of bucking her fellow Democrats. Peltola has hosted at least 16 events in Alaska this month, the campaign said, and has interviewed with eight news outlets in the past week.
“Dan Sullivan has tripled his wealth in the Senate and voted fourteen times for the war in Iran that is raising costs one everything from gas to groceries, Mary has been talking with Alaskans in every corner of the state about her plan to take on the rigged system in DC, lower costs, and put Alaska first,” Harry Child, a campaign spokesperson, said in a statement to Blue Light News.
Sullivan is leaning on his strong legislative record and support for oil and gas development in the state. He has sought to tie Peltola to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and has attributed her massive fundraising edge to “lower-48 liberal millionaires and billionaires who want to turn Alaska into national parks.”
Though he’s largely embracing Trump, there’s still moments of disagreement. But even in those spaces, he’s touting his close ties to the White House and effectiveness as a Washington operator instead of pushing the president away.
Sullivan was opposed to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s plan to livestream the execution of the convicted Fort Hood shooter, and told Blue Light News “there’s probably no senator weighing in more with senior White House and directly with the Secretary of War than me, saying this is not a good idea.” Trump called off the livestream on Thursday.
Trump’s approval rating here, like the country at large, is underwater. The war with Iran has hit Alaska hard, where nearly all goods are imported by plane or barge, with urban gas prices hovering around $5 per gallon and prices in the bush often double that. In a year when Republican voters may be more likely to stay home without Trump on the ballot — Democrats eye an opening.
“We have a golden opportunity with a fantastic candidate on our end and a really mediocre one on theirs,” said Alaska Democratic Party Chair Eric Croft. “I think we’ve been coming that way for a long time, and this is our chance to pump through.”
Trump on Tuesday flew more than eight hours from Washington to Wasilla, home of Sarah Palin and the Iditarod, with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, FCC Chair Brendan Carr and FHFA Administrator Bill Pulte in tow. He announced that Taiwan had joined South Korea in its commitments to a proposed Alaska energy pipeline — though the project is still in flux — and that the FCC will vote this month to invest an additional $162 million to expand high-speed internet in the state.
Thousands of the president’s fans piled into the ice hockey rink and thousands more gathered outside, watching Trump speak on a jumbotron. Asked by Blue Light News what he thought about Peltola, rally attendee Jeff Caswell, 59, replied: “I don’t.”
But in a state where independents outnumber Republicans, that enthusiasm may only go so far.
“Very conservative MAGA voters can’t vote for you harder,” said Scott Kendall, a veteran political strategist who worked on two of Alaska GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s campaigns and was chief of staff to former Alaska Gov. Bill Walker. “Donald Trump’s support in this current climate is both a blessing and a curse,” Kendall noted.
Even some reliable Trump supporters at the rally acknowledged the outlook appeared bleak.
“I think Alaska’s turning blue,” Matt Niessink, a 45-year-old general contractor from Wasilla, said at the rally. He said he had voted for Trump three times and planned to support Republicans this year.
What did he wish the president would do differently?
“I wish he’d shut his mouth sometimes and not be such a pompous ass,” Niessink said.
Donald Trump is barnstorming the country to boost Republicans in the final weeks of the midterms. But many candidates want to keep that support quiet.
The president is nowhere to be found in GOP ads, even in red states where Republicans were happy to tout his endorsement two years ago. And some candidates are hesitant to appear with Trump on the campaign trail — even as they hope he will help juice turnout among the MAGA base in November.
Democratic House and Senate candidates and outside groups have spent $145 million on general election ads mentioning Trump, while Republicans have spent just $8 million, according to a Blue Light News analysis of data from AdImpact, which tracks political advertising. That’s in sharp contrast to 2024, when GOP candidates spent $62 million on ads mentioning Trump.
“Trump is at historic lows right now, so if he comes to your district or state, it’s about getting the Republican base vote out there and that can certainly help,” said Ron Bonjean, a longtime GOP strategist. “But it’s really important for the candidates not to be talking about Trump 24/7 on the campaign trail.”
The unfavorable national political environment leaves few incentives for GOP candidates to tie themselves to Trump, and more and more Republicans in competitive races have broken with the president on issues such as the Iran war and tariffs.
When Republicans do mention Trump in ads, they often aren’t touting his support. In Alaska, GOP Sen. Dan Sullivan has run an ad citing how he “voted to force Trump’s DOJ to release the Epstein files.”
The silence on the airwaves is especially stark in red states like Nebraska and Ohio. In 2024, Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.), who was facing a challenge from independent Dan Osborn, and now-Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio), who was challenging then-Sen. Sherrod Brown, both ran several general election ads featuring endorsements from Trump. The president won Nebraska by more than 20 points and Ohio by 12 points that year, with Fischer and Moreno also winning their races.
But this cycle, the GOP isn’t focusing its ads on Trump in either state, as the match-up between Osborn and Republican Sen. Pete Ricketts heats up in Nebraska and Brown seeks to oust Republican Sen. Jon Husted in Ohio.
Both Ricketts and Husted appeared at Trump rallies earlier this month. Still, Trump is absent from all Republican Senate ads in Ohio, and the only Ricketts ads that name the president accuse Osborn of disparaging Trump supporters — but don’t mention Trump’s endorsement.
“The war in Iran, I think, has become a real noose around the neck of Republican candidates because of the affordability crisis,” said former Ohio Rep. Jim Renacci. A nonprofit he works with surveyed voters on whether GOP candidates should appear with Trump and found that “in most cases you do not want [Trump] standing near you, which is why I was a little bit surprised that Jon Husted has had two events with President Trump, because I do believe there’s a strong headwind in Ohio, and a big change from 2024.”
Husted’s campaign spokesperson Amy Natoce told Blue Light News in a statement, “President Trump won Ohio decisively three times by 8 points, 8 points and 11 points. If we successfully turn out the MAGA vote this November, then we will retire Sherrod Brown for good.”
The National Republican Senatorial Committee did not respond to a request for comment.
“President Trump is the unequivocal leader, best messenger, and unmatched motivator for the Republican Party, and he is committed to maintaining Republican majorities in Congress,” White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said. “The choice has never been more clear: doubling down on President Trump’s winning, commonsense agenda or the Democrats’ extreme liberal policies and obstruction.”
Another Republican operative, who is based in Ohio and like others was granted anonymity to speak candidly about their own party, said GOP candidates need to find a way to talk about the Trump administration — no tax on tips, protecting social security — without mentioning the guy in the Oval Office.
“This is a historically unpopular president,” said the strategist, who has worked on multiple statewide races over the course of the last 15 years. “We all agree with that, and so it’s kind of hard to attach yourself on the airways, I think, too closely to him.”
Trump’s rallies, unlike candidates’ ads, are seen more as targeting the president’s base. He’s not only visiting traditional battlegrounds like Georgia and Michigan, but also typically safe red states like Alabama and Kansas.
Still, his events have been a source of tension with some GOP candidates. When Trump’s team was making plans for the president to campaign in Michigan last week potentially in western Michigan, several Republican candidates and their teams up and down the ticket initially didn’t know whether they should attend and be seen with the president, according to three Republicans with direct knowledge of the conversations, who were granted anonymity to share private details. They were concerned about being associated with Trump’s tariffs, which have hammered the state, along with high fuel prices amid the Iran war.
Trump officials scrapped the event and said the president would visit the state later in the month. Trump is now scheduled for a rally in the state on Oct. 25.
“[Republican candidates] are going to do what they need to do,” said one GOP pollster close to the White House. “What the White House and the president are doing is they are targeting places where they think the president can be helpful.”
Trump has allowed Republicans to discuss issues pertaining to their states or districts as “he understands that it is not a balk on him,” said one White House official, granted anonymity to speak candidly.
If Trump “was to believe that all these individuals were balking him, I A) don’t think that he would want to be on the road every day, and B) I do think that you would probably see a more vocal President Donald J. Trump on Truth, et cetera, kind of voicing his opinion on it,” the official said.
The president and his team are giving most Senate GOP candidates especially a wide latitude to break with some of his policies at times, according to two other White House officials involved in the conversations. Trump, they said, understands the need for vulnerable candidates to create some distance, even though in the past he has lashed out at members of his party for similar moves.
Republicans in the more MAGA-friendly House, however, are expected to run more in lock-step with the president. Only the most at-risk candidates are afforded some room to break with Trump, the officials said, given the tidal wave of chaos that can spur within the conference.
One GOP strategist working on a battleground House race, granted anonymity to discuss private information, said he had gotten pre-approved from the White House for his candidate to miss a planned rally. Still, the strategist cautioned, that doesn’t mean Trump won’t berate someone from the stage when he notices the candidate is missing.
Republicans still see Trump as a unique motivator for his base and rallies as a tool to help turn out voters who might be driven by the president. With Democratic voters already energized by opposing Trump, the GOP has less to lose by bringing the president out to turn out MAGA voters too.
“The reality is, Democrats are going to vote in this midterm,” said Paul Shumaker, a Republican strategist from North Carolina, where Trump is set to return for a rally next week as GOP Senate nominee Michael Whatley struggles to close the gap in his race. “And what Republicans need to be doing is focus on what they can do to improve their voter turnout on their side.”
Lauren Fedor, Myah Ward, Andrew Howard and Alex Gangitano contributed to this report.
WICHITA, Kansas — Roger Marshall was running behind.
The bus Kansas Republicans booked for a five-day barnstorming tour sat idling Tuesday morning, with other statewide candidates onboard. The tour was already a few minutes delayed as state party chair Danedri Herbert awaited word from the senator who some Republicans grumble isn’t campaigning hard enough as polls show him tied or trailing.
Finally, she got word: Marshall would ride separately.
As the bus reached its first stop in rural Newton, Marshall crept aboard — and was spotted by reporters doing so. He then joined the other candidates exiting to greet the crowd like he’d been there the whole time.
Marshall is playing catch-up as he races to avoid becoming the first person to lose a Senate contest to a Democrat in the state in nearly a century. He faces the most serious challenger for a Kansas senator in over a decade as his party stares down a grim environment under President Donald Trump’s second term.
National Republicans are pouring millions into the state to prop him up; national Democrats are responding in kind, and Democrat Adam Hamilton, a well-known United Methodist pastor, is suddenly flush with cash for the campaign’s homestretch.
But some Republicans think it’s already too late for Marshall.
“He took it way too much for granted,” said former Kansas Gov. Mike Hayden, a Republican who supported Marshall’s previous campaigns but is now publicly backing Hamilton. “He’s been almost invisible, except on national television. And there’s not a lot of love in Kansas for Washington D.C.”
National Republicans have privately urged Marshall to take his race more seriously on numerous occasions, according to a person familiar with the conversations who was granted anonymity to discuss them. Marshall, this person said, never appeared too worried about the race. Marshall’s latest Federal Election Commission report indicates this may be true. He raised just $866,000 for the third quarter to $9.9 million for Hamilton, and that filing did not appear to include any full-time payments to campaign staff.
Marshall’s team did not respond to requests for comment on this article.
One Republican strategist close to the White House, granted anonymity to speak candidly, acknowledged the race is an “uphill battle,” comparing Marshall to an “old athlete who, it takes them a lot longer to warm up to get ready for the game time, and they didn’t start that early enough.”
That strategist said that the remaining undecided voters are overwhelmingly Trump voters, and predicted they’d come home. Kansans “are mad at Republicans, but they just hate Democrats more,” the strategist said. “As much as DC Republicans are bedwetting, the ones actually working on the races are cognizant of this.”
As the race nears the homestretch, a deluge of bad press has dogged the senator: His campaign used pictures of a Kansas campground without permission and had to edit the ad; his team faces accusations of blurring the line between his official and campaign offices; his campaign reportedly didn’t pay a bill to a local bakery for six years until after the unpaid debt was made public (he apologized).
Two other stories landed the hardest.
The first focuses on a Florida property that he owns, raising questions about how much time he actually spends in Kansas. The second stems from a New York Times report that Marshall, an obstetrician-gynecologist who served two terms in the U.S. House, had allegedly taken legal action against hundreds of medical patients who didn’t pay their bills. Marshall has said he spends the bulk of his time in Washington or Kansas, calling the claims “bologna.” He called the Times’ report a “hit job by left media” and told Fox News he had “nothing else to do to with the process” after patients’ accounts went to collections.
At a Monday rally in the liberal college town of Lawrence, Hamilton told supporters that Kansans deserve a senator who isn’t just “showing up for photo ops” between “time with your family in Florida.”
“I want to know from Roger Marshall: What’s your plan when people … show up and they don’t have health insurance?” Hamilton said, standing on a hay bale in a shady park. “Is the plan we’re going to sue them? Then we’re going to have some of them arrested, and maybe a few of them put in jail?”
Hamilton’s campaign cut a face-to-camera ad with one of Marshall’s former patients, who said she was arrested when she was eight months pregnant because she missed a $50 payment to Marshall’s office. The Marshall campaign sent a cease-and-desist letter in response, saying the ad’s “message is false in every material respect,” and went up this week with its own ad of a former patient singing his praises.
National Republicans have swooped in to prop up Marshall with $11 million in planned spending in recent days. And he’s getting other reinforcements: Chris Grant, the stalwart Trump-world operative and veteran of previous Marshall campaigns, will take an expanded role on the senator’s team through Election Day, Axios first reported.
Marshall’s struggles are drawing unfavorable comparisons to the last Republican who needed to be bailed out to win a Senate race in the state.
“This race reminds me of Sen. Pat Roberts’ last race [in 2014], when he was accused of not maintaining a Kansas residence and campaigning poorly,” said one Kansas state GOP lawmaker, who was granted anonymity to speak openly.
But Republicans had a strong wind at their backs in 2014, sweeping nearly every Senate race that year; Roberts managed a 10-point win, similar to Marshall’s 11-point win in 2020. This time around, the national climate is blowing hard the other direction.
Kansas has been especially hard-hit by some of Trump’s policies. His tariffs and spiking fuel prices left the state’s row crop farmers struggling. A plan to import cheap foreign beef infuriated ranchers in a state that produces the second-most cattle annually. And his threats to cut off U.S. sales of Bombardier planes — a Canadian company whose U.S. headquarters are in Wichita — rattled the state’s robust aviation industry.
Marshall has recently shown signs he knows he’s in a fight. The normally strident MAGA backer broke with the president on the beef import plan and on a recent local immigration enforcement action, after ICE activity rattled some of his state’s agricultural towns.
He’s banking on the conservative nature of the state, working hard to paint Hamilton as a progressive who will fall in line behind Washington Democrats. “This guy is the most radical liberal Democrat in the history of Kansas to get through a primary,” Marshall said in an interview in Garden City. “He is this wolf in sheep’s clothing.”
At rallies in Newton, Hutchinson, Dodge City and Garden City, he warned that his election could decide which party controls the upper chamber. “If my opponent were elected, it would give Chuck Schumer and AOC control of the Senate,” he repeated. Recent Republican ads hit Hamilton as “woke” and “radical,” pointing to his past praise of the Black Lives Matter movement.
But as Marshall tagged along with the other GOP candidates for their barnstorming tour, holding mini-rallies across central and western Kansas on Tuesday, he was reminded how deep the anger at Washington runs right now — even in ruby-red Kansas.
In Dodge City, the self-described “cattle capital” of the country, some Republicans in the crowd grumbled about spiking fuel prices. In Newton, protesters screamed through Marshall’s speech, calling Republicans “fascists.” (“Quiet, Satan!” a disgruntled attendee retorted.) In Garden City, where ICE activity sent shockwaves last month, Marshall got an earful in a private meeting with local lawmakers over their frustration that immigration officers barged into town without coordinating with local law enforcement.
”I think the frustration is still there,” state Rep. Jason Goetz, a Republican who represents some of the cities affected by ICE enforcement.
There’s a belief among some Kansas Republicans that Marshall has thrown together so poor a campaign that if he wins, it won’t be of his own accord — it will be because of Ty Masterson, the Republican state Senate president running for governor who joined him on the bus tour and has polled a few points ahead of Marshall in most surveys.
Rep. Tim Huelskamp, a Kansas Republican who lost a U.S. House primary to Marshall in 2016, said Masterson is “going to pull everybody across the line,” a list that “absolutely” includes Marshall.
Patricia Woods, a Hutchinson resident, said at a rally that she is “100% behind Masterson.” When asked about Marshall, she said she is “kind of on the fence.”
Masterson, when asked about Marshall’s race, simply chuckled. “It’s more complicated than mine,” he said.
Adam Wren and Andrew Howard contributed reporting.
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