WASHINGTON ― Just weeks after claiming he would visit every House district in play for the coming midterm elections, President Donald Trump is kicking off his pre-election rallies with visits to Trump-loving safe spaces hundreds of miles from the nearest toss-up race.

Trump will begin with a visit to Durant, Oklahoma, Thursday evening, followed by a rally in Mobile, Alabama, on Friday. He won Oklahoma by 34 percentage points in 2024 and Alabama by 31 points.

After a Saturday trip to Ohio, which does have a competitive Senate race, Trump will hit Nebraska on Monday, another state he won by a blowout, 21-point margin two years ago.

Stuart Stevens, a former top Republican consultant who helped run the 2000 and 2004 successful George W. Bush campaigns, said there’s no mystery to Trump’s venue choices. “I don’t think it’s complicated. No one wants him,” he said of Trump, who is now a historically unpopular president thanks to his trade war against the world and his actual war against Iran.

“The vital swing states of Alabama and Oklahoma,” joked longtime Florida Republican consultant-turned-Trump critic Rick Wilson. “It’s a sign of how deeply unpopular Trump is in the rest of the country and those states he’s barely above water. It’s all about his delicate ego and not about political outcomes.”

At a Sept. 2 gathering of Republican lawmakers in the White House Rose Garden, Trump said there were some three dozen competitive House races across the country and that he would be visiting them all. “It’s all about 35 races,” he said. “I’m going to go to every one of those 35 places, and we’re going to see if we can get everyone elected.”

He repeated that pledge a week later at his “Trump-a-palooza” midterm rally in Dallas: “I’m going to go to every one of those states for congressmen and senators.”

At least in his first set of rallies, though, he has chosen instead places where the locals are more likely to still adore him.

Durant is a solid 350 miles, a five-and-a-half-hour drive, from the closest “toss-up” House seat, neighboring Texas’ 15th Congressional District, said J. Miles Coleman, an analyst with the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.

Similarly, the closest toss-up seat to Mobile, Alabama, is the 11th District of North Carolina, Coleman said, a good 450 miles to the northeast. The nearest toss-up seat to Grand Island, Nebraska, is Iowa’s 3rd Congressional District, 180 miles away. (Nebraska’s GOP-controlled 2nd District in Omaha is now seen as very likely to flip to Democratic control.)

Only on his Saturday stop in Vandalia, Ohio, is there a competitive House seat relatively close by: the 9th District, which is only 75 miles away, Coleman said. There’s also a marquee Senate race in the state between incumbent Republican Jon Husted ― who has told a Cleveland news outlet that he will be attending ― and Democrat Sherrod Brown.

One Republican official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Trump would, in fact, go to battleground states and districts soon enough. “These two rallies at the start are kind of outliers,” the official said. “He will be spending a lot of time in battleground races.”

Trump will not be going to districts where his presence would, on balance, hurt the Republican candidate running, the official added: “They’re not going to send the president to anyplace that’s not helpful.”

How Trump might react to that analysis, however, is unclear. After South Florida Republican congresswoman Maria Salazar released an ad criticizing Trump for his aggressive immigration crackdown in her district, Trump responded with a string of attacks against her on his social media platform. And when Florida’s GOP nominee for governor, Byron Donalds, scrubbed his website of most of the mentions of Trump, the president responded with a lengthy post calling it fake news and claiming he would stage rallies for Donalds.

In any case, said one former Trump campaign official on condition of anonymity, finding places where Trump’s presence is helpful is not going to be easy: “He’s underwater nearly everywhere.”

Republicans have long said their midterms strategy would center, in large part, around using Trump to encourage turnout among low-propensity voters who have shown up in the past when Trump is on the ballot but not for other Republicans.

Polling, however, indicates many of those voters now have a significantly lower opinion of Trump than they did in 2024, with the president’s image battered by a war with Iran and his administration’s reluctance to release files from the federal investigation into billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

Nonetheless, Trump claimed this week that GOP candidates all want him to come to their states and districts. “They all want me to go, I’m one person. They all want me to go campaign,” he told reporters at the White House Tuesday.

A day earlier, when asked why Republicans around the country, including many in areas he won easily two years ago, are now facing tough races, Trump denied the premise of the question. “First of all, the polls are fake,” he said.

And on Wednesday, Trump said he was starting his rally tour because other Republicans were not sufficiently talking up what a great job he has done since returning to office. “I‘m going out because nobody’s selling it. I’m doing ― we’re doing an extremely poor job of promotion and an extremely great job of running the country,” he said.

Natalie Baldassarre, a Republican National Committee spokesperson, emphasized how much more money Republicans have at their disposal than do Democrats.

“While Democrats squabble over the last two cents their party has to spare, the president is barnstorming the country, energizing our base, and supercharging Republican candidates in key races and beyond,” she said. “We have the resources to spend, and Republicans are full steam ahead to protect and expand our majorities.”

Republican consultant Rick Tyler, who worked on Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign, said the most obvious explanation for Trump’s rally schedule is almost certainly the correct one.

“The president’s travel schedule reflects his party’s willingness to be on stage with him,” he said. “His second term is effectively coming to a rapid close.”

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