Trump Opens Midterm Blitz in Reliably Red Oklahoma and Alabama, Not the Battlegrounds He Promised

President Trump opened the final five-week sprint to the midterm elections this week not in a contested battleground but in two of the reddest states on the map. On Thursday night he addressed a rally at the Choctaw Event Center in Durant, Okla., on behalf of Republican gubernatorial nominee Mike Mazzei. On Friday evening he flew to Mobile, Ala., for a rally meant to lift a slate of Republicans running for governor, the Senate and a redrawn House seat. Both states backed Mr. Trump by roughly two-to-one margins in 2024.

The itinerary marks the start of what the president has promised will be 30 days of near-constant travel before Nov. 3, when control of the House and, to a lesser extent, the Senate will be decided. But the choice of Oklahoma and Alabama as opening stops is notable: in January, Mr. Trump pledged to spend the campaign's final month in 35 of the most competitive districts and states in the country. Durant and Mobile are not among them.

A base-first start to the sprint

Mr. Trump's schedule had him leaving the White House Thursday afternoon for Dallas-Fort Worth, touring a Peterbilt truck plant in Denton, Texas, then flying on to Durant for a 7 p.m. rally that ran past 10. On Friday he left Washington in the afternoon for Joint Base Andrews and landed at Mobile's Mitchell Center by early evening for a second rally. Republican officials described the stops as efficient rather than symbolic, noting that Durant sits inside the Dallas-Fort Worth media market and that Mobile's signal reaches into the Florida Panhandle. "The President's ability to engage with and activate low-propensity voters is unmatched," a Republican National Committee spokeswoman, Natalie Baldassarre, said of the strategy, according to reporting from the Associated Press.

The stops come as Mr. Trump's standing with the broader electorate has slipped. Polling from The Economist and YouGov this fall put his disapproval rating at 58 percent. Republicans hold the House 218 to 214, meaning Democrats need a net gain of only three seats to take the majority, and the Senate 53 to 47. Both chambers are narrow enough that a handful of races — including some in states Mr. Trump carried easily — could tip control either way.

How the party got here

The red-state opening follows a difficult stretch for Republicans. In November 2025, Democrats won the Virginia and New Jersey governorships by wide margins and took the New York City mayoralty, results that rattled party strategists heading into the midterms. Vice President JD Vance argued afterward that the losses said little about 2026, telling reporters it would be "idiotic" to overreact to races lost in blue states and insisting that affordability, not the president's approval rating, would be "the metric by which we'll ultimately be judged." The Republican National Committee has since restructured its operation around the midterms, holding its first-ever midterm convention in Dallas in September and adopting a rule to let Mr. Trump headline party events outside a presidential campaign.

Alabama's 2nd Congressional District, one of the races Mr. Trump is trying to shore up in Mobile, is itself a product of recent Supreme Court action. The seat was redrawn earlier this year by the Republican-controlled legislature after the justices' ruling in Louisiana v. Callais narrowed the circumstances in which the Voting Rights Act requires race-conscious districting. The new lines kept the district roughly 40 percent Black, short of the share that produced a Democratic winner in 2024.

The races riding on the visits

In Oklahoma, Mr. Mazzei faces Democratic state House Minority Leader Cyndi Munson in a race that independent handicappers, including Cook Political Report and Sabato's Crystal Ball, rate solidly Republican. Mazzei had committed to the state's only televised gubernatorial debate, hosted by the public broadcaster OETA, on the same Thursday evening as the Durant rally; as of that morning his campaign had not said whether the debate would go forward without him or be rescheduled.

Alabama's ballot carries higher stakes. Sen. Tommy Tuberville is giving up his seat to run for governor against Democrat Doug Jones, the former senator he unseated in 2020 — a rematch six years in the making. The Senate seat Mr. Tuberville is vacating has drawn Rep. Barry Moore, who won the Republican nomination with Mr. Trump's endorsement, against Democratic attorney Everett Wess. And next door to Mobile, Rep. Shomari Figures, a first-term Democrat, is defending the newly redrawn 2nd District against Republican Rhett Marques in a contest the National Republican Congressional Committee has made a top flip target. An internal Democratic poll this fall showed the two tied at 46 percent, and a nonpartisan ratings shift — Sabato's Crystal Ball moved the seat from "Likely Republican" to "Leans Republican" last month — has added to Democratic optimism about turnout among Black voters, who make up roughly 40 percent of the district.

Both parties read the itinerary differently

Democratic officials seized on the red-state swing as proof that Mr. Trump's drawing power no longer travels to the places Republicans most need it. "This race continues to get more competitive — and national Republicans are right to be worried about Mazzei," said Kevin Donohoe, a spokesman for the Democratic Governors Association. Viet Shelton of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee put it more bluntly, saying "the political floor is falling out from underneath Trump and Congressional Republicans."

Republicans counter that shoring up turnout in friendly territory is itself a sign of discipline, not weakness, pointing to races up and down the ballot in both states that are closer than their presidential lean would suggest. Mr. Trump, for his part, has framed the whole stretch as a personal project. At a Rose Garden dinner last month he told Republican donors and candidates:

"It's all about 35 races. I'm going to go to every one of those 35 places."

Durant and Mobile were not on that original list of 35, underscoring how much ground Republican strategists now feel they must cover.

What comes next

Mr. Trump's campaign travel is expected to turn toward competitive terrain in the coming days, with stops planned in Iowa, Florida, Texas and Alaska — the last on behalf of Sen. Dan Sullivan, who faces Democrat Mary Peltola in one of the cycle's marquee Senate races. Both Oklahoma's and Alabama's general elections, like those in every state, fall on Nov. 3. With both chambers of Congress within reach for Democrats, strategists in both parties say the next month will be a test of whether a president who remains popular with his base can still move the voters his party needs most.