As President-elect Trump begins his second term in the White House, his days as a candidate are numbered.
But even though he’s term limited and his name will no longer be on the ballot, Republican National Committee chair Michael Whatley says Trump will play a ‘significant’ role in supporting GOP candidates in the 2026 midterm elections.
‘President Trump is going to be a very significant part of this because at the end of the day, what we need to do is hold on to the House, hold on to the Senate so that we can finish his term and his agenda,’ Whatley emphasized in a recent interview with Fox News Digital at the RNC headquarters in the nation’s capital.
Republicans enjoyed major victories in last month’s elections, with Trump defeating Vice President Kamala Harris to win back the White House, the GOP flipping control of the Senate from the Democrats, and Republicans holding on to their razor-thin majority in the House.
Whatley argued that ‘as we go forward into this next election cycle, the fundamentals are going to remain the same.’
‘We need to make sure that we are building our state parties, that we’re building our ground game, we’re building our election integrity apparatus to be in place to make sure that when we get those candidates through those primaries in ‘26, that we’re going to be in a position to take them all the way to the finish line,’ he emphasized.
But the party in power traditionally suffers setbacks in the ensuing midterm elections. And Trump, who was a magnet for voter turnout in this year’s elections, won’t be on the ballot in 2026.
Whatley predicted, ‘Donald Trump will be very active on the campaign trail for Republicans. And his agenda is the agenda that we’re going to be running on.’
The Harris campaign and the Democratic National Committee outraised the Trump campaign and the RNC this past cycle, but Whatley is confident that with the party soon to control the White House, Republicans will be even more competitive in the campaign cash race in the midterms.
‘We’re pretty excited about where we are in terms of the fundraising that we did throughout the course of this cycle and what we’re going to do going forward,’ he said.
Whatley said his message to donors will be, ‘We were successful in putting Donald Trump into the White House, and we need to carry forward with his agenda by keeping these House majorities and Senate majorities.’
He also pushed back on the persistent questioning of the RNC and Trump campaign’s ground game efforts during the general election.
‘We focused very hard on low propensity voters. This was an entirely new system that we put in place over the course of this election cycle. It worked very, very well,’ he touted.
And looking ahead, he said, ‘In a midterm election cycle, low propensity voters are going to, again, be very, very important for us. So, we’re going to continue to focus on building that type of a program.’
Whatley spotlighted that ‘we also focused on outreach to communities that the Republican Party has traditionally not reached out to – Black voters, Hispanic voters, Asian American voters. That’s why we were able to see such seismic shifts toward Donald Trump versus where those blocs had been in 2016 and 2020. We also saw seismic shifts among young voters and women voters because we were talking to every single American voter. Our ground game was very significant.’
Whatley was interviewed earlier this month, a week after Trump asked him to continue as RNC chair.
In March, as he clinched the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, Trump named Whatley to succeed Ronna McDaniel as RNC chair. Whatley, a longtime ally of the former president and a major supporter of Trump’s election integrity efforts, had served as RNC general counsel and chair of the North Carolina Republican Party.