Trump heads to Iowa and Kansas for final rallies two days before the midterms
President Donald Trump returns to the campaign trail on Sunday with rallies in Iowa and Kansas, Republican-leaning farm states where his party is fighting to hold US Senate seats two days before midterm elections that will decide control of Congress.
President Donald Trump returns to the campaign trail on Sunday, 1 November 2026, with rallies in Iowa and Kansas, Republican-leaning farm-belt states where his party is fighting to hold US Senate seats, two days before midterm elections that will decide control of Congress. The trip comes after a Saturday spent at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, following weeks of campaigning across multiple states.
Thirty-five Senate seats and all 435 House seats are on the ballot on Tuesday, 3 November. Republicans currently hold a 53-47 Senate majority and a narrow edge in the House, so even a small number of losses could change the balance of power in Washington for the remainder of Trump’s term. That arithmetic is why the final weekend has been spent not in safe territory, but in states where Republican incumbents are under unexpected pressure.
Kansas is the clearest example. The state last elected a Democratic senator in 1932, yet the race for the seat held by Republican Senator Roger Marshall is now unexpectedly close. Trump is due to hold a rally in Salina, Kansas, for Marshall. Multiple polls suggest the Democratic nominee, Adam Hamilton, has opened a lead: a Washington Post poll released on Friday found Hamilton ahead of Marshall by 52% to 43% among likely voters, while a CNN poll found a narrower four-point lead for Hamilton, within the survey’s margin of error.
Iowa presents a different but equally tight contest. Trump is due to hold a rally in Dubuque, Iowa, for Representative Ashley Hinson, the Republican Senate candidate. Hinson narrowly leads the Democratic nominee, Josh Turek, by less than one percentage point, according to a Real Clear Politics average of recent polls cited by USA Today. Trump won Iowa by double digits in 2024, which makes the closeness of the current Senate race a measure of how much the political ground has shifted in the state.
The Sunday rallies themselves have had an unusual history. On Thursday, 29 October, the Republican National Committee abruptly cancelled the planned weekend rallies in Kansas and Iowa in favour of tele-rallies, only for the in-person events to be restored less than 24 hours later. USA Today reported that the dates were rearranged to accommodate dozens of tele-rallies Trump is planning for Republican candidates in the final days of the campaign.
Trump addressed the schedule changes himself in the Oval Office on Friday, 30 October, saying he had received calls from Republicans in both states asking him to come. “We have a couple of races that are very important, and they said if you could go, it would be better than a tele-rally,” he said, according to USA Today. “I said, ‘What about a tele-rally?’ But they asked me. So I’m going to go on Sunday.” The Salina rally had originally been scheduled for Saturday, 31 October, while the Dubuque rally remained on Sunday.
The wider campaign context helps explain the urgency. Trump has held more than two dozen rallies in the final stretch of the campaign as he seeks to energise his base, and Reuters/Ipsos polling in October found his approval among rural Americans had fallen to a new low of 45%. In a midterm election where turnout in rural and farm-belt areas can decide close Senate races, that figure is one reason the president is spending his last weekend in Iowa and Kansas rather than in larger, more reliably Republican states.
Early voting has already broken records. More than 52 million Americans have voted in person or by mail, according to the University of Florida’s Election Lab, a record for a midterm election and up from nearly 46 million who voted before election day in 2022, Reuters reported. That means a large share of the electorate has already made its choice before Sunday’s rallies, and the remaining task for both parties is to motivate the voters who have not yet cast a ballot.
Legal fights are also running alongside the campaigning. Trump’s administration is pressing a criminal investigation in Alaska’s pivotal Senate race and said on Saturday it would likely take its fight over thousands of California mail ballots to the Supreme Court, Reuters reported. In Michigan, where Democrat Abdul El-Sayed faces Republican Mike Rogers in another closely watched Senate race, it was unclear whether US Representative Haley Stevens, the Michigan Democrat whom El-Sayed beat in the primary, would attend a Detroit event with him on Sunday billed as a show of party unity.
What happens on Tuesday will therefore be decided by more than Sunday’s crowds. The rallies in Dubuque and Salina are the visible end of a campaign that has combined record early voting, tight polling in historically Republican states, a flurry of tele-rallies and court battles over ballots. If Republicans hold both seats, they will have survived their toughest tests in the farm belt; if either falls, the story of the midterms will be written in states that were supposed to be safe.
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