(WBAP/KLIF) — WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance both hit the campaign trail on Thursday, but headed to heavily Republican areas to shore up lagging enthusiasm in their party ahead of next month’s midterm elections.
Trump’s traveled to Texas and Oklahoma and kicked off what the president said will be a 32-day campaign blitz leading up to Nov. 3.
“I think we’re going to win. Every place I’ve gone, we win,” Trump said during a speech at a truck facility in Denton, northwest of Dallas. He said some have suggested his “heart isn’t in it. My heart is in it,” and if not, he’d promised he’d be “home right now.”
“My heart is in it like never before,” Trump said of the run-up to the midterms.
Later, during a rally in Durant, Oklahoma, the president acknowledged, “We are worried about Michigan, we are worried about Texas. We are worried about a few states” before adding, “It’s all about 35 different contests.”
Vance, meanwhile, stumped in Florida, putting the Republican Party’s highest-ranking officials in areas where GOP candidates once expected to have glide paths to victory but are now facing tougher races.
The vice president tried to cast the GOP as representing common sense in the face of a Democratic push to the left.
“I have the easiest job in the world,” the vice president said in Lakeland, Florida. “I get to talk about how crazy the Democrats are.”
Trump and Vance could have their work cut out for them, though.
A new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that only 17% of U.S. adults approve of Trump’s handling of the cost of living. Just 26% approve of his handling of the economy overall, marking a new low.
Republicans have expressed growing pessimism about their chances in the election, which will determine control of Congress, as the president has repeatedly dismissed concerns about high costs and gas prices as his unpopular war in Iran drags on.
According to Trump, his party has merely done a poor job of public relations in promoting his administration’s accomplishments.
“Maybe we’re doing a bad job selling it,” Trump said in Texas.
Still, the president spent far more time scoffing at his predecessor, President Joe Biden, reliving his 2024 presidential campaign and defending the war in Iran than he did talking about how he’ll help lower the cost of living.
Trump scoffed at questions about affordability, insisting that they’d been caused by Biden, who left office almost two years ago. He also insisted that prices were actually on the decline.
“I think inflation is very real, but they’re the ones that caused the inflation,” he said. “I’m the one that’s bringing it down, and we have to be able to get that word out somehow because they’re using the word affordability.”
(Copyright 2026 WBAP/KLIF Newsroom News. All rights reserved. Contains material from the Associated Press.)
