**The Republican candidates walking a Trump tightrope**

As US President Donald Trump heads out on the campaign trail in the final stretch before the midterm elections, he is mounting a forceful defence of America’s economic record, attempting — as he often does — to bend reality to his will.

"We have the best economic numbers of any president in the history of our country, and yet people don't know about it because the press won't talk about it," he said last week.

Some indicators, such as surging stock market indexes and low US poverty rates, are indeed historic, but the broader picture is far less upbeat.

Trump frequently brushes aside worries about affordability and the high cost of living in the US, calling them "fake" and a Democrat-driven "hoax".

The public, though, sees things differently — and several major economic measures offer plenty of evidence for that frustration. Inflation is still running at 3.4%, ahead of wage growth. The average price of petrol has climbed to $4.37 (£3.30) a gallon, and beef prices are at a record high.

A YouGov survey found that 63% of respondents think the economy is "getting worse". An AP/NORC poll published last week showed only 17% of adult Americans approve of the president’s handling of cost-of-living issues, while 26% approve of his handling of the economy overall.

Those polls also indicate that many of Trump’s policies, including tariffs, aggressive immigration enforcement and the ongoing conflict with Iran, are broadly unpopular.

"We ask our voters their motivation to turn out, and what we find is cost of living, cost of living, cost of living," said Avery James, communications director at the Republican-aligned polling firm Echelon Insights. "That's the top issue."

Some polls suggest that many of Trump's policies, including the ongoing conflict with Iran, are unpopular

That has left Republicans contesting the Congressional elections on 3 November with a painful dilemma: should they distance themselves from Trump?

Their concern is that repeating his upbeat assessment could cost them a number of races that are currently expected to be extremely close. But they also know that appearing to break with the president on the economy is not without consequences.

Few Republican politicians are as loyal to the president as Floridian House Congressman Byron Donalds. And few states are as traditionally welcoming to Republicans as Florida.

Yet even in the president’s adopted home — which he won in all three of his elections and which has not had a Democratic governor since 1999 — candidates such as Donalds are having to adjust their pro-Republican message to acknowledge economic strain.

Donalds, who stood with Trump as he fought his way back to power after losing the 2020 election and played a prominent part in his 2024 campaign, is now running for governor of Florida, with Trump’s encouragement and enthusiastic backing.

When I saw him at a Hispanic church in Kissimmee, he was preaching to the proverbial choir — but tailoring his message with a recognition that money is tight for many people right now.

"We're the best state in America," he said before adding: "But success has gotten expensive."

He ran through a list of Florida residents — retirees, teachers, emergency workers, restaurant staff and local government employees — stressing that they need to be able to "make ends meet".

In his stump speech, Donalds did not mention Trump at all. Instead, he leaned heavily on stories of his own financial hardship when he was younger, including living paycheque to paycheque and waiting tables at the southern-style restaurant chain Cracker Barrel.

When he opened the floor to questions, the usual cultural flashpoints came up, including the perceived threat of Sharia law in America, transgender athletes in women’s sports and youth crime in public spaces.

But his supporters also raised the high cost of housing — insurance, taxes, mortgage rates and homeowner fees — as well as shortages of healthcare workers.

Trump may have mocked the word affordability, but Donalds — who is travelling across the state on an "affordability tour" — is not the only Republican candidate talking about high prices.

A similar tone emerged at a campaign stop in a Tampa seafood market the following day, when Bryan Avila, who is running for lieutenant governor on the same ticket as Donalds, took questions about energy prices and data centre construction.

"Everything is going up in prices, from food to even books for people going to college," said John Carroll, who sits on a Florida county housing commission. "It's a challenge no matter which party is in power, but here in Florida it's been Republican for so long."

Meanwhile in Texas, Governor Greg Abbott last month travelled to Texarkana to hold a "rural affordability roundtable".

"We must lower costs for Texans in every corner of our state, and with my affordability agenda we will help make Texas the most affordable state in America."

And in Iowa, Ashley Hinson, a Republican congresswoman running for Senate, unveiled her own "affordability agenda".

"Iowans are paying the price for Washington's failures, and they deserve real relief that actually lowers costs," she said.

Hinson also recently urged the president to quickly end the Iran war — a view echoed by Republican Senate candidates in Ohio and Michigan. Two of Hinson’s Iowa colleagues in the House of Representatives even voted for a Democratic-backed measure to limit Trump’s war powers in Iran.

For the past two years, Republicans have controlled the levers of power in Washington — from the White House to both chambers of Congress. Inevitably, that makes for a difficult rhetorical balancing act for Republican candidates this time around when discussing Trump’s less popular policies.

Even Donalds has been accused of trying to create daylight between himself and Trump. The media recently reported that he had removed most prominent references to Trump from his campaign website.

Donalds quickly denied that account — and it drew an angry reaction from the president himself.

"Another Fake Story is that a very close friend of mine, a man I endorsed very early, Byron Donalds, is taking me off his website and campaign materials," Trump posted on his Truth Social website. "If Florida thought the story that Byron 'dropped' me was true, he would lose the election, and that would be a terrible thing because he's going to be a fantastic governor!"

Donalds did say, however, that when it comes to explaining how to deal with high prices, Trump should not be part of the equation.

"That's not even about President Trump," he told reporters after the website story broke. "I'm the one asking for the votes for the people of Florida to be their governor."

While Donalds and Trump remain closely aligned, the same cannot be said for Republican candidates who have gone further in criticising him.

Congresswoman Maria Salazar ran a television ad in which she said bluntly that Trump’s immigration crackdown had "gone too far". Trump reposted several messages on Truth Social accusing the Cuban-American Salazar of betrayal and urging her to quit, while other potential candidates had already faced his anger during the primaries.

According to Marc Short, a Republican strategist and former chief of staff to Donald Trump’s first vice-president, Mike Pence, Trump’s move is hard not to read as a warning to any other Republicans considering a public break with him. But he says Trump’s anger is not the only reason Republican candidates should be cautious about this approach.

"It's almost disingenuous now to try to create separation," he says. "I think for voters it looks opportunistic."

Candidates like Salazar, who have stayed with Trump for years, have little option but to rise and fall with the president’s fortunes, he said. Republicans who have built their own brands and identities — such as Senator Susan Collins in Maine — can more credibly draw distinctions between themselves and the president.

The fact that so many people are gloomy about the economy, combined with the fact that Republicans have been in power in Washington, suggests Republican candidates are facing strong headwinds in November’s elections. "I think they're hurricane force right now," said Short.

Still, it is far from a lost cause for Republicans heading into these midterms. Many polls show battleground congressional and state races are dead even. And while Democratic candidates are encouraged by the fact that so many people feel the economy is not working for them, a majority of voters still view the Democratic Party negatively overall.

"I think Republicans are closing out on the fact that they've delivered on a bunch of things, but we need to do more," said Alex DeGrasse, a Republican campaign consultant with close ties to the party’s congressional leadership. His advice for the Republican message was blunt: "If you elect the Democrats, they'll destroy everything. Democrats had a chance to run the country, and by every objective economic metric, they did a worse job."

He added that Republicans in the White House are not panicking right now; they are focused on carrying out their strategy.

In Florida’s governor race, Republican messaging contrasts the "Florida dream" of economic growth that Republicans say they delivered with what they describe as the hardship and depravity of Democratic-run states such as Illinois, California and New York. Florida’s population is booming, and many newcomers are conservatives who lived in — and grew tired of — more liberal states in the north and west. But even this pitch often included a nod to current economic pain.

"For the past 26 years, we have been living in a Florida dream, and a lot of people don't realise the amount of work that has been done in this state," Avila said in Kissimmee last week.

According to James, from the Republican-aligned polling firm, the key for conservative candidates is to focus on issues where they are relatively strong, such as crime, taxes and immigration, and connect them to the affordability concerns Americans say matter most.

"Republicans are certainly looking to tell those independents that you might not be happy with everything, but we have delivered on these issues," he said.

With Republicans spending heavily on advertising in battleground states, often outpacing Democrats by wide margins, there is still a chance the picture could improve in the final month of the midterm campaign.

Even so, that has not stopped Republican loyalists from worrying about their side’s prospects — and what some see as a lack of enthusiasm on the right.

"Campaigns are won at the end by momentum," said Joseph Robinson, an engineer who attended the Avila fish-market event in Tampa. "But the momentum has been slow. It's not really like, 'Hey, I'm going to go run out there and vote right now.'"

Trump, for his part, remains predictably upbeat. Last month, he went to Tennessee for a college football game, where a crowd of more than 100,000 greeted him with cheers. The next day, he attended a golf tournament in Illinois and received another warm welcome. This weekend, he is heading to another football game — in Alabama.

He is campaigning, but often in states that mostly elect Republican candidates — Texas, Oklahoma and Nebraska.

Still, in classic Trump fashion, he is saying and doing things that could make life harder for the careful balancing act many Republicans are trying to maintain.

He has repeatedly dismissed claims that high costs are a serious problem for many voters, most recently arguing that their discomfort stems from a "very bad job" by his administration in explaining how good things really are.

"The only thing we're doing badly at is public relations," he said in Texas last week. "In other words, we're doing a phenomenal job."

Several times over the past few months he has insisted that voters imagine his name is "on the ballot", but at other times he has said he does not care about the midterms and that this is not his election to fight.

If Republicans struggle, he said, that does not reflect how Americans view him.

"A lot of them are very angry at Republicans, to be honest with you," Trump said in August. "They're angry at Republicans, but they're not angry at me."

But if Republicans are punished at the ballot box in November, whether they run with the president or away from him, Trump will bear the consequences — in the form of a hostile Congress with legislative and oversight powers — for the final two years of his presidency.