The Republican candidates walking a Trump tightrope

As US President Donald Trump hits the campaign trail in the final sprint to the midterm elections, he is launching an emphatic defence of America's economic performance, trying - 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.

While some economic indicators, including roaring stock market indexes and low US poverty rates, are indeed historic, the overall picture is not nearly as rosy.

Trump is often dismissive of concerns about affordability and the high cost of living in the US, describing them as "fake" and a Democrat-inspired "hoax".

The American public, however, sees it differently - and some key economic indicators provide ample evidence for their discontent. Inflation remains high at 3.4%, outpacing wage growth. The average cost of petrol has soared to $4.37 (£3.30) a gallon and beef prices are at a record high.

According to a YouGov survey, 63% of respondents believe the economy is "getting worse". An AP/NORC poll released last week found just 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 suggest that many of Trump's policies, including tariffs, aggressive immigration enforcement and the ongoing conflict with Iran, are widely 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, the director of communications at the Republican-aligned polling company Echelon Insights. "That's the top issue."

There are few Republican politicians as loyal to the president as Floridian House Congressman Byron Donalds. And there are few US states as traditionally hospitable to Republicans as Florida.

But even in the president's adopted home, which he carried in each of his three elections and which hasn't had a Democratic governor since 1999, candidates like Donalds are finding themselves having to adapt their pro-Republican messaging to acknowledge economic concerns.

Donalds - who stood by Trump as he fought his way back to power after his 2020 election defeat and took a prominent role in his 2024 election campaign - is now running for governor of Florida, with Trump's encouragement and enthusiastic endorsement.

When I saw him at a Hispanic church in Kissimmee, he was preaching to the proverbial choir - but pitching his message with a nod to the fact that for many money is currently tight.

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

He ticked through a laundry list of Florida constituents – retirees, teachers, emergency workers, restaurant staff and local government employees, flagging that they need to be able to "make ends meet".

In his stump speech, Donalds didn't mention Trump at all. He leaned heavily into stories of his own financial hardship during his younger years, of living paycheque to paycheque and waiting tables at the traditional southern style restaurant chain Cracker Barrel.

In Florida's governor race, the Republican messaging contrasts the "Florida dream" of economic growth that Republicans say they delivered versus what they say is the hardship and depravity of Democratic-run states like Illinois, California and New York. Florida's population is booming, and many of the new arrivals are conservatives who lived in - and grew tired of - more liberal states in the north and west. But even this pitch often came with a nod to the current economic difficulties.

"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 take subjects on which they are relatively strong, like crime, taxes and immigration, and link them to affordability issues that Americans say they care about 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 pouring money into advertising in battleground states, often outpacing their Democratic opponents by significant margins, there's still the possibility that the situation will improve in the final month of the midterm campaign.

That hasn't stopped the Republican faithful from being nervous about their side's chances, though – 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, is inevitably upbeat. Last month, he travelled to Tennessee for a college football game, where the crowd of more than 100,000 greeted him with cheers. The next day, it was a golf tournament in Illinois and another welcoming crowd. This weekend, he's going to another football game - in Alabama.

He is hitting the campaign trail, but frequently in states that mostly return Republican candidates – Texas, Oklahoma and Nebraska.

However, in classic Trump style, he is saying and doing things that could complicate the careful balancing act many Republicans are trying to strike.

He has repeatedly dismissed claims that high costs are a problem for many voters, with his latest explanation being that their discomfort is due to a "very bad job" on the part of 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's insisted that voters imagine his name is "on the ballot", but at other times he has said he doesn't care about the midterms and that this isn't his election to fight.

If Republicans struggle, he said, it is not a reflection on 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 get punished at the ballot box in November, whether they run with the president or away from him, Trump will bear the brunt of the consequences - in the form of a hostile Congress with legislative and oversight powers - for the last two years of his presidency.