Some running in November's elections are deciding whether to distance themselves from an unpopular president who still dominates his party.

By Anthony Zurcher 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." That has left Republicans running for office in the Congressional elections on 3 November with an agonising choice - should they be distancing themselves from Trump?

Their fear is that by echoing his sunny outlook they risk losing a number of electoral races that are currently projected to be very tight. But they also know that being seen to break with the president on the state of the economy is far from consequence free.

The economy looming large 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.

When he invited audience questions, there were the usual cultural hot-button topics, like the perceived threat of Sharia law in America, transgender athletes in women's sports and youth crime in public spaces.

But his supporters also wanted to talk about the high cost of housing - insurance, taxes, mortgage rates and home-owner fees - and healthcare worker shortages.

Trump may have mocked the term affordability, but Donalds – who is criss-crossing the state on an "affordability tour" – isn't the only Republican candidate talking about high prices.

It was a similar track at a campaign event in a Tampa seafood market the next day, when Bryan Avila, who is running for lieutenant governor on the same ticket as Donalds, took questions on 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 serves 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 went to Texarkana to host 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 called for the president to quickly end the Iran war – a sentiment echoed by Republican Senate candidates in Ohio and Michigan. Two of Hinson's Iowa colleagues in the House of Representatives went so far as to vote for a Democratic-backed measure to curtail Trump's war powers in Iran.

For the past two years it has been Republicans who control the levers of power in the nation's capital – from the White House to both chambers of Congress. Inevitably, that makes for a challenging rhetorical pirouette among Republican candidates this time round when it comes to touching on Trump's less popular policies. The Donalds-Donald relationship Even Donalds has faced allegations that he is trying to open daylight between himself and Trump. The media was awash in reports recently that he had removed most prominent mentions of Trump from his campaign website.

It was a story Donalds quickly denied – and one that prompted an angry response 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 addressing how to tackle high prices, Trump shouldn't be a factor.

"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 tight, the same cannot be said for Republican candidates who have gone farther in their criticism.

Congresswoman Maria Salazar aired a television spot in which she bluntly said Trump's immigration crackdown had "gone too far". Trump reposted a handful of messages on Truth Social accusing the Cuban-American Salazar of betrayal and calling for her to drop out, while other potential candidates had been on the receiving end of 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, it's hard not to see Trump's move as a warning directed at any other Republicans who might consider a public break with him. But he adds that Trump's ire isn't the only reason Republican candidates should approach this strategy with caution.

"It's almost disingenuous now to try to create separation," he says. "I think for voters it looks opportunistic." Candidates like Salazar, who have stuck with Trump for years, have little choice but to rise and fall with the president's fortunes, he said. Republicans who have built their own brand and identities – like Senator Susan Collins in Maine – can more convincingly draw distinctions between themselves and the president.

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

It is, however, far from a lost cause for Republicans going into these midterms. Many polls show battleground congressional and state races in a dead heat. And while Democratic candidates' hopes are buoyed by so many people feeling the economy is not working for them, a majority of voters still have a negative view of the Democratic Party as a whole.

"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 recommendation for the Republican electoral message was simple and pointed: "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 right now in the White House, Republicans aren't panicking, they're focusing on executing their strategy.

The Republican messaging 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. Top picture credit: BBC / Getty Images BBC InDepth is the home on the website and app for the best analysis, with fresh perspectives that challenge assumptions and deep reporting on the biggest issues of the day. Emma Barnett and John Simpson bring their pick of the most thought-provoking deep reads and analysis, every Saturday. here