As he criss-crosses the nation, stumping for Republican candidates, Donald Trump keeps asking voters to use their imaginations.

“In this election, I’m asking you to pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot. Just pretend,” he urged at a Kansas rally as he campaigned for the incumbent senator Roger Marshall and gubernatorial challenger Ty Masterson last month.

“Pretend I’m on the ballot” has become a regular rallying cry as Trump tries to fend off a Democratic “blue wave” in Congress. But will it work? That seems increasingly unlikely.

Given his own lack of popularity and weird behavior, it’s an egotistical notion – more appealing to himself than to voters.

After all, his approval ratings are in the basement. Gas prices are higher, on average, than at any time during the Biden years. People feel like they need to float a loan before heading to the supermarket.

In that Kansas rally, he referred to the opposition as “Dumocrats”, which is typical of the level of presidential discourse to which the nation has become accustomed.

In his rallies, he appears “increasingly detached from reality”, as one campaign analysis in the Independent put it, as he “vacillates between topics to the point where his remarks border on the nonsensical and he ends every appearance by awkwardly dancing to the Village People’s well-known gay anthem YMCA”.

Stranger still, as the Guardian’s Adam Gabbatt reported recently, Trump has been offering “unsolicited and increasingly unhinged assessments of men’s bodies” over the past few weeks.

“I examined his ass,” the president said in Kentucky, speaking about Republican senator Jon Husted. “And then I looked at his shoulders … I looked at his jawline … I then patted him on the shoulder, and it was like a piece of steel. I’m still recovering.”Trump has also been – to put it mildly – stretching the truth on the campaign trail, sometimes merely misleading in his remarks, sometimes straight-up lying.

For example, he promised a North Carolina rally that gas and oil prices would tumble soon and he claimed: “I had it down to the lowest level in years,” apparently speaking about the price of filling up a gas tank at the pump. A PolitiFact examination disputed this, noting that when Trump took office at the beginning of last year, the average gas price was $3.23 a gallon, but by late September of this year, it was $4.61. But it’s not just what he says at rallies that may backfire on the candidates he hopes to help.

Much of what’s happened in Trump’s second term is working against Republican candidates. That includes the widespread self-dealing that, as the historian Garrett Graff wrote recently, “is so endemic and so obvious that it has broken through to voters”.

It’s also his misguided war, his rants on social media, his disparagement of longtime allies, including Canada. It’s also his obvious plan to declare the election rigged should it not go his way.

“Even Maga die-hards and GOP allies in Congress have grown weary of his erratic behavior,” as the Wall Street Journal’s Jason Riley noted.

And Democrats, including Barack Obama, are only too happy to campaign by associating Republican candidates with Trump.

These midterm elections, Obama told a crowd in Ohio, “is our last best chance to at least rein in some of the foolishness of this administration. It’s the circuit breaker in the system.”That blast of sanity and good sense seems far more likely to resonate with potential voters than Trump’s unhinged rants and dangerous threats. Pretend he’s on the ballot?

Maybe that’s effective with Trump’s remaining cult-like base. And maybe it bring some of those loyalists out to vote next week if they had been thinking of sitting out this election.

But more likely, the imagined association with Trump will serve to remind most voters that Trump’s malfeasance must be rebuked and rejected. Certainly not encouraged.

Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture