“It’s the economy, stupid,” a phrase from Bill Clinton’s winning 1992 Presidential campaign, epitomizes how economic issues drive US voters.

In 2016, Donald Trump won the Presidency in part due to his ability to convince voters the trade policies of his predecessors hurt Americans.

Trump ran against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, calling it a "bad deal" and promising to withdraw the United States from it, if elected. He slammed the North American Free Trade Agreement as the "worst trade deal ever signed".

"We can't continue to allow China to rape our country... It's the greatest theft in the history of the world," he said at the time.

In this year’s midterm elections, Trump and his Republican Party could be on the receiving end of trade-driven voter sentiment, this time turned against Trump because voters view his tariffs and foreign policy as leading to their economic woes. Voter approval for Trump’s handling of the economy hovers around 30%.

To some economists, the connection between trade and the US economy remains highly debated because of the relatively low share of trade in its GDP. At around 27%, it makes the American economy one of the least trade-oriented in the world.

Not so in politics.

Trade matters to American voters. A study of the 2018 midterms found Republican candidates lost support in counties most exposed to China's retaliatory tariffs.

Trade is rarely an election's dominant issue, but where it affects jobs and incomes, it moves votes. In the coming midterms, trade is moving front and center in a big way.

Immigration, Iran, and trade

The 2026 midterms could result in the Republicans losing both the House and Senate because Trump’s actions on immigration, Iran, and trade — and the Republican-controlled Congress refusing to check him — have led to historically low approval ratings for the President.

In forecasting this year’s races, Thurgood Marshall, Jr., former White House Cabinet Secretary, breaks it down this way: “Midterm elections are a referendum on the incumbent President. His approval rating becomes theirs. With Trump being historically unpopular, Democrats have a huge advantage.”

Trump’s unpopularity derives from plummeting support among the general population for his signature policies.

On immigration, only 41% of Americans are confident in his decisions, down from 53% after his 2024 win, Pew Research Center polls showed in May. His handling of Iran fares even worse: just 34% approve, while 65% disapprove, according to an Associated Press survey in June. And on trade, Pew research showed fully 60% disapprove of his tariff increases, versus just 37% who approve.

“Three of Trump’s actions as President — invading Iran with no strategy, deporting millions of people who have committed no serious crime and do the hard labor most Americans don’t want to do, and jacking up tariffs — cause high prices at the pump and the grocery store,” political strategist Peter Goelz told us.

“Voters are angry with all that’s being done. Republicans will not be able to run away from him,” he said.

“It can be difficult to tie foreign policy into the economy,” Mike McCurry, former White House Press Secretary and State Department spokesperson said. “But not this year.”

“Farmers know that the war with Iran is the reason fertilizer and diesel costs so much, and those that trade with Canada know the impact of Trump’s policies towards them,” McCurry said.

“It does not happen often, but trade will be a campaign issue, especially in the states it matters most,” McCurry added.

“In the states whose economies lean on Canada, trade will show up in every competitive race — enough, possibly, to cost Republicans the Senate,” Marshall said.

“True, Democrats aren't running downhill. Redistricting cuts against them, they trail in overall fundraising, and a couple of recruiting bets didn't pay off. And they need to find a winnable candidate in Maine. Still, Democrats are way better off because of Trump’s impact on the economy,” he added.

Trade matters most at the border

This year, trade runs hot through the most competitive Senate races — Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Texas. Yes, even Texas, once a reliably red state, turns out to be competitive this year.

Trump’s rhetorical and real attacks on Canada and Mexico’s economies, culminating in July with his refusal to renew the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement, hit each of these states directly. The refusal now means USMCA will be reviewed annually to address what the US Trade Representative deems its shortcomings and the US trade deficits with Mexico and Canada.

Trump won Iowa by 13 points in 2024. Eighteen months later, more Iowans disapprove of him 55% to 42%, and a Democrat has taken the polling lead in the race for a Senate seat a retiring Republican will vacate there.

Why? Because of trade and foreign policy.

“The tariff policies and the war in Iran, they are kind of underreported stories, how hard that is hitting rural America,” said Ryan Horn, a Nebraska-based Republican strategist.

In Michigan, America’s car-making heartland, the public mood has found expression in the media in three words: “auto-crushing tariffs.”

Next door in Ohio, Sherrod Brown, the Democrat trying to reclaim his former Senate seat, has turned the arithmetic into a campaign pitch, telling voters the tariffs cost Ohio households more than US$1,000 each.

James Talarico, the Texan Democratic nominee for the Senate, has made Trump’s trade agenda a campaign issue, pledging to roll back “the Trump Administration’s tariff policies that are raising costs for American consumers and hurting Texas business owners” and to reject actions that risk escalating trade wars.

In the state that trades more with Mexico than any other, the message resonates. Polls show Talarico running even with Republican Ken Paxton, and Texas voters say Talarico better understands their economic struggles and will do more to lower their costs.

The uncertainty now surrounding USMCA is now in play as a factor that could push the biggest red state on the map to send a Democrat to the Senate for the first time since 1988.

A once favorable Senate map may turn out not to be so

A President’s approval rating drives the midterm results in the House of Representatives. Every modern “wave election,” an informal term meaning an election cycle in which one party makes significant gains in either the lower or upper body of Congress — in 1994, 2006, 2010, and 2018 — followed the same script: an unpopular President, an energized opposition, a majority swept away.

If the pattern holds, Democrats would easily take the House.

Not always the Senate, however. Unlike the House with 435 individual elections, there are just 35 Senate seat elections this year, as every state has exactly two federal senators, who each serve a six-year term.

Senators get to build their own brand and can ask voters to judge them as individuals rather than merely as extensions of their national party.

That independence once let US senators survive hostile voter territory.

Ticket-splitting has all but vanished, and a Republican senator in a blue state — or a Democrat in a red one — has become one of the rarest creatures in American politics. Maine’s Susan Collins now serves as the only Republican senator representing a state Trump lost.

That makes the 2026 map unusual. Almost all the competitive seats are in states Trump won: Republican states such as Alaska, Iowa, Ohio, and Texas, plus traditional swing states Michigan and New Hampshire.

Democrats therefore still face a narrow path to reclaiming the Senate. They must hold every seat they currently have while flipping four Republican seats.

We believe they have a good chance to do so.

According to Sabato's Crystal Ball, a closely read Beltway newsletter edited by the head of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, if the midterm elections were held today, the Senate odds currently stand at 49 Republicans, 47 Democrats, with four seats rated as toss-ups.

Four toss-up Senate seats — Alaska, Maine, Michigan, and Ohio — border Canada, underscoring how trade with America's northern neighbor — now subject to intense uncertainty over the future of USMCA — could become a decisive electoral issue.

In those Senate races, USMCA serves not just as an acronym but as part of the paycheck.

With the USMCA fight set to drag on, trade can push other states that are usually safe for Republicans into play.

Republicans cannot change the subject to cultural issues like boys playing girls’ sports because the loudest voices linking politics to trade and USMCA are coming from their own side.

In Michigan, The Detroit News reported that Trump's threats to scuttle USMCA have rattled the auto industry.

The business council that speaks for Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis urged the administration to reach "a swift and durable resolution" that provides the "long-term certainty needed for capital-intensive automotive investments."

With USMCA's future unsettled, the billion-dollar decisions about where to build cars — and where the jobs go — could stay frozen, though other analysts say that businesses have and do quickly adapt to annual bilateral trade policy reviews.

In Iowa, Stu Swanson, chair of the Iowa Corn Growers Association, called USMCA “the lifeblood of the Iowa farm economy” and urged fellow farmers to demand its renewal. “There isn’t one of us who isn’t impacted by USMCA,” he wrote.

In Ohio, Jed Bower, the Ohio farmer who leads the National Corn Growers Association, calls it “the single most important trade agreement to the corn industry,” noting that corn exports to Mexico and Canada more than doubled in value to over US$6.2 billion in the pact’s first five years.

In a February Senate Finance Committee hearing, Montana’s Republican Senator Steve Daines called the USMCA “vital for Montana ag(ricultural) producers, manufacturers, and consumers alike” and told colleagues that Canada serves as Montana’s most important trading partner, accounting for nearly half the state’s exports.

“Farmers use fertilizer from Canada to grow malt barley that goes to Mexico, which comes back as imported beer,” he explained. “Our supply chains are interconnected, and Montana producers are better for it.”

That a Republican from a state Trump won by double digits spends a hearing defending a trade deal his own president attacks signals a shifting calculus for trade as an electoral pivot.

USMCA checks in at the Hotel California

The US Chamber of Commerce estimates that North American trade supports 13 million American jobs, and Canada and Mexico are the United States’ top two agricultural export markets, by far.

When the formal joint review of the agreement began on 1 July, the US administration declined to commit to renewing USMCA.

The pact now faces annual renegotiation until it expires in 2036 — potentially strengthening US leverage in negotiations to achieve an array of geoeconomic goals but also potentially creating a decade of uncertainty for businesses and voters and a fresh grievance for every challenger on the ballot this November.

The consensus view holds that the US will never withdraw completely from USMCA. The short-term leverage the US may gain is at risk of the longer-term calculation that USMCA is too valuable to let go. Kellie Meiman Hock, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University, drew from the Eagles' classic rock song Hotel California to describe the Trump administration’s position: with US$2 trillion worth of trilateral trade at stake, "you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave."

The result will be a review with no ending.

Expect Democrats to hammer the Trump administration and tie their Republican opponents to this decision.

It’s still the economy…

Democrats tie the Republicans to affordability.

The Clinton campaign strategist James Carville used to hang a sign in Bill Clinton’s Little Rock, Ark., campaign war room that said the line that made sure no one would forget what Clinton's presidential campaign was about. Whoever writes the sign for 2026 needs only a small revision: It’s the economy, stupid — and this year, highlight trade with it.

Unless Trump can get the Republicans in Congress to change the election rules by passing the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act and historical forecasts no longer apply, voters are looking for someone to hold accountable for the economic consequences from global tariffs, the war with Iran, and uncertainty over USMCA. Trump may not be on the ballot in 2026. But his policies are — and his party looks set to pay for them by losing the majority in the House and quite possibly the Senate.