President Donald Trump arrives on Air Force One at Ellington Field Joint Reserve Base in Houston on Thursday, Aug. 27, 2026. President Trump is spending two days in Houston attending a fundraiser and an event at NASA.
Elizabeth Conley/Houston Chronicle
President Donald Trump returned to Texas for the first time in six months on Friday amid a political nightmare brewing for the GOP in South Texas and in the U.S. Senate race that could turn his final two years in the White House into a gridlocked morass.
While Trump made a detour to NASA for a ceremony honoring astronauts at Johnson Space Center, his two-day return amid sagging approval ratings to Houston was first and foremost about helping Republican U.S. Senate candidate Ken Paxton and raising money from Texas’ wealthiest donors to finance a final effort to try to defy decades of U.S. political history.
“I’m going to help Ken Paxton, and I’m going to spend a lot of time in Texas,” Trump told reporters just as he prepared to leave the White House.
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Six of the last seven major public polls have shown Democrat James Talarico tied with or leading Paxton, who has struggled to raise money for television ads while his opponent bombards the airwaves.
Talarico has spent $27 million on TV ads since July 1 compared to less than $200,000 for Paxton.
“We need help,” Paxton told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo earlier this month. “I want to compete. I want to be able to tell people exactly what he believes because I am convinced when Texas (knows) those issues that nobody actually believes, he will not be elected in the state of Texas.”
On Thursday, Trump was trying to do his part to help Paxton, attending a Republican National Committee fundraiser at the Post Oak Hotel in Houston. RNC chairman Joe Gruters has met with Paxton and is determined to help him as much as he can while also dealing with tight midterm battles around the country.
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“We’ll do whatever is needed to make sure Ken Paxton is going to get over the finish line as the winner,” Gruters told the Dallas Morning News earlier this summer.
While Paxton is struggling to keep up with Talarico’s fundraising, it’s a much different story for the RNC. Republicans had more than $129 million in their bank account as of July 1 compared to less than $20 million that the Democratic National Committee was holding.
A recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling now allows the national parties to coordinate directly with candidates running for the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House, something they were barred from doing in the past.
Democrats have not won a Senate seat in Texas since 1988. With Democrats needing to flip four Republican held seats to retake the majority in the Senate, Talarico has emerged as one of the party’s surprise pickup opportunities.
“We want to win that race,” Trump said on Thursday.
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But it’s not just the Senate race. Trump returns to Texas at a time when other Republican U.S. House candidates in Texas are struggling especially in South Texas. Trump won much of South Texas in 2024, but this year, Republicans are at risk of losing three seats they thought they could win.
For over a year, Trump has been making moves to avoid a repeat of 2018. During his first midterm election as president that year, Republicans lost 41 seats in the House, flipping its control to Democrats.
If anything close to that happens this year, with Republicans clinging to a five-seat majority in the House, Trump’s final two years in the White House will be a nightmare, as Democrats launch investigations and impeachment hearings and grind the president’s agenda to a halt.
But stopping that from happening could get more challenging as Trump’s approval ratings have slid amid rising gas prices since he launched military strikes on Iran. Plus persistent affordability concerns among voters has become a key piece to nearly every Democrats campaign going into the midterms.
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Despite everything Trump has tried to do to save the midterm elections, Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said Trump can’t defy a history where GOP presidents on average have lost 22 seats in Congress in midterm elections dating back to the 1970s.
“It is a formula for a very unpleasant midterm for the GOP,” Sabato said.