No matter how badly the midterm election goes for Republicans, there will still be Republicans in office all over the country, but having members of a party in office is not the same as having power.
What Republicans risk right now is their power.
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For a decade, Republicans have surrendered their fate and the party’s power to Donald Trump.
This arrangement got Trump elected in 2016 and Republicans in power. Two years later, that power was lost to a Democratic midterm election victory. Trump failed to keep and restore Republican power in 2020, and in hindsight, the Republican victory in 2024 that returned Trump and his party to power looks more like a strategic implosion by the Democratic Party than anything Trump and the GOP did well.
Trump no longer has a reason to need or care about the fate of the Republican Party. He is term-limited, and the president likes to remind everyone that he doesn’t care about the midterm election and will keep his job no matter how many seats Republicans lose.
The end result is that Trump is holding “midterm rallies” that aren’t in battleground states, and don’t focus on Republican candidates.
The rallies are really a chance for an aging president to play his hits one more time in front of smaller crowds.