Trump cancels final midterm rallies in Kansas and Iowa, shifts to phone campaign

President Trump has canceled the final two in-person rallies on his midterm campaign schedule, dropping weekend stops in Kansas and Iowa in favor of a telephone-based campaign "sprint," as the 2026 election enters its last four days with control of both chambers of Congress still undecided.

The Republican National Committee said Thursday night that Trump would no longer headline a Saturday rally at Salina Regional Airport in Kansas or a Sunday event in Dubuque, Iowa. In their place, the committee said he would spend the campaign's closing 72 hours delivering remarks by phone to Republican audiences in nearly 20 states, a format detailed by Spectrum News that lets him reach far more markets than a single rally but trades away the local television coverage and volunteer turnout a presidential visit typically generates. The committee attributed both cancellations to Republican candidates' "strong position" in Kansas and Iowa; campaign officials offered no further explanation for the sudden change in plans.

Asked by a reporter Thursday whether his health had factored into the Kansas decision, after a notably raspy delivery earlier in the week at a rally in Corinth, Mississippi, Trump pushed back directly.

"I feel perfect," Trump said. "I don't feel I have to go to Kansas."

At that Mississippi stop on Monday, he had told the crowd, "God didn't make your vocal cords to do a rally every day," an acknowledgment of a closing pace that, by Thursday, had taken him to 25 rallies in October alone, short of a target of more than 30 stops he had set for himself earlier in the month. A person familiar with the campaign's thinking said the Trump operation remained optimistic about Kansas specifically, where Republican Sen. Roger Marshall is being challenged by Democrat Adam Hamilton, reinforcing the RNC's public rationale even as the abruptness of the switch drew notice from reporters traveling with the campaign.

The last rally and the map behind it

Trump's one remaining in-person appearance before Tuesday is a Friday evening rally at the Ocean Center in Daytona Beach, Florida, organized by the Republican Party of Florida, which had not announced a speaking time beyond doors opening at 3:30 p.m. It follows an October 23 stop in Fort Myers and an October 24 trip to West Palm Beach, where Trump cast his own midterm ballot early. The White House had not released a public schedule for Monday, the last full day of campaigning before polls open.

Vice President JD Vance, who has spent much of the fall campaigning in Texas, also pulled back his own schedule this week, canceling a Friday press event in Minnesota as both men's travel thinned in the campaign's final days.

The stakes behind that math are straightforward. Republicans currently hold 53 seats in the Senate to Democrats' 45, with two independents who caucus with Democrats, meaning Democrats need a net gain of four seats on Tuesday to flip the chamber. It is the first midterm election of Trump's second term, a point in the political cycle when a sitting president's party has historically lost ground in Congress, and both parties have treated the closing week as a test of whether that pattern holds. Reporting from the trail this week has described an electorate still preoccupied with the cost of living and gas prices, concerns that have shaped the closing message of candidates in both parties far more than any single rally or ad.

Where the money moved

The rally reshuffle landed the same day the Wesleyan Media Project, the Wesleyan University research center that has tracked campaign advertising on American television since 2010, released its final pre-election accounting of 2026 spending. Cumulative spending on House, Senate and governor's race ads has now passed $7.1 billion for the cycle, the project found, with roughly $1.4 billion of that spent in the two weeks from October 12 to 25 alone. Outside groups — super PACs and other independent spenders not directly affiliated with a candidate — outspent the candidates themselves by roughly three to one in recent Senate and House advertising, and broadcast television accounted for 63.5 percent of spending in that final two-week stretch, a larger share than its 52.8 percent mark for the cycle as a whole.

The project's late-October figures show the Senate battlefield still shifting rather than settling in its final weeks, with spending climbing sharply in some contests even as it eased in others:

• Iowa's Senate race drew $64.59 million in ad spending in the second half of October, up from $41.82 million two weeks earlier, with 58.7 percent of that spending favoring the Democratic candidate.
• Michigan's race drew $65.93 million, nearly evenly split between the parties, while Ohio's contest between Republican Sen. Jon Husted and Democratic challenger Sherrod Brown led all Senate races nationally at $111.30 million.
• Spending eased in Texas, down to $89.15 million from $96.27 million two weeks earlier, and fell further still in Georgia and North Carolina, two races where Democratic-aligned spending had earlier run especially heavy.

"Following the money suggests that the Senate battleground has been changing over these past two weeks," said Travis Ridout, a co-director of the Wesleyan Media Project, in the release accompanying the data.

The same analysis found that spending on ads made with the help of artificial-intelligence tools has reached roughly $187 million this cycle, with about 90 percent of that total, or $169 million, coming from Republican candidates or allied groups, a gap the researchers said likely understates the true figure given how difficult AI-assisted production can be to detect in a thirty-second spot. Spending by campaigns and parties on federal races more broadly can be tracked through Federal Election Commission disclosure data, which compiles the itemized contributions and transfers that underlie the totals both parties are racing to spend down before polls close.

What comes next

For Republican candidates in Kansas and Iowa, the switch to a telephone format means forgoing the free local media coverage and door-knocking boost that typically follows a presidential visit, a trade-off the national party framed publicly as a sign of confidence rather than retreat. Marshall's campaign did not immediately comment on the change, and it remains unclear whether Trump will add any further in-person events after Friday's Daytona Beach rally. For down-ballot Republicans elsewhere on the map, the shift illustrates the limits of relying on a single surrogate for turnout this late in a race: a tele-rally can still reach a candidate's supporters by phone, but it cannot replicate the local news coverage, volunteer sign-ups and door-to-door energy that an in-person stop generates in the campaign's final hours.

With early voting already underway nationwide and Tuesday's results set to decide not only the Senate but the full House and a string of governorships, the campaign's final days will likely be measured less by rally attendance than by turnout in the handful of Senate races Wesleyan's tracking shows still moving — Iowa, Michigan and Ohio among them. Both parties' field operations are expected to spend the weekend working early-voting and absentee returns in those states, with Tuesday's outcome likely to turn on the races where spending patterns suggest neither side has settled the argument.