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EXCLUSIVE: President-elect Trump won’t be on the ballot in the 2026 midterms, but Republican National Committee chair Michael Whatley says that Trump will play a “significant” role in supporting GOP candidates.
Republicans enjoyed major victories in last month’s elections, with Trump defeating Vice President Kamala Harris to win the White House, the GOP flipping control of the Senate from the Democrats, and holding on to their razor-thin majority in the House.
Whatley argued that “as we go forward into this next election cycle, the fundamentals are going to remain the same” during an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital.
“We need to make sure that we are building our state parties, that we’re building our ground game, we’re building our election integrity apparatus to be in place to make sure that when we get those candidates through those primaries in ‘26, that we’re going to be in a position to take them all the way to the finish line,” he emphasized.
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Republican National Committee chair Michael Whatley gavels in and calls the convention to order on the first day of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum on July 15, 2024 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
But the party in power traditionally suffers setbacks in the following midterm elections. And Trump, who was a magnate for voter turnout, won’t be on the ballot in 2026.
Whatley said that even though he won’t be a candidate, “President Trump is going to be a very significant part of this because at the end of the day, what we need to do is hold on to the House, hold on to the Senate so that we can finish his term and his agenda.”
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And Whatley predicted that “Donald Trump will be very active on the campaign trail for Republicans. And his agenda is the agenda that we’re going to be running on.”
President Donald Trump arrives to speak during an election night event at the Palm Beach Convention Center on November 6, 2024 in West Palm Beach, Florida. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
The Harris campaign and the Democratic National Committee outraised the Trump campaign and the RNC this past cycle, but Whatley is confident that with the party soon to control the White House, Republicans will be even more competitive in the campaign cash race in the midterms.
“We’re pretty excited about where we are in terms of the fundraising that we did throughout the course of this cycle and what we’re going to do going forward,” he said.
Whatley said that his message to donors will be “we were successful in putting Donald Trump into the White House, and we need to carry forward with his agenda by keeping these House majorities and Senate majorities.”
He also pushed back on the persistent questioning of the RNC and Trump campaign’s ground game efforts during the general election.
“We focused very hard on low propensity voters. This was an entirely new system that we put in place over the course of this election cycle. It worked very, very well,” he touted.
And looking ahead, he said “in a midterm election cycle, low propensity voters are going to, again, be very, very important for us. So, we’re going to continue to focus on building that type of a program.”
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Whatley spotlighted that ‘we also focused on outreach to communities that the Republican Party has traditionally not reached out to – Black voters, Hispanic voters, Asian American voters. That’s why we were able to see such seismic shifts towards Donald Trump versus where those blocks had been in 2016 and 2020. We also saw seismic shifts among young voters and women voters because we were talking to every single American voter. Our ground game was very significant.”
Whatley was interviewed a week after Trump asked him to continue as RNC chair moving forward.
In March, as he clinched the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, Trump named Whatley to succeed Ronna McDaniel as RNC chair. Whatley, a longtime ally of the former president and a major supporter of Trump’s election integrity efforts, had served as RNC general counsel and chair of the North Carolina Republican Party.
Trump is term-limited and won’t be able to seek election again in 2028. Vice President-elect Sen. JD Vance will likely be considered the front-runner for the 2028 GOP nomination.
Vice President-elect Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio (left) and President-elect Donald Trump during an election night event at the Palm Beach Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Fla., US, on Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2024. (Eva Marie Uzcategui/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
But asked if the RNC will hold to its traditional role of staying neutral in an open and contested presidential primary, Whatley said “we will.”
And he added that “I’m very excited about the bench that we have in the Republican Party right now. You think about all the Republican governors, you think about all the Republican senators, the members of the House that we have, the leaders across the country that have been engaged in this campaign are going to be part of the president’s cabinet.”
Whatley argued that the president-elect’s “America First movement is bigger than Donald Trump. He is the tip of the spear. He is the vanguard of this movement. But. It is a very big movement right now.”
The chairman also emphasized that “Donald Trump has completely remade the Republican Party. We’re now the working-class party. We’re now a party that is communicating and working with every single voter, speaking to every single voter about the issues that they care about. So, as we go into 2028, we are in a great position to be able to continue the momentum of this agenda and this movement.”
The sign outside the New Hampshire capitol in Concord honors the state’s cherished century-old tradition of holding the nation’s first presidential primary in the race for the White House. (Fox News )
Unlike the DNC, which in the 2024 cycle upended the traditional presidential nominating calendar, the RNC made no major changes to their primary lineup, and kept the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary as their first two contests.
Asked about the 2028 calendar, Whatley said “I’ve not had any conversations with anybody who wants to change the calendar on our side. I know the Democrats did during the course of this election cycle, not sure that it really helped them all that much.”
“We’re very comfortable with the calendar as it is. But as we move towards 2028, we’ll have those conversations,” he added.
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