If President Trump really enjoys campaigning in front of adoring crowds over governing, he's preparing to live his best life in the next two weeks. "Trump will hold at least 10 midterm rallies between Oct. 31 and Election Day, with the possibility of bumping it up to two rallies each day in two different states," report Alexi McCammond and Jonathan Swan at Axios, citing three people familiar with the planning. Trump has already held dozens of rallies, several a week, for more than a month, but the campaign-o-rama marathon starts in earnest next Wednesday in Florida, and Vice President Mike Pence will apparently make an appearance at some of the rallies.
"This is a heavy load of campaigning for a sitting president, but it's clear that Trump wants to overcome the historical pattern of presidents losing congressional seats in their first midterm election," Axios reports. "And he's viewed as the GOP's best motivator to energize their base ahead of a tough election."
But Trump is not welcome everywhere. "While polls show this president is more of a factor in voters' calculations — pro and con — than his predecessors," report Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman at The New York Times, "Trump has avoided large swaths of the country. The entire Pacific Coast, much of the Northeast, and large interior cities like Chicago, Minneapolis, and Kansas City, where Republican lawmakers do not want to be seen with him, are effectively no-go zones." You can read more about how GOP candidates are avoiding Trump appearances, and the unprecedented "collision between the vanity of a president and the political reality he's confronting," at The New York Times.
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