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The most powerful members of Donald Trump’s government, security details in tow, filed into the Capitol Hill Club in February for a pep talk from the president’s top political adviser, James Blair. Weeks earlier, Trump had predicted midterm defeat because, he explained, “when you win the presidency, you don’t win the midterms.” But in the green-awninged building just a couple of blocks from Congress, Blair wanted to share a more optimistic vision, urging everyone to focus on a particularly notable exception: In 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt overcame economic headwinds to expand his party’s House and Senate majorities.

Blair is brash and intense, a combination that has irked some administration officials and lawmakers who prefer their staff to behave more like staff. The 37-year-old keeps his head shorn shiny and his lips pressed together—half smirk, half quiet skepticism—not unlike a drill instructor. His goal that day was to apply data-driven discipline to the careening Tilt-A-Whirl of Trump’s governing style. The team had already decided that it would abandon the traditional midterm playbook of downplaying the president. Trump would command center stage no matter what. “The ground you have is the ground you have, and you have to fight on it,” one Trump strategist told us. Like others, the strategist spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations and internal strategies.

But that was just the start. Blair laid out a strikingly optimistic view of the coming eight months. The map was stronger than in 2018, with fewer swing seats and a real chance of Republicans holding both the House and the Senate, Blair told the assembled crowd, which included Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. Blair emphasized that FDR was careful to calibrate his message in the 1934 campaign, arguing not that the problems had been solved but that things were getting better —and would continue to improve.

No one had any illusions that Trump would be as disciplined as FDR. The president would be “doing his own thing,” and that would help Republicans by exciting his base of loyal but infrequent voters, Blair told the group. But everyone else needed to stick to a message shaped by polling, so they could speak to people beyond the MAGA bubble. There was little doubt—then or now—about the dominant issue. “I think you’ll see him be very, very focused on prices and cost of living,” Blair had previously said about Trump’s expected midterm message—an exercise in wishcasting, it turned out.

Eleven days after the meeting, Trump launched a war against Iran. Voters already living on the edge—with the highest rates of car repossession since 2009 and record sales of Spam canned meat—found themselves stretched even further. Gas prices spiked more than 50 percent, diesel rocketed more than 70 percent, and inflation-adjusted wage gains vanished. By September, a poll found that 73 percent of Americans had concerns about buying groceries. Nearly two-thirds blamed Trump’s policies for the abnormally high prices.

The goal of maintaining House control soon slipped away, and states that Trump once won by double digits, such as Texas, Kansas, and Iowa, became Senate battlegrounds. The president showed no interest in displaying Roosevelt-style empathy for the economic struggles of ordinary voters. Instead, he talked about the new stock-market highs, his ballroom and golf-course projects, and his close friendships with billionaire tech oligarchs. “We’re in the golden age,” Trump thundered at a rally in Arizona this month. “You know, I knew we were going to do well. I didn’t know we were going to do well this fast.”

This would not be like 1934.

Those who work closely with Trump must live with contradictions. He makes the decisions but does not accept fault. He expects order but thrives on transgression. It’s easier to make it into his circle than to leave with your reputation intact. With just days to go before the midterms, Blair is reprising the role occupied in the past by the likes of Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman, architects of the Republican strategy who have the ear of the president. Blair ran Trump’s endorsement process, helped plan his travel, forced a brutal off-year battle over redistricting, and set up the independent spending machine that will deploy enormous sums to help Republican candidates, including more than $400 million raised by the president.

In many ways, political chiefs resemble Super Bowl kickers, trotted out for a game-determining field goal whose distance from the yellow uprights is not under their control. They receive outsize glory and blame. Political consultants alone can’t win elections, but they can keep the game from being lost unnecessarily. And now Blair finds himself a potential fall guy for a midterm result that could be disastrous for Republicans.

Blair’s critics describe him as imperious, smug, and in over his head—a fringe Florida political guy who stumbled into the big leagues. What Blair lacks in experience, one told us, he makes up for in arrogance. They also noted that his authoritative style may not work in the coming years, when he no longer has Trump’s power behind him. (Others said—some admiringly, some dismissively—that they suspect Blair would like to manage a 2028 presidential campaign.) Republicans have already begun the early stages of postelection second-guessing: What if the ad spending had started sooner? What if Trump’s self-aggrandizement had been tempered? What if Blair had stayed inside the White House, despite the boundaries of campaign-finance law, and not taken on outside clients, as he did in early October, when he made a weekend trip to the Republika Srpska? What if Blair had somehow persuaded him to endorse Senator John Cornyn of Texas, say, or averted the “Trumpapalooza” midterm convention that no one wanted?

[Read: Trump’s dream world in Dallas]

Ultimately, however, the only question that really matters is the one no one can yet answer: If the election goes poorly for Republicans, who will Trump choose to blame? The one thing everyone expects: The president will not blame himself.

Blair’s defenders argue that he has salvaged whatever chance Republicans still have to minimize losses. “All things being equal, if your goal is to tactically give your side every advantage, James has done exactly what you are supposed to be doing,” Chris LaCivita, the top strategist on Trump’s 2024 campaign, told us. Blair lobbied the president, for instance, to include his plan for congressional stock restrictions in this year’s State of the Union address, assuaging Trump’s concern about lawmaker backlash. (“This speech isn’t for Congress; it’s for the public,” one person who heard Blair’s argument told us, adding that the line proved one of the most popular in the address.) Blair has encouraged senators to campaign on health care by going after a boogeyman, whether health insurers or drug companies. They also say that, yes, Blair is intense, but he is solicitous of others’ opinions and doesn’t mind being challenged.

Perhaps most impressively, his allies say, Blair has managed to wrangle a motley crew of outsize, complicated personalities, getting them to work together. “James is very sure-footed in what he believes, and thinks he and the team can work around these situations,” White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles told us. “He doesn’t like criticism—none of us do—but he’s pretty fearless, he believes his plan is right, and he’s going to go execute it, regardless of atmospherics.”

Trump has continued to rely on Blair as conditions have deteriorated, even though he publicly chastised Blair for the Srpska trip. As a rule, Trump prefers men with full heads of hair (one ally surmised it’s because the president believes they’re genetically superior, and a second person laughingly—but seriously—concurred) and usually likes garrulous operatives with big personalities. But Trump has come to appreciate Blair’s candor and political savvy anyway, one White House official said.

The Trump ally recounted a staff gathering last year on Wiles’s West Wing patio, where Trump held court. At one point, the president pointed to Blair and said, “I always thought he was a wet blanket and had no personality, but really, he’s a tough guy,” this person told us. Trump initially called Blair “Little James”—James Braid, who until recently was Trump’s director of legislative affairs, was “Big James”—but he soon alighted on a more complimentary nickname: “Brilliant James.” The flattery is mutual; “Hail to the Chief” plays whenever Trump calls Blair’s phone.

“He does what he believes is right, whether or not everyone agrees, and that is exactly what he was elected to do,” Blair told us in a statement about the president. “I’m certain that before long, even his critics will be forced to acknowledge he has always made the right decisions for our country and the American people. I’m proud to have supported him for more than ten years, and I will continue to stand with him.”

Blair has told associates that he considers himself an adherent of Jocko Willink, a retired leadership trainer in the Navy SEALs, who preaches the value of “extreme ownership”—the idea that a leader of any operation must take complete responsibility and never place blame elsewhere. “James is the most Italian non-Italian you’ll ever meet,” Tony Fabrizio, a Trump pollster, told us. “He’s very much into loyalty, keeping your mouth shut. You screw me, I’ll screw you.”

Two weeks before the election, Blair acknowledged his critics on social media. He referenced an Old Testament passage in which God asked for a volunteer to serve him “until the cities are laid waste and without inhabitant, the houses are without a man, the land is utterly desolate.” The prophet Isaiah answered that call, a response that Blair posted on X: “Here am I; Send me.”  

We first met Blair at a dinner in Iowa shortly before the 2024 presidential caucuses, while reporting for The Washington Post. We were struck by his granular political knowledge and his confidence bordering on cockiness—a potent yet also potentially combustible combination. Michael James Blair was raised Southern Baptist, but moonlights as a metalhead; he attended Metallica’s two-night No Repeat Weekend at the Cowboys’ stadium in 2023. Like his four siblings, he has always gone by his middle name, and he has described the experience of growing up with three older brothers, including two who are now Florida law-enforcement officers, as shaping his disposition. He was introduced to Tallahassee political circles as the kid brother of Matt, a longtime lobbyist in the state, before falling into the orbit of Wiles, who helped Ron DeSantis run for governor and then launch his administration in 2018. Wiles and Fabrizio had worked on Trump’s first presidential bid, and by 2022, Blair had joined them in Trump’s circle. Blair earned the nickname “Oracle” for his optimistic view that Republicans were going to win big. Even though Republicans underperformed that year—largely because of the struggles of candidates backed by Trump—Blair was soon tasked with building Trump’s 2024 campaign.

Trump’s previous campaign had blown through its massive war chest, ending in debt, and the goal this time was to avoid the same mistakes. After the Federal Election Commission decided to allow campaigns and outside political-action committees to coordinate get-out-the-vote and door-to-door canvassing efforts, Blair pitched the campaign on a counterintuitive strategy, trying to take advantage of scant resources: outsource all of turnout and canvassing to PACs. He also authored a so-called gender memo contending that Trump could win by focusing more on turning out male voters who liked Trump than by trying to win over women voters.

[Read: Losing the ‘big-ass truck’ vote]

Skeptics within the GOP were more than happy to criticize Blair. They included Rove, who was credited with George W. Bush’s victories. Blair held his ground. “To stand up to what is supposed to be the gray hair, the grand poo-bah, the Wizard of Oz, who is saying, Don’t. There is no there there, that takes a lot of guts to do that,” Tim Saler, the campaign’s data expert, told us.

Weeks before Election Day 2024, Blair was in the Palm Beach, Florida, area with his wife—a former Tampa Bay Buccaneers cheerleader turned political consultant—and their three young children, watching, via webcam, as Hurricane Milton flooded their Tampa home. (They welcomed their fourth child earlier this year.) Those who worked with Blair say he never expressed doubts about whether his plan would work. “He shrugged it off by saying, Well, they’re wrong, I’m right, and they’re going to see that I’m right,” a longtime Trump adviser who worked closely with Blair during the 2024 race told us. “His view was basically, We just gotta win. If we win, we shut all these people up.” Winning also proved an aphrodisiac to the boss. “At the end of the day, the president likes guys who bring him victories, and James Blair has brought him a hell of a lot of victories,” Braid told us.

Saler said that, just weeks after Trump’s victory, he and Blair began to try to reshape the midterm landscape, starting with the gerrymandering push that became so associated with Blair that, as The Wall Street Journal first observed, some White House aides refer to it as “Blairymandering.” By February 2025, the two were in Blair’s West Wing office where they discussed, among other things, their goal of picking up more than a dozen seats by redrawing House districts, which states typically do only after the census. By April, Blair was presenting the plan to the president and securing his sign-off, triggering months of legal and legislative battles.

California Democrats surprised them by responding with their own gerrymandering plan, and South Carolina and Indiana Republicans rebelled against the White House demands, forcing a costly effort by Trump to punish some who had refused his orders. Even the Texas redistricting effort seemed, at times, lost, especially after a federal court froze the plan.

But the Texas plan went ahead with the Supreme Court’s blessing, and five of the seven Indiana Republican lawmakers Trump had targeted over their votes to block his redistricting push were ousted in their state’s May primary. That same month, it looked briefly like the redistricting push would lead to double-digit gains for Republicans: “16 net seat swing to GOP,” Blair posted on X at the time. Most now think Republicans will gain only a fraction of the seats Blair tallied. Republicans are likely to lose multiple seats in southern Texas near the border, including districts that saw their GOP majorities diluted. Yet Blair has argued that the new district lines will prove a major vulnerability to Democrats during the next election, with a presidential race on the ballot, when Republican turnout will likely rebound. Blair has assured people that if Representative Hakeem Jeffries, a Democrat, wins the speakership, it will be for just one term. He has also begun telling Republicans to prepare for another redistricting push next year, in order to take advantage of a spring ruling by the Supreme Court that further weakened the Voting Rights Act, imperiling seats that had been drawn to ensure adequate Black representation in the South. The point, it seems, is to stay on offense.

The presidential tradition, until recently, was to run midterm politics from inside the White House. Rove and Scott Jennings during the Bush years, and David Axelrod under President Obama, kept government jobs through the midterm cycles they ran. But in the early spring, Blair and other White House advisers, after consultation with lawyers, decided that it would be better for him to manage the independent spending effort from outside of government. Trump has long been concerned about top advisers billing him too much for their services, so Blair decided to forgo payment from the president’s political operation and took on private clients instead.

A full list of those clients has not been disclosed, but it includes the social-media company Meta, which hired Blair to advise its executives on how to publicly discuss data centers, according to people familiar with the arrangement. The Republika Srpska, a self-governing territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina that’s about the size of Vermont, was another; officials there hired Blair for advice on how to spot election fraud on their new Smartmatic voting machines.

The disclosure that Blair had joined LaCivita on an October trip to the pro-Russian enclave infuriated Republicans and earned the duo a rare public rebuke from the president, who hates the idea of anyone (other than his family) profiting off of him. “They are allowed to do work for others, just like all consultants in Washington, D.C.,” Trump wrote on his social-media platform. “If there’s a conflict, I will terminate them, immediately!” Blair and LaCivita later agreed to donate their payment for the Srpska trip to the Trump presidential library, and people familiar with the imbroglio say Trump has since calmed.

The episode might not have cost Blair much credibility among fellow Republicans if the party were on course to buck history and overperform in the midterms. But the final weeks of the campaign have been consumed by the affordability issues that Blair identified in 2025 as likely to be decisive. U.S. diplomats are being relocated out of the Middle East in anticipation of a resumption of conflict with Iran, global oil prices have reached levels not seen since May, and the average gas price in the United States remains elevated. Trump is at center stage, doing his own thing, just as Blair anticipated—and voters have rewarded him with record-low approval ratings, an almost-certain Republican defeat in the House, and a down-to-the-wire finish in Senate races that were once considered solidly Republican.

[Read: Trump’s gamble to end the Iran war ]

As it stands, Democrats enjoy an advantage of nine points on the generic ballot one week ahead of the election, far higher than Republican strategists were prepared to concede at the start of the year, when they mapped out plans to hold both houses of Congress. Inside the White House, officials looking for reasons to be optimistic have been closely tracking GOP enthusiasm in the Republican areas where Trump has been traveling, comparing surveys before and after his rallies. Even with less than a third of Americans approving of his job performance, he still has a clear pull on his base, they say.

But that may not be enough. Blair has long planned to see Metallica after the election, during the band’s residency at the Sphere. Regardless of the outcome, the show will likely be a welcome distraction from the stress of the past year. But the location, too, in the heart of Las Vegas, feels particularly fitting—a potent reminder that you can know the odds and the landscape, you can choose your strategy accordingly, and there will still be some things you simply can’t control.

* Illustration sources: Brendan Smialowski / AFP / Getty; Carol M. Highsmith / Library of Congress; Kayla Bartkowski / Getty; SKrow / Getty.

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A new boogeyman arrived in Democratic campaign ads this year with such force that it was possible to forget it had ever been absent. Slotted between clichés about “rising costs,” the “rigged economy,” and the elusive “fair shot” for the middle class, the familiar villains of billionaires, insurance companies, and “MAGA extremists” were joined by a friend turned foe.

“Big Tech’s invading Ohio, driving up our electric rates, damaging our environment, destroying our farmland,” Representative Marcy Kaptur of Ohio warned in one ad. Roy Cooper, who is running in North Carolina for Senate, said in another: “My plan stops grocery stores from using AI to overcharge you.” A 30-second spot in Wisconsin features Rebecca Cooke, a congressional candidate, promising voters seated around a kitchen table: “I don’t want to be beholden to any of these Big Tech companies.” And the House Majority PAC, a group closely aligned with Democratic leaders that has been attacking Republicans for their proximity to the new baddie on the block, released an ad labeling the incumbent Republican in Wisconsin’s Third District “Data Center Derrick Van Orden”—and suggesting that he was designed by artificial intelligence to serve its interests.

The sudden Democratic revulsion toward Big Tech and all its offspring—data centers, artificial intelligence, tech oligarchs—has defined this midterm election and will likely continue through the early innings of the 2028 presidential campaign. For most of the past few decades, Democrats cast themselves as a futurist party heralding a digital utopia, a posture founded by Al Gore and solidified when Barack Obama traveled to Google’s headquarters in 2007 to announce his presidential campaign’s commitment to “use technology to reach ever-expanding horizons.” Republicans were the ones warning about censorship and centralized power, as corporate executives clumsily adjusted the levers of permissible speech on social media.

But partisan passions on tech have been realigning from the moment President Trump delivered his second inaugural address in 2025, with Silicon Valley’s centibillionaires as background props. The president’s hostility toward attempts to rein in AI has solidified the shift. Democratic politicians and strategists now enter the final weeks of a midterm season convinced that they have uncovered a way to persuade Trump’s voters to at least hesitate before voting for Republicans. “Trump and his anti-AI-regulation posture is dragging the party to a politically suicidal place,” Rob Flaherty, one of Joe Biden’s top digital strategists, told me. “They are grabbing the wrong side of an 80–20 issue at exactly the wrong time.”

Republican campaign advisers, including those in Trump’s circle, admit the new vulnerability—and are taking tentative steps to address it. The president laid out a voluntary Ratepayer Protection Pledge in March, aiming to assure voters that new AI server farms would not increase their utility bill. The Republican-led House voted in September to request that state regulators require those standards, legislation that was then championed by Senator Jon Husted of Ohio, who is in a tight race with his Democratic challenger, former Senator Sherrod Brown. “The data center brand is the anchor,” the National Republican Senatorial Committee wrote in an August memo, describing a drag on Husted’s reelection efforts that was first reported by The New York Times. Republican strategists were also alarmed by how much voters responded to the issue: “This messaging is significantly more effective than traditional messaging tracts, as it introduces new information on a highly relevant, emerging topic.”

[Read: The Republicans are bolting from Trump]

But the memo declaring “a sleeper issue for the entire election cycle” had little influence over Trump’s own rhetoric, and the president spent much of September insisting that concerns of an AI-induced apocalypse were a “hoax” and “sick conspiracy.” While his Cabinet went on television to defend data centers as a great American boon, Trump gathered the leaders of the nation’s technology companies at the White House so that he could praise them and they could praise him. Democrats have been delighted. When the progressive data firm Catalist asked in a poll which party Americans trust when it comes to “responding to the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on jobs and society,” they favored Democrats by eight percentage points in July and August. The lead grew to 12 points in September, just as the explosion of television advertising started hitting screens. “Donald Trump decided to convene executives from Big Tech and then lecture the American people that their concerns about data centers are unfounded,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told me in a recent gaggle with reporters. “This is extraordinary stuff.”

The anti–Big Tech ads have saturated swing districts around the country. Reset Tech—a left-leaning group focused on the intersection of AI, media, and democracy that supports more technology regulation—recently used advertising data collected by the tracking firm AdImpact to quantify the messaging shift. From 2020 to 2024, a period that includes three congressional and two presidential cycles, Republican candidates and their allies spent more than $7.3 million on 26 ads that name-checked Big Tech, while Democrats spent just $512,000 on two ads. This cycle the polarities have reversed. Democrats have spent $14 million on 86 ads that mention Big Tech, compared with almost $6.3 million by Republican interests on 37 ads. The contrast in this cycle regarding spots critical of the data-center boom is even more profound: Democratic candidates and groups have run 286 critical ads, compared with 121 ads by Republican interests.

Rishi Bharwani, the U.S. director of Reset Tech, told me that the investments Democrats have made over the past three months to “seed this issue” are now helping produce changes in polling. “This will play a meaningful factor in the outcome of the 2026 midterms,” Bharwani said, “and put Democrats on a strong footing going into the presidential election cycle.”

[Read: Trump’s see-no-evil AI policy]

Democratic strategists began tracking the opportunity earlier this year, when polling from House districts showed surprising concern about AI. In one batch of Democratic polls from March, which I obtained, unfavorable views of AI stood at an average of 63 percent across Maine’s Second District, California’s Twenty-Second District, and Colorado’s Eighth District—all battlegrounds.

New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, was an early tech critic, and her 2025 campaign focused on online safety for children. She told me that she became interested when, during her time in Congress, Republican leaders in the House refused to call a vote for the Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act, which had passed the Senate with 91 votes. Since then, she has signed multiple bills in New Jersey that regulate social-media access for children and clamp down on the use of algorithms to set grocery prices and rent. “Trump is the Republican Party in Washington,” she said. “Democrats have to step into this, and they have to lead here, and I think you see it in these campaigns.” Just this week, two candidates from opposite ends of the party’s ideological spectrum—Abdul El-Sayed, the Senate candidate in Michigan, and David Crowley, the candidate for governor in Wisconsin—released plans for technology regulation.

Flaherty and Bharwani argue that the potency of this issue will only grow as AI’s disruption persists. Polls this cycle continue to show that AI barely ranks as a priority for voters. But Democrats believe that they can tie it to the cost of living and economic insecurity—issues that are at the top of the list. A Democratic-aligned super PAC called Tomorrow Together, which Flaherty co-founded, recently began testing the theory with a $4 million ad buy in four House districts. The ads connect concern over Big Tech with the populist frustration over diminished economic opportunity. One of the taglines: “Lining their pockets, emptying yours.”

Bharwani said that the Democrats’ new stance is a recognition that Obama’s vision of a virtuous cycle of tech-driven innovation never came to pass. “What we all experienced was a ton of growth in the tech sector, the creation of numerous new billionaires, and even the world’s first trillionaire, and a bunch of working families basically recognizing that they’re not sharing,” he told me. “These tech companies are actually undermining their economic security and their safety.” That argument is now being served up to prospective 2028 presidential contenders, who will be shaping the next vision for Democratic governance in a nation where technological change continues to accelerate.