Former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, who served during the first George W. Bush administration, appeared on Fox News to discuss President Donald Trump‘s influence and legacy.
Discussing the gravity of the upcoming midterm elections, Fleischer suggested that the President tell Republican voters: “You need to show up in 2026 to make your down payment, on my legacy, my name, and keeping the White House in 2028. If you don’t show up to make your down payment in 2026, you can’t show up in 2028 because it could be too late.”
Ari Fleischer on the midterms: "[Trump's] got to get the base turned out in 2026, and the base loves Trump more than they love Republicans. So it's a little bit of a tough sell to get people to come out in huge numbers. There's been in recent elections a drop off of almost 50… pic.twitter.com/VcdSVU8Irm
— Blue Georgia (@BlueATLGeorgia) August 25, 2025
Fleischer warned: “[Trump’s] got to get the base turned out in 2026, and the base loves Trump more than they love Republicans. So it’s a little bit of a tough sell to get people to come out in huge numbers. There’s been, in recent elections, a drop off of almost 50 million Americans from the presidential year to the non-presidential year.”
According to the Center for Politics: “The turnout of eligible voters in midterms is consistently lower than the turnout in the most recent presidential election.”
The Center also shares that “midterm electorates are typically older, whiter, and more educated than presidential electorates” and illuminates a historical precedent showing “the non-presidential party usually wins a higher share of the two-party House vote in the midterm than that party did in the preceding presidential election.”
Note: In July, Fleischer amplified former RNC political director Curt Anderson’s op-ed in The Washington Post titled ‘How Republicans can defy history and survive the midterms,’ with the subtitle “The governing party nearly always loses seats, but there is a way to turn precedent on its head.”
Anderson suggested: “The way to do that is not to shun Trump and concentrate on bills passed and pork delivered to the locals, but to think counterintuitively. Republicans should nationalize the midterms and run as if they were a general election in a presidential year. They should run it back, attempting to make 2026 a repeat of 2024, with high turnout.” He added: “There is a very important segment of voters who show up to vote for Trump but are quite likely to fall asleep during the midterms. If that happens, Republicans are cooked.”
Some critics of Anderson and his op-ed responded with sarcasm. As one replied: “I completely Agree, Put the guy with dropping approval ratings front and center. Make every local election a referendum on R national policy that is increasingly unpopular. Run on immigration, foreign policy, tariffs and health care, issues on which Trump is underwater in polling by double digits.”
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