Go back and look at Rep. Elijah Crane's campaign website from a year ago and you'll find a candidate who wanted you to know exactly where he stood: against "forever wars," against "reckless government spending," against what he called Critical Race Theory in Arizona classrooms. Look at it today and that language is gone, replaced by a page about local issues in his district. Crane still supports the president — that part hasn't changed, and it's still visible on the site. What's changed is the emphasis, and the timing of that shift is the whole story.

According to a Washington Post investigation published Saturday, Crane is one of at least seven House Republicans in competitive races who have toned down or removed references to Donald Trump and his agenda from their campaign websites since this summer. The list spans the map: Mike Beltran in Florida, Ralph Alvarado in Kentucky, Joe Mitchell in Iowa, Eric Flores in Texas, Rep. Nick Begich in Alaska, and Crane in Arizona, alongside Senate hopeful Andy Barr, also of Kentucky, who quietly swapped a photo of himself standing beside the president for one with his own children. None of it happened overnight, and none of it was announced. It surfaced because reporters started taking screenshots and comparing them month over month.

Summary

  • Two months before the midterms, a wave of House Republicans in competitive districts have deleted or downplayed the president on their campaign pages.
  • Some call it routine post-primary tidying.
  • The math on Trump's approval rating suggests otherwise.

The receipts are in the screenshots

The clearest example is in Florida's 14th District, where Mike Beltran is trying to unseat Democratic Rep. Kathy Castor in a seat redrawn to favor Republicans — one Trump carried by roughly 11 points in 2024. As recently as July, Beltran's site declared that he had "stood with President Trump every step of the way," name-checking his refusal to break with Trump even when, as the copy put it, most of the Florida legislature endorsed Ron DeSantis for president instead. That passage, along with mentions of Beltran's vote for Trump's signature tax-and-spending package, is no longer on the site. His campaign told the Washington Examiner the edits were routine post-primary housekeeping and had nothing to do with the president or his sagging approval numbers.

In Kentucky, the shift is even starker because there are two examples running side by side. Ralph Alvarado, running in the state's 6th District, deleted a May pledge that "President Trump needs more allies in Congress to deliver on his bold vision to Make America Great Again" along with his own promise to "be that fighter." Andy Barr, the sitting congressman now seeking Kentucky's open Senate seat, took down a hero image of himself alongside Trump under the label "Trump-Endorsed" and replaced it with a family photo; a paragraph crediting him as the first Kentucky Republican to endorse Trump in 2024 and the chairman of his primary campaign in the state disappeared along with it. Trump carried Kentucky's 6th by 15 points last cycle. This isn't a district where Republicans usually feel the need to hide anything.

"It's easy to understand why those careening towards defeat are attempting to distance themselves from the President. Voters are angry at Republicans for making their lives worse."— Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-WA), chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee

What the polling actually says

None of this is happening in a vacuum. Trump's approval rating has been stuck in the mid-30s for months, dragged down by an economy still working through inflation and, more specifically, by a war with Iran that has run far longer and cost far more than the administration originally promised. Multiple national polls this summer put support for the six-month-old conflict underwater with independents, and Republican pollsters have quietly told candidates in swing districts that the war and the president's approval numbers are now the two biggest liabilities on the ballot — bigger, in some cases, than any single vote a candidate has cast in Congress.

That's the backdrop for Elijah Crane's edits in Arizona, a race that has drawn outsized attention because his opponent is Jonathan Nez, the former Navajo Nation president running to flip the seat. Nez didn't mince words when the Post asked him about Crane's rewritten site, accusing him of "callously trying to cover up his tracks." Crane's campaign disputes the framing entirely, and it's true his page still displays his support for the president prominently — it's the "forever wars" and "reckless spending" language, popular with the MAGA base a year ago but harder to square with a six-month war overseas today, that quietly vanished.

An RSVP problem for Trump's own convention

The website edits are the subtler half of the story. The louder half is happening in real time in Dallas, where the Republican National Committee is holding its first-ever midterm convention on September 9 and 10 — a two-day, Trump-headlined rally built explicitly to sell the party's record to voters before November. Vice President JD Vance, First Lady Melania Trump, and members of the Cabinet are expected to speak. And a growing list of the party's most vulnerable candidates are choosing not to show up.

Sen. Susan Collins of Maine — the only Senate Republican defending a seat that Kamala Harris carried in 2024, and the top target of national Democrats this cycle — confirmed through a spokesperson that she will skip the convention, citing a long-standing practice of not attending party conventions during a reelection year. Former New Hampshire Sen. John Sununu, running for that state's open Senate seat, is also not expected to attend, according to a person familiar with his schedule. ABC News reported that several other battleground Republicans it contacted were either declining the invitation outright or still hadn't decided, even as some vulnerable colleagues — Ohio's Jon Husted and Michigan Senate hopeful Mike Rogers among them — confirmed they're going, describing the stage time as a chance to reach a national audience on their own terms rather than a trap to avoid.

Trump's answer: pretend I'm still on the ballot

If Trump is rattled by any of this, he isn't showing it in public. Speaking with Sean Hannity last week, he argued that Republicans only turn out when his own name is on the ballot, and asked voters watching to "pretend I'm on the ballot" this November. It's a message aimed squarely at the base turnout Republicans will need, delivered at the same moment a chunk of his own party is editing his name out of their pitch to everyone else.

Both things are, in a sense, correct read from different vantage points. Trump's argument that his base needs him personally invoked to show up is backed by years of midterm turnout data. The candidates scrubbing their sites are betting on a different, equally real number: with his approval rating in the mid-30s and a war with no clear end date, the independents and soft Republicans they need in November are more likely to be repelled by his name than drawn in by it. A campaign website can't serve both audiences with the same homepage, so something has to give — and in seat after competitive seat this month, it's been Trump's name that gave.

Additional reporting and background for this story draw on coverage from The Washington Post, Raw Story, Daily Kos, Louisville Public Media, and ABC News.