Candidates fleeing Trump after he 'aggressively squandered' his strengths

President Donald Trump gestures before leaving the Republican National Midterm Convention in Dallas, Texas, September 9, 2026. REUTERS/Evan Vucci

Republican midterm candidates are starting to flee from associating with President Donald Trump while others tune out his outlandish antics, and according to one conservative commentator, it comes down to how he "aggressively squandered" the strengths that got him reelected.

Rep. Mariá Elvira Salazar, a Florida Republican who has represented the state's 27th District since 2021, turned heads across the political world this past week when she released a new midterm ad firmly breaking with Trump on immigration, saying that some of his mass deportation efforts have "gone too far." Her district is nearly 74 percent Latin American, and Trump carried it by around 15 points in 2024, amid a major shift towards Republicans made by Latino voters that year.

Now, as anti-Trump conservative Charlie Sykes said on the "Fast Politics" podcast, that voting bloc has made a dramatic shift away from supporting the president, resulting in an ad like Salazar's, which would have once seemed unthinkable given Trump's huge sway over the GOP.

"She calls out Donald Trump, saying that Hispanic voters feel betrayed," Sykes said. "You know, when she ran last time, she told them, you can trust Donald Trump. This is an indication of what's happening with the Hispanic vote, not just in Florida, but all around the country, and so I think this is not just a Florida story. It's a Texas story. It's, you know, wherever you have significant concentrations [of Latino voters]. And it is amazing... Donald Trump put together, let's be honest about it, kind of an impressive coalition to get elected in 2024. He has aggressively squandered that coalition, and there's no more dramatic example than the Hispanic Latino vote. And so, yeah, I mean, that ad has got to be raising lots of eyebrows."

Host Molly Jong-Fast asked if this could be the "beginning" of a broader trend of GOP candidates and leaders breaking with Trump on his most unpopular issues. Sykes was uncertain about taking things to that degree, but suggested that "if they're not abandoning [Trump], they're tuning him out."

"Have you noticed a couple of things? Number one, when he proposed the $5,000 giveaway to everybody, Republicans, like, kind of rolled their eyes and it just kind of disappeared," Sykes added. "Used to be that, you know, when he said something, the herd would move. Not anymore. He's declaring all of the warnings about AI to be a big hoax. You know, that's the bat signal right to his base, and yet you're not seeing the numbers. You're seeing one Republican governor after another say, 'Maybe we ought to hold up on the data center issue.'"

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