Barack Obama is set to add to Donald Trump and the GOP’s midterm misery by jumping in to campaign for Democrats.
The former president, who remains a popular and influential figure among Democratic voters, will appear at a fundraising event for the party’s Senate campaign arm in the Washington, D.C., area on October 7.
The event will be the first time Obama has appeared at a Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee fundraiser this midterm cycle and will come during the crucial run-up to the November 3 elections, when the GOP could suffer an electoral wipeout.
Obama will also join a conversation with Delaware Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester, a DSCC vice chair, focused on “the importance of flipping the Senate and the stakes of the election,” a DSCC spokesperson confirmed to the Daily Beast.
The GOP is widely predicted to lose control of the House in the midterms, due to backlash to Trump’s disastrous policies, his handling of the economy and his war with Iran, combined with the party’s razor-thin majority in the lower chamber.
Democrats are increasingly optimistic about their chances of flipping the four Senate seats they need to control the upper chamber in November, as several red states are now considered in play.
This includes Texas, where Trump’s scandal-filled endorsed candidate Ken Paxton is trailing James Talarico in multiple polls. Talarico could become the first Democrat to win a statewide election in the Lone Star State since 1988.
Democrats are also likely to view Obama’s involvement as a boost at a time when voters are becoming more engaged in the midterm elections.
An NBC News poll conducted earlier this month found that 43 percent of registered voters, including 77 percent of Democrats, said they would be more likely to support a candidate endorsed by Obama.
In comparison, multiple GOP lawmakers are deciding that distancing themselves from Trump—who is recording near-record-low approval ratings—could help them in the midterms.
This includes scrubbing all references to the 80-year-old from their campaign websites and publicly speaking out about Trump’s unpopular policies.
On Monday, CNN data guru Harry Enten revealed an “eye-popping” statistic that less than 1 percent of GOP political ads that aired in the first half of September mentioned Trump at all, compared with 20 percent of Democratic ads.
