Across the country, in the reddest of red states and districts, Republicans — clinging to what were once thought to be safe seats with a Blue Wave breaking — have a plan to eke out a victory in November: Avoid Donald Trump.

In Florida — Trump’s adopted state, and one he has won three times — gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds has scrubbed references to the president, including a photo of the two of them, from his website. Representative María Elvira Salazar, who represents a district Trump won by 15 points in 2024, recently cut an ad attacking Trump over his immigration policies. In Kansas, a state that hasn’t elected a Democratic senator since 1932, Senator Roger Marshall posted on social media that he had gone to the White House directly to air his complaints to Trump about the president threatening to ban the sale of Canadian-made Bombardier jets in the United States. As Trump and JD Vance have held rallies from Iowa to Texas, Republicans are suddenly finding their campaign schedules filled with conflicts that keep them away from any camera capturing them with a president who has record-low approval ratings.

Despite the national landscape, Trump is finding a warmer reception in the unlikeliest of locales: his one-time home state of New York. On Friday, Trump held a rally in Syracuse with Bruce Blakeman, the Nassau County executive running an uphill race against incumbent governor Kathy Hochul. “I’m asking you to do me a favor,” the president said, “just pretend I’m on the ballot.” The association does not seem to be hurting Blakeman. The gubernatorial race isn’t as uphill as it should be. New York is nearly as Democratic a state as it gets, a place where Republicans haven’t won statewide office since 2002 and a Republican presidential candidate hasn’t won since 1984. Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than two to one. But in a national political environment that pollsters say boosts Democrats by eight percentage points, Blakeman is........

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