Donald Trump’s signature style failed to influence the 2026 midterm campaign. Candidates avoided his loud, branded look, choosing instead to wear plain, safe clothes. Democrat James Talarico became the best example of this shift, dressing like a loyal son to avoid distractions while his opponents attacked his political character.
An election that rejected Trump's style as well as his substance
Donald Trump has always grasped that, in politics, clothes are a costume. Try to think of any other American leader who used what they wore to create as recognisable and fitting a brand. The billowing blue suit, the satiny sash of a tie, the cherry-red hat. Tacky? Vulgar? Loud? Oh yes indeed: that was the point of the clothes and the campaign. Both worked brilliantly -- until this week.
It turned out to be telling that absolutely no one in either party followed the Trump sartorio-political model in the midterm campaign. If Trump's style was the perfect analogue to his politics of disruption, the men on the trail in 2026 made a headlong rush towards the innocuous (someone better qualified can consider whether it was the same for the women).
This time there were no outliers on the model of Democrat Senator John Fetterman, known for his hoodies and shorts. It has long been a standard approach for many candidates to make sure that clothes do not distract, but this year you needed a microscope to find an interesting branding choice in what the candidates wore. Visually as well politically, the writing was on the wall: this was not a year for Trumpian flamboyance -- or for Trump.
The best democratic exemplar of this year of inoffensiveness was Democrat James Talarico, who flipped one of Texas's senate seats. One can't blame him for aiming for the anodyne given that his political enemies were busy insinuating that he was a vegan transsexual from outer space bent on bringing a mix of communism and sharia law to the Lone Star state.
But he went above and beyond: his standard costume of crisp white shirt, blue blazer, dark trousers and carefully brushed hair evoked a loyal son dressed to visit his mother on Easter Sunday -- all that was missing was the bouquet of tulips. There were cowboy boots involved, but those are a regional obligation. Dressing down -- as he did recently while performatively eating barbecue to dispel the veganism slur -- he went for jeans and a work shirt with a literal blue collar in case the message was too hard to interpret.
Talarico's opponent, Ken Paxton, was dogged by colourful scandals but was almost as beige as Talarico is in his clothes. Sometimes he boldly chose a blazer in a regional-manager check. There are a few faint vestiges of Trumpness that have not been scrubbed away: big cufflinks in patriotic motifs, western-style belt buckle, a shiny watch (Talarico goes conspicuously watchless). These turned out to be a bad bet.
In the physical and metaphorical middle of the country, Ohio, the Senate race between Republican Jon Husted and Democrat Sherrod Brown was another battle between shades of normalcy. Both men are career politicians who look most at ease in a suit. Neither looked remotely at home trying on workingman style: Husted in a plaid shirt and carrying a hunting bow, Brown in a union man's Carhartt jacket. This race was instead between the well-pressed look of the former college football player Husted and the classic slept-in-his-suit liberal Brown. Their contest suggests the best way to distinguish between Democrats and Republicans might be by their choice collars: a crisp spread on the right against the academic-ish button-down of the left. Note that both signal fidelity to an establishment, albeit different ones.
If there was anything even resembling a costume on the ticket, it was worn by Troy Jackson, who upset eternal Republican incumbent Susan Collins. On his campaign website he stands in front of a tractor wearing a battered work coat and a Red Sox cap. But his working-class credentials -- as far as I can tell from my desk in Brooklyn -- are faultless. Born by the Canadian border, he's the son of a logger and a schoolteacher. We are so accustomed to politicians cosplaying as the salt of the earth, it's hard to read the genuine article. His unassuming, ordinary-man clothing rang true -- which may have put him over the top in a year when no one was interested in anti-establishment performances.
The highest compliment one can pay to an American politician in an age when people have come to expect insincerity, if not dishonesty, from their leaders is that they seem real. So politicians' clothes speak to the reality they believe voters want. The midterm candidates dressed for a country that wanted a return to normalcy, even normalcy taken to the point of boredom. This was something that Trump, for all his political talent, could not deliver. And the Republican candidates, whatever they wore, could not get far enough away.