With diplomatic delicacy, the Republican strategist Matt Mackowiak told me that Trump’s “highest and best use over the next 80 days should be fund-raising,” especially “in the 10 red-state Senate races with vulnerable Democratic incumbents,” and maybe in the 15 or 20 House districts where the Trump base is more sizable than the opposition. That’s the standard formula for presidents with lousy poll numbers: George W. Bush didn’t stump extensively in the 2006 midterms, nor did Barack Obama in 2010 or 2014. But Trump doesn’t hew to tradition. As Ohio Governor John Kasich told ABC News last week, “Donald Trump decides where he wants to go.”

Ohio’s special election is a blue-wave red alert

Tradition also dictates that scandal-plagued presidents stay off the midterm stump. In 2004, two scholars wrote in Political Research Quarterly that presidents “have less time to spend on the campaign trail if they are preoccupied with fending off their accusers.” But while they noted that their analysis was “consistent with the conventional wisdom,” Trump doesn’t do conventional wisdom.

Tweeting attacks at Robert Mueller and the FBI, and assailing the Russia probe as a “hoax”—as he did again while riling his base at a recent rally—are the new normal. He doesn’t view scandal as an impediment, even if House Republican candidates fear otherwise. Dan David, the GOP nominee in a difficult suburban Philadelphia race, told the Associated Press back in May that he “would like the president to do his job and I’ll do mine … I think that the president has a very, very full plate with foreign affairs and special-prosecutor investigations.”

David is campaigning in Pennsylvania’s new Fourth District, which is packed with college-educated voters—precisely the demographic that has bailed on the GOP since Trump took office. Republican candidates in similar districts, incumbents and challengers alike, would prefer that Trump stay far away. Sympathetic commentators say it, too. Rich Galen, a former House strategist and spokesman, told me: “If I were in the White House politics shop, I wouldn’t send him to either Pennsylvania or Ohio. He’s not going to be able to stop the blue wave if it exists.”

What happened in Ohio last week is proof that Trump’s presence may not help even in a reliably red region. The special House election should’ve been a cinch win for the Republican candidate, Troy Balderson—his predecessor routinely won the GOP-gerrymandered district by double-digit percentages—but the race was tight thanks to a grassroots backlash against Trump. So Trump flew in to help at the 11th hour, regaling an arena of fans with his greatest rhetorical hits. The result: Balderson appears to have eked out a victory, but provisional and absentee ballots are still being counted. Certification is weeks away. And it appears, in a master stroke of irony, that one of Trump’s most vocal critics, Governor Kasich himself, was the key player who pulled Balderson across the finish line.