The Republicans are erasing Trump. The president is now Mr 2.4 per cent

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Of the $US1 billion spent by the Republican campaign apparatus since September 1 of this year, just $US11 million of that had gone towards ads promoting the candidate’s relationship with Donald Trump.

Candidates themselves are telling us exactly what they think their voters want to hear. The president’s unpopularity is changing the Republican Party.

In battleground seats, 41 of 62 Republican House and Senate candidates have distanced themselves from Trump in some way recently.

Trump held a midterm convention in Dallas last month where he expected all the battleground Senate candidates to speak or appear, but a third avoided the event .

In most midterm elections, the party that holds the White House hides away from the president. Midterms typically bring a shift to the opposition – such is the nature of America’s everlasting dissatisfaction with anyone in power.

But in Trump’s first midterm as president in 2018, candidates bucked the historical trend, with 27 per cent of their advertising demonstrating their loyalty to the party’s unquestioned leader. This time, there has been a clear shift – that figure has crawled to just 2.4 per cent.

For much of the past decade, one of the core facts of American politics was that Trump himself was the source of the Republican Party’s power, even in challenging national environments.

He still holds unilateral control over the party’s nominating contests, thanks to his singular status within conservative media. His idiosyncrasies have become Republican orthodoxy.

During the primary contests, 70 per cent of advertising dollars went toward ads tying candidates to Trump. By the time the general election arrived, and Trump’s unpopularity began to set in, Republican ads in the general election focused on the core policies of Trump’s Republican Party – without naming him explicitly.

They hammer on immigration, an obsession with transgender people, and tax cuts, core parts of Trump’s brand.

And they still rely on Trump to encourage Republican diehards to turn out. They accept his “Total and Complete Endorsement” and appear with him at rallies, though the opportunity looks different now.

At the weekend, Trump appeared in Georgia with local gubernatorial candidate Rick Jackson, who did not mention Trump’s name once in his five-minute speech introducing the president at the rally.

Conservative campaigners are trying to sell voters on a Republican government and hope that they’ll forgive or forget who leads that government.