John Thune’s balancing act: Inside the GOP leader’s push to save his Senate majority

October 27, 2026 / 5:00 AM EDT / CBS News

Sioux City, Iowa — Less than 24 hours after President Trump held a raucous rally inside an airplane hangar in this western Iowa town, Senate Majority Leader John Thune stood alongside Rep. Ashley Hinson in a strip-mall bar and grill a few miles away.

Looking out over a giant water tank that punctuated the flat plains stretching out to the horizon, Thune and Hinson were hosting a roundtable with six local business owners last Friday, a decidedly less boisterous crowd than the one that had greeted the president. The event last Friday was part of Thune's final campaign sprint before the midterms, one of several stops he's made to support his GOP candidates for Senate.

Hinson fielded a reporter's question that has trailed Republican candidates all fall: How is she threading the needle between the president's demands for loyalty and his increasingly unpopular policies? She offered a version of what has become her standard answer: that she would back the president when she agreed with him, and be a "thorn in his side" when she did not.

Thune barely flinched. The exchange was representative of the balancing act he is…

Original source: https://www.cbsnews.com/entertainment/