Republicans vie to be Trumpiest candidate
Primary contenders try to outdo each other, without going too far
WASHINGTON— Tim Pawlenty, the milquetoast former governor of Minnesota, was trying to make a political comeback. So he did what Republicans running this year tend to do: make like President Donald Trump and rail against illegal immigrants.
Pawlenty’s opponent in the Republican primary tried to stop him from seizing the role of Trumpiest candidate. At a debate in early August, Jeff Johnson reminded the audience that Pawlenty had called Trump “unhinged and unfit” after the 2016 release of the tape in which Trump seemed to boast about sexually assaulting women. Pawlenty had a response ready. Johnson, he reminded the audience, had called Trump a “jackass.”
Johnson was prepared for that. He had called Trump a jackass, he acknowledged, but a jackass who was preferable to Hillary Clinton.
Johnson seemed to win the exchange, if anyone can win such an exchange, and he ended up winning the race. Upon his defeat, Pawlenty said, “It is the era of Trump, and I’m just not a Trump-like politician.”
There were other reasons for Pawlenty’s loss. For one, he had been a top lobbyist for big banks. But he was correct in his assessment of a Republican era Trump has thoroughly consumed.
Trump is unpopular with the American public, with an approval rating of just 40 per cent. But he is enormously popular — 80-plus-per-cent-approval popular — with voters who identify as Republicans. That figure left Republican candidates competing to sound and act most like the president, as they sought their party’s nominations for the House of Representatives, Senate and state governor.
They tried to outdo each other’s professions of devotion. They ran on Trump’s preferred issues and with his preferred style. They gave their opponents Trump-style nicknames, like “Taxin’ Tedra” and “Sneaky Shapiro.” They scrambled to earn Trump’s endorsement. One candidate, Arizona Senate candidate Kelli Ward, went so far as to doctor a Trump tweet to make it sound like she already had his endorsement.
Florida Rep. Ron DeSantis, running for governor of Florida, may have been the most fawning. He ran a television ad in which he coached his toddler daughter to “build the wall” with toy blocks and then cooed the trademark Trump phrase “big league” to his infant son, who was lying in a crib wearing a red “Make America Great Again” onesie.
Aided by Trump’s endorsement, DeSantis won the Republican primary.
It is nothing new for party candidates to embrace the president or mimic successful campaign tactics. What is remarkable is the zeal with which this year’s candidates have rushed — amid polling that suggests Republicans are in dire danger of losing control of the House — to be seen as similar to and close with a president who is disliked by key voter groups.
“We’re getting smoked with independents, and we’re having the problem Republicans always have, which is keeping Republican women in the tent. It’s a problem that is exacerbated by the president,” said Brian Murray, an Arizona Republican strategist who is working on two House races and believes the Democrats will handily win the House. “I think between 45 and 50 seats are down the drain,” Murray said in mid-August. “It’s bad. I’ve been doing this for a while, and you can just smell blood in the air.”
Some Republicans in districts with large numbers of Democratic or minority voters are trying to demonstrate that they are different than Trump. Florida governor and Senate candidate Rick Scott has invested heavily in ads in which he speaks Spanish.
On the whole, though, Republican candidates have mentioned their support for Trump in an unusually large percentage of their TV ads: 27 per cent in June and July, according to an analysis by the Wesleyan Media Project. That’s higher than the percentage that had mentioned support for George W. Bush at this point in the 2002 mid-terms, when Bush was riding a post-Sept. 11 approval rating above 65 per cent.
Even when this year’s primary candidates did not talk explicitly about Trump, they often attempted to adopt his signature issues, immigration foremost among them, and his signature smash-mouth style.
“Voters want ‘fighters,’ especially if that means fighting the media and the liberals,” said Republican strategist Scott Jennings. “More than policy choic- es, you have to show emotional connectivity with the fighting mood primary voters are in.”
One unsuccessful Georgia governor candidate, Lt.-Gov. Casey Cagle, was secretly recorded saying his primary felt like it was about “who had the biggest gun, who had the biggest truck, and who could be the craziest.” Cagle soon released an ad in which he criticized “fake news” and concluded, “I’ll never apologize for outlawing sanctuary cities or stopping liberals from taking the values that make our country great. The time for conservatives getting kicked around is over!”
For some candidates, Cagle arguably among them, the Trump suit is an awkward fit. Murray said candidates are often attaching themselves to Trump policies as a “headline,” but then explaining that their positions are more nuanced. Jennings, a former special assistant to Bush and campaign adviser to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, said voters can “immediately” sniff out a “phoney” effort to pull off a Trump-like brand.
“Trouble is, most folks don’t have Trump’s personality or talent for this particular style, so sometimes they look silly trying to do it,” Jennings said. “Authenticity is the coin of the realm; you can’t be something you aren’t.”
Election Day, Nov. 6, is just about two months away.