GOP worries about divisive Trump factor
Republicans see White House distracting voters from economy
As Democrats enter the fall midterm campaign with palpable confidence about reclaiming the House and perhaps even the Senate, tensions are rising between the White House and congressional Republicans over who is to blame for political difficulties facing the party, with President Donald Trump’s advisers pointing to the high number of GOP retirements and lawmakers placing the blame squarely on the president’s divisive style.
Yet GOP leaders do agree on one element in the battle for Congress: They cannot rely on the booming economy to win over undecided voters.
To the dismay of party leaders, the healthy economy and Trump have become countervailing forces. The decline in unemployment and soaring gross domestic product, along with the tax overhaul Republicans argue is fueling the growth, have been obscured by the president’s inflammatory moves on immigration, Vladimir Putin and other fronts, party leaders say.
These self-inf licted wounds have helped push Trump’s approval ratings below 40 percent and the fortunes of his party down with them.
“This is very much a referendum on the president,” Rep. Tom Cole, R-okla., said of the November election. “If we had to fight this campaign on what we accomplished in Congress and on the state of the economy, I think we’d almost certainly keep our majority.”
Glen Bolger, a leading Republican pollster working on several top races this year, was even blunter: “People think the economy is doing well, but that’s not what they’re voting on — they’re voting on the chaos of the guy in the White House.”
Democrats still face challenges of their own, namely the unpopularity of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, and the party’s tilt left on issues like immigration, both of which could chill support from some otherwise persuadable voters. And the threat of a Democratic majority impeaching the president, which Trump is eager to raise, could rouse some of his supporters who otherwise may not show up in a year when he’s not on the ballot.
Even so, Bolger and many other prominent Republicans believe they are likely to lose the House, where they have a 23-seat majority and as many as 60 seats are being fiercely contested by Democrats. In the narrowly divided Senate, both parties see eight or nine seats, most of them held by Democrats, on a knife’s edge.
Instead of attempting to highlight positive economic news, Republicans have turned to a scorched-earth campaign against Democrats in a bid to save the House majority and salvage their one-seat Senate edge.
Republican electioneering groups have spent millions in recent weeks attacking Democratic candidates in intensely personal terms. The committees, along with some Republican candidates, have blasted one Democratic hopeful in New York for rap lyrics he once wrote; branded another, in Pennsylvania, as a “trust fund baby” and “tax dodger”; and aired commercials featuring veterans in wheelchairs to sow doubts about the patriotism of some Democrats.
The Republican lurch away from economic issues amounts to a bet on the politics of Trumpstyle cultural division as a means of driving up conservative turnout and disqualifying some Democratic candidates among more moderate voters.
Party leaders say individual attacks are only the first step in a broader campaign to shift the midterms away from the Trump focus and toward the implications of Democratic majorities in Congress.
Laying out the strategy in an interview this week in his Capitol office, Rep. Kevin Mccarthy, the would-be successor to House Speaker Paul Ryan, warned that if Democrats took power they would swiftly impeach the president, stymie immigration enforcement and seek to enact universal health care.
Mccarthy acknowledged House Republicans would suffer losses but predicted they would keep a narrow majority so long as Trump’s approval rating rebounded. He even settled on a specific threshold, saying Trump’s approval rating had to be above 43 percent to hold on to the House.
“It’s week by week of where the weather is at — and it’s ever changing,” Mccarthy said of the political environment. “Let’s just hope it’s a sunny day on Election Day.”
Yet there are already clouds forming over the Gop-controlled capital, visible in the growing anger between the Trump White House and those in the party aligned with congressional Republicans.
After a summer in which the administration implemented a policy of separating migrant children from their parents, and the president sided with Putin over U.S. intelligence services and then showed little sympathy following the death of Sen. John Mccain, GOP strategists say Trump is alienating a sizable bloc of moderate and Republicanleaning voters who favor rightof-center economic policies but recoil from the president.
Yet the intraparty fingerpointing goes beyond skirmishing between the White House and Congress.
Republican strategists affiliated with the Congressional Leadership Fund, the House super PAC, are privately voicing exasperation with the National Republican Congressional Committee for not raising more money, and for being unwilling so far to begin a triage that would transfer resources toward their most viable incumbents.
America First Action, a political committee aligned with Trump, conducted a series of focus groups over the summer and concluded the party had a severe voter-turnout problem, brought on in part by contentment about the economy and a refusal by Republicans to believe that Democrats could actually win the midterm elections.
Conservative-leaning voters in the study routinely dismissed the possibility of a Democratic wave election, with some describing the prospect as “fake news,” said an official familiar with the research. Breaking that attitude of complacency is now the Republicans’ top priority
So Republicans are turning toward more hard-edge tactics. America Rising, a GOP firm that specializes in finding damaging information on Democrats, is working on three times as many House races as it did in 2016, according to a group official.
In the Senate, a mood of highly guarded hopefulness has spread among Democrats, who see a path to a majority that runs through a mix of right-leaning and solidly conservative states. By this point in the cycle, some in the party had feared several incumbents would be headed to certain defeat, and once-inviting takeover opportunities would have slipped off the map, including in Tennessee and Texas. But both of those states remain competitive.
“Despite the difficulty of the map’s geography, if there’s a big wave I think our odds are very, very good,” Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., the minority leader, said in an interview, adding that when “you’re feeling the wave in September it rarely changes much by November.”
And the main reason Democrats are sensing a wave is obvious to party veterans.
“He won’t allow himself to get credit for the economy,” said James Carville, the Democratic strategist, referring to Trump. “He’s made himself bigger than the economy. Every conversation starts and ends with Trump.”