Hopefuls distance from Trump
Polling suggests challenges for GOP
During Troy Nehls’ recent bid for the Republican nomination in one of Texas’ battleground congressional districts, the Fort Bend County sheriff prominently displayed his support for President Donald Trump across his campaign website.
“In Congress, I will stand with President Trump to defeat the socialist Democrats, build the wall, drain the swamp, and deliver on pro-economy and pro-America policies,” Nehls said under the top section of his issues page, titled “Standing with President Trump.”
Within two days of Nehls’ lopsided runoff victory, that section had been removed, along with a paragraph from Nehls’ bio page that stated that he “supports President Trump” and wants to “deliver President Trump’s agenda.” Fresh language now focuses on his record as sheriff during Hurricane Harvey and managing his agency’s budget.
Nehls’ abrupt shift in tone captures the challenge facing Republican candidates in suburban battleground districts up and down the ballot, including Nehls’ district and two neighboring ones, where polling suggests that Trump’s coronavirus response has alienated voters and, for now, created strong headwinds for his party’s congressional hopefuls.
In those contested districts, which even Republicans acknowledge Trump may lose, GOP candidates are navigating the choppy political waters by emphasizing their personal backgrounds and portraying their Democratic foes as too extreme. Most have dropped the enthusiastic proTrump rhetoric they employed during the primaries.
It is not uncommon for candidates to tailor their messages to the far ends of their party bases during the primaries before tacking back toward the center for the general election.
Still, it remains a unique challenge for Republicans in competitive races to distance themselves from the president and his lagging poll numbers without angering
their supporters, said Jim Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin.
“I think how you do that is still not quite clear, but I also think the ground is really shifting,” Henson said. “(Trump’s) overall favorableunfavorable numbers are going down, he’s losing ground among independents and we see glimmers — but just glimmers — of doubt among some Republicans in some suburban areas.”
House Republicans, fearing the wrath of Trump and future primary challengers, have remained collectively loyal to the president during his tumultuous first term. They struggled to shake off the Trump effect last cycle, losing 22 of the 25 GOP-controlled districts won by Hillary Clinton in 2016. Since then, Trump’s statewide and national approval ratings have plummeted, and several recent Texas polls show him virtually tied with former Vice President Joe Biden after he won the state by 9 percentage points in 2016.
In the Houston area, Trump’s narrowest margins came in Texas’ 7th, 10th and 22nd congressional districts, where he failed to crack 52 percent in each and lost the 7th District. Two years later, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz fell short of a majority in each district, and the 7th District was one of the 22 to flip to Democratic control.
This year, it is the 22nd Congressional District that has attracted the most local attention, thanks to incumbent GOP Rep. Pete Olson’s decision to not seek re-election and a subsequent bruising Republican primary. Nehls’ Democratic opponent in November is Sri Kulkarni, a former diplomat who lost to Olson by 5 percentage points in 2018.
In a statement, Kulkarni accused Nehls of “trying to scrub his past” by removing the Trump references.
Nick Maddux, a spokesman for Nehls’ campaign, said the language was removed amid a redesign of the campaign website.
“Sheriff Nehls has been very clear in his support of President Trump and his policies; which pre-COVID-19, delivered us historic lows in unemployment and one of the strongest economies we’ve ever seen,” Maddux said in a statement. “We will be working together to save this great country.”
Though a first-time congressional candidate, Nehls commands strong support in Fort Bend County, which anchors the district and has accounted for roughly twothirds of the vote in recent election cycles. Last week, he claimed 78 percent of the Fort Bend vote against a runoff opponent who outspent him more than 14 to 1 during the primary.
In the 7th Congressional District, formed by Houston’s Energy Corridor and wealthy western suburbs, Republican Army veteran Wesley Hunt is aiming to unseat Democratic Rep. Lizzie Fletcher, who flipped the district blue in 2018 for the first time since the 1960s.
Hunt easily beat out five other candidates in the March primary while touting an endorsement from Trump. Since then, he has yet to mention the president on Twitter and has run digital ads that say he “will work with both parties.” The ads do not highlight Trump’s endorsement, unlike the ones Hunt ran during the primary.
In a statement, Hunt campaign manager Jim Hilk criticized Fletcher for aligning her voting record with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and said Hunt “has served the country in combat and he’ll continue to serve in Congress by working with President Trump and Democrats to find common ground and solutions that move America forward.”
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has sought to amplify Trump’s endorsement of Hunt, with a spokesman saying in June that the candidate has “branded himself a ‘Trump Conservative’ in a pro-Clinton district where the president’s numbers are utterly cratering.”
Trump’s widening national deficit to Biden has been fueled mostly by a defection of seniors and white voters with college degrees, wrote Dave Wasserman, House editor for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, in a recent NBC News piece.
The Texas Politics Project’s Henson said that “the ostensible chinks in Trump’s armor are college-educated Republicans, and in particular college-educated women, with women being a bigger problem than men.”
Across the 7th District, about 50 percent of adults 25 and older have received at least a bachelor’s degree, according to U.S. Census Bureau data, the second-highest rate of Texas’ 36 congressional districts and about 20 points higher than the statewide total. The rate in Texas’ 22nd District is 45 percent, the sixth-highest in the state.
In Texas’ 10th Congressional District, which borders the western edge of the 7th and 22nd districts, Democratic nominee Mike Siegel recently labeled incumbent Rep. Michael McCaul “Trump’s favorite coward” and accused him of “running interference for Trump’s blatant moves toward outright fascism” after McCaul defended the president over his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and the deployment of federal agents to Portland, Ore.
McCaul, R-Austin, advised Trump on national security during the 2016 election and since has been considered for such highprofile positions as homeland security secretary and national intelligence director. McCaul also has broken with Trump, however, saying that “family separation, I think, was the wrong policy” and criticizing the president’s 2017 travel ban.
In an interview on Fox News this week, McCaul expressed optimism in Trump’s re-election, saying he thinks “there’s a silent majority out there.”
“This reminds me a lot of the year 1968, where you had a lot of social unrest,” McCaul said. “At that time, (Richard) Nixon ran on a law-and-order platform. President Trump has always — and I used to debate prep him back in the day — he ran on a very strong law-and-order platform, and that’s what he’s doing right now.”