DON STAKES HIS REP.
Prez boosts GOPer in Ohio special election
President Trump hit the campaign trail in Delaware, Ohio, Saturday to boost an embattled Republican House candidate — and fend off a surging Democrat — three days ahead of Tuesday’s special election, which is seen as a referendum on his presidency.
“His opponent is a puppet of Nancy Pelosi/high taxes,” Trump tweeted Saturday in support of Troy Balderson, an Ohio state senator running in the state’s 12th Congressional District in the Columbus suburbs.
The latest polls show the race tight, with Balderson leading by a single point. The strongly Republican district voted for Trump by 11 points in 2016.
Back in June, surveys gave Balderson a 10-point lead over Democratic rival Danny O’Connor, an official in Franklin County.
The winner will hold the seat for only five months, until January 2019, to serve out the term of Rep. Patrick Tiberi.
Tiberi, an eight-term incumbent with a powerful perch on the House Ways and Means Committee, resigned last October to take a private-sector job.
But a victory will let the temporary congressman run as an incumbent in November’s midterm election, a significant advantage at the ballot box.
At a rally Saturday night in central Ohio, Trump told a cheering crowd that Balderson “is really tough. He’s really smart. He never stops working.’’
Balderson also spoke, saying, “if you want someone who will fight for President Trump’s economic agenda, that is putting people back to work, then I need your help and I need your vote.’’
On paper, the district seemed a lock for the GOP: largely white, suburban and middle class, it has sent a Republican to Congress for the past 80 years, except for a single term in the 1980s.
But its more affluent neighborhoods are home to college-educated voters who are uncomfortable with Trump’s smash-mouth brand of politics.
Those are the voters Democrats plan to target this November in their effort to win back the House of Representatives, making the special election a test case of the party’s strategy.
Meanwhile, with his relentless schedule of rallies and endorsement tweets, Trump seems intent on making himself the face of the GOP.
With his popularity among Republicans at 90 percent, according to Gallup, that may be a canny strategy.
But the possibility that his bombast will instead drive Democrats to the polls and turn off independent voters is giving GOP strategists agita.
“He can distract and he can also overshadow,” Ryan Williams, a former Mitt Romney campaign aide, told The Hill. “He tends to make events about him rather than the candidate.”