Republicans tiptoe around Trump factor

Republican candidates in Massachusetts are struggling to deal with President Trump and his sometimes explosive comments as they campaign to win a GOP pri- mary expected to be dominated by Trump supporters.

U.S. Senate candidate John Kingston declined to call Trump a “racist” and has backed away from attacking him, even though in 2016 Kingston led a “Never Trump” campaign and shed his party membership.

Kingston has since returned to the GOP and now that he’s running in a primary, prefers to go after Democrat Elizabeth Warren, not Trump.

In an interview yesterday on “Battenfeld” on Boston Herald Radio, Kingston said Trump’s reported reference to Haiti and African nations as “s---hole” countries was an “unfortunate distraction” from what voters care about.

And though he attacked Warren for calling Trump a “racist bully” during a speech on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Kingston trod carefully on the question of whether Trump’s remarks were racist.

“The problem is this gets into (the) category of all this definitional and semantic things about what is and what is not racist,” he said. “I just know that it is all an unfortunate distraction.”

One reason Kingston and others are reluctant to attack Trump is simple: Trump got more than 300,000 votes in the 2016 primary in Massachusetts, and those voters are likely to show up again in September.

So attacking Trump carries risk, and could doom a GOP candidate’s chances of winning a relatively lowturnout primary.

Another Republican Senate candidate, Beth Lindstrom, is campaigning as a moderate conservative but has also been reluctant to make Trump a target. Lindstrom has called out Trump a few times, but has also made voters aware that she voted for Trump in 2016. She says she will oppose the president “when he’s wrong” and support him when she feels he’s right — like on the recent tax cut law.

And Lindstrom, like Kingston, usually aims her fire at Warren — such as when the Democrat called Trump a “racist bully.”

“When Donald Trump goes low, Senator Warren goes lower,” Lindstrom said. “Calling people names may work up Sen. Warren’s followers on Twitter, but it does not get us any closer to achieving a positive outcome in the immigration debate. In fact, it’s driving us further apart.”

State Rep. Geoff Diehl, another GOP candidate for U.S. Senate, has no such problem with semantics — he has always backed Trump. Diehl was co-chairman of Trump’s 2016 campaign in Massachusetts and this week reported crossing $1 million in fundraising.

Diehl is expected to heavily target Trump voters as he solidifies his base during the campaign.