Republicans are panicking about the forthcoming midterm elections, as the party is expected to see a wipeout at the ballot box, and President Donald Trump doesn’t appear to be helping.
After tying themselves to Trump for over a decade now, some Republicans now fear that they have little room to distance themselves from the increasingly unpopular president.
“I’m fearful that the president’s numbers are a ball and chain that will be hard to overcome,” said Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, a moderate Republican who is not running for re-election in his battleground district, told the New York Times.
“I’m worried that we’ve lost a lot of our swing voters. In the Midwest, tariffs aren’t popular. Ukraine polls at 70 percent — why aren’t we doing more for them? Nebraskans don’t like chaos and all the name calling and treating our allies bad,” he added.
Trump, whose approval rating has sunk to one of the lowest of any president, has doubled down on tying the midterms to his own record. Last week, said his strategy to muster support for the GOP will be to focus on touting his own record as he campaigns.
“I’m going to go out, and I’m going to campaign like I did for myself,” he said last week.
He also proclaimed that it is actually congressional Republicans, not himself, whom voters dislike.
“But some people like me more than they like the party,” Trump proclaimed. “I mean, you can’t be insulted by it. There’s nothing you can do about it.”
Still, several Republicans in tight districts are forgoing attending the GOP’s midterm convention in Dallas next week, with only two Republicans in tough House races confirmed to be headed to Texas.
“Most congressional candidates are better served by getting out of the national political jet-stream, and they’re better off reinforcing local credentials, local messages and local issues than trying to make the case for re-election from a platform in Dallas,” Republican strategist Kevin Madden told the Daily Beast.
Some Republicans in tight races have even resorted to trying to position themselves as a MAGA disruptor to win over voters.
Republican Mike Lawler, who represents a toss-up district in the New York City suburbs, aired a digital advertisement last week that includes Trump calling him a “pain in the ass” for being a holdout for tax deductions last year. And freshman Michigan Rep. Tom Barrett took out ads on Facebook that highlighted his votes to limit Trump’s war powers in Iran.
Both Barrett and Lawler, however, have still campaigned with the president in recent months.
On the Senate side, some Republicans are still fuming over Trump’s decision to endorse scandal-ridden Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton over incumbent Sen. John Cornyn, who was one of the strongest fundraisers for the GOP in the upper chamber.
The GOP now has to pour money into Texas, a reliably Republican state, as polling shows that Democratic candidate James Talarico has real momentum going into November, as Paxton has been seen as absent from the campaign trail, and even Texas, for that matter.
A growing number of Republicans —including those in safely Republican districts — have also deleted references to Trump on their campaign website, including candidates whom Trump has endorsed. Recent polling could explain why Republican candidates are so hesitant to associate with Trump.
A Reuters/Ipsos survey last week found that the president is steadily losing support from even his own base, with only 35 percent of Republicans saying they “strongly approve” of Trump’s job as president. The president’s net approval rating is at 33 percent—the lowest of his presidency.
The White House has also maintained that it is still Trump’s Republican Party, and has downplayed any fractures between the president and his party.
When asked about the fracture, White House has repeatedly used a canned statement from Olivia Wales, a spokeswoman, reading: “President Trump is the unequivocal leader of the Republican Party, who is committed to maintaining Republicans’ majority in Congress.”
