Trump's Reverse Coattails

Mutiny by Nancy Ohanian

Early in the cycle, I noticed that a reasonable theme to cover would be Trump as an albatross whose reverse coattails would pull down Republican candidates across the country-- particularly in districts with large numbers of independent covers. I asked Nancy Ohanian, the best of the political artists, what she thought about it. She came up with these two graphics:

Yesterday, in his Washington Post column, Dana Milbank went right for it: The Trump Albatross. He wrote that Señor Trumpanzee "is getting his wish: It’s all about him. The election, that is. New evidence indicates that the midterm elections in seven weeks will be the clearest referendum on a president in at least 80 years. But while it may delight the narcissistic president that the 2018 midterms are entirely about him, this is precisely what his fellow Republicans were hoping to avoid. With Trump’s support at historic lows-- 60 percent overall disapprove of his performance, including 59 percent of independents-- Republicans scrambling to hold the House and Senate have been struggling in vain to make the election about other issues: tax cuts, Democrats’ personal foibles-- anything to avoid the election being about Trump.This has failed, bigly."

Midterm elections have generally come to be seen as the electorate’s reaction to a presidency. But this one is on a whole different level. “In no previous election,” Gary Jacobson, a University of California political scientist who crunched the numbers, tells me, “has the linkage between opinions of the president and how people are likely to vote been as strong as this time.” Jacobson’s research goes back to the 1930s, before which there was no polling and therefore no ability to compare... [He] found in 93.1 percent of cases this year, voters’ approval or disapproval of the president is correlated with their planned votes for or against the president’s party in House races. That’s an all-time high. It averaged 86 percent in recent elections, 74 percent in the 1980s and 1990s.

And it’s more than a casual correlation. Using regression analysis, Jacobson determined that for every percentage point movement in Trump’s job approval rating, support for Republican House candidates in the midterm elections move by 0.75 percentage points-- the highest effect ever seen.

...Trump’s unpopularity seems to offset the benefit Republicans should get from the strong economy [and gerrymandering]. Using results from previous midterms and factoring in the president’s approval and the growth in real disposable income, Jacobson reports that in conditions close to the current situation-- 2 percent income growth and Trump’s approval at 40 percent-- Republicans would, by historic models, lose 33 House seats.

Republicans in competitive races are in a bind. Among independent voters they need to win, Trump is a pariah. But among the Republican voters they need to turn out in high numbers, Trump has 78 percent approval.

Their dilemma was evident on Thursday when Trump made the outrageous and false claim that the official death toll of 2,975 from last year’s storms in Puerto Rico was inflated by Democrats “to make me look as bad as possible.” (Even storm deaths are all about him.) Delicately, Republican candidates in Florida, who had been trying to win over Puerto Rican voters, tried to step away from Trump. Gov. Rick Scott, running for Senate, tweeted: “I disagree.” Rep. Ron DeSantis, running for governor, issued a similar statement.

Good luck with that. Trump, later in the day, repeated his insulting and bogus claims.

As Trump continues to repel, opinions of him drop and support for a Democratic Congress rises. It has the makings of a wave, but one that could recede before the election. We are destined for one of two outcomes: a massive repudiation of Trump or an unthinkable affirmation of him.

The stakes could hardly be higher.

I spoke with David Keith, campaign manager for Randy Bryce and one of the sharpest minds on the political landscape. He told us he "gets the feeling that a lot of pundits and pollsters and operatives are going to wake up on November 7 and say, 'How did I miss that? No one knew the wave was going to be that powerful.' The 'Trump factor' hasn't been properly factored in to Beltway projections. Trump is an albatross around the neck of every Republican on every level. Even those progressives who ousted those 6 IDC state senators in New York last week. No one beat Jeffrey Klein before but this time, he collapsed, in part thanks to people disgusted with Trump wanted to get out and vote. He's driving turn out and he's turning independent voters away from the GOP. People who may have found him amusing at one time, have woken up and they're starting to worry for their families and their country. There are going to be a lot of Republicans in 'safe' seats looking for jobs after January."

Yesterday Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns wrote from a very similar perspective about why GOP candidates are so worried going into the midterms. "As Democrats," they wrote, "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 Trump’s advisers pointing to the high number of G.O.P. retirements and lawmakers placing the blame squarely on the president’s divisive style.

To the dismay of party leaders, the healthy economy and Mr. 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 V. Putin, and other fronts, party leaders say.

These self-inflicted wounds since early summer have helped push Mr. 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,” said Representative Tom Cole, an Oklahoma Republican, about 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.”

Perhaps... but voters' seem to have decided that what the midterms are about are not countervailing claims about so-called GOP "accomplishments," but on Trump. They know it and they're freaking out. If you drive straight south from Ardmore in Cole's district, you'll hit TX-10, where entrenched Republican multimillionaire Trump rubber-stamp Michael McCaul is getting the battle of his life from Austin City Attorney Mike Siegel. Siegel doesn't have to mention Trump as he crisscrosses the gerrymandered district stretching from Austin to the exurbs west of Houston. The voters are already aware of Trump, but what they hear from Siegel is about what trade wars have done to the price of sorghum and how climate change denial is causing flooding. He talks about healthcare and jobs and environmental and racial justice, not about Trump. He won his primary election with 70.2% of the vote and now faces one of the architects of Trump's family separation agenda. Still, the DCCC is refusing to back his race. This morning I asked Mike about a path to victory in a district where Trump beat Hillary 52.3% to 43.2%.

A while back, he told us McCaul is less "safe" than Beltway pundits all assume he is. "Even though the 10th was gerrymandered to be a 60/40 District in favor of the Republicans, Texas cities keep growing, and Austin and Houston continue to sprawl towards each other. In the 2016 presidential election, Trump beat Clinton by nine points in the 10th. And since that time, McCaul has only inflicted harm on his constituents, by cutting our healthcare and transferring a trillion dollars from working families and essential government programs to the richest among us. McCaul has also neglected the most basic aspects of representation. The 10th includes Katy, Cypress, and Tomball, three Harris County cities that were dramatically impacted by Hurricane Harvey. McCaul has done little to nothing to help those affected. And instead of obtaining federal support to fund fixes to decrepit flood control facilities, McCaul trumpeted his demand for $20 billion to fund a useless Border Wall."


McCaul’s base of support is brittle, and can be dislodged by a strong field campaign supplemented by targeted outreach across the nine counties of the 10th. We can motivate volunteers because we are fighting for the needs of our friends and neighbors.


We are fighting for healthcare for all and a reversal of the 2017 cuts; for fair immigration policies that keep families together; for a living wage and a retirement with dignity. We are fighting to keep corporate and NRA money out of politics.


To win the primary in a field of seven Democrats, I recruited 250 volunteers from diverse constituencies, including labor organizations, Indivisible activists, and the immigrant rights community.

"To win the general," he continued, "we will need to multiply efforts and reach out to additional communities who are suffering under the Trump-McCaul paradigm. The 10th is not first on the "flippable" lists, but McCaul is not invincible, and his disdain for regular Texans is an Achilles heel."

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.”

...Bolger and many other prominent Republicans now 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. The party is preparing to shift advertising money away from some of their most beleaguered incumbents toward a set of races in somewhat more favorable territory. In the narrowly divided Senate, both parties see eight to nine seats, most of them held by Democrats, on a knife’s edge.

And instead of attempting to highlight positive economic news like the 3.9 percent unemployment rate, Republicans have turned to a scorched-earth campaign against the Democrats in a bid to save their House majority and salvage their one-seat edge in the Senate.

Republican electioneering groups, including the Congressional Leadership Fund “super pac” and the National Republican Congressional Committee, 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 Democratic nominees.

The Republican lurch away from economic issues amounts to a bet on the politics of Trump-style cultural division as a means of driving up conservative turnout and disqualifying some Democratic candidates among more moderate voters.

From the very first day of his campaign in southeast Wisconsin, Randy Bryce started talking about Medicare-For-All. It's part of his sterling @IronStache brand and it's expected to help win in a red district where Trump beat Hillary 52.6% to 42.3%. Bryce seems very focused on what he wants to do for his neighbors in Racine, Kenosha, Janesville and points in between. "When people in WI-01 learn what Medicare for all actually involves they like it," he told me yesterday. "A Koch Brother funded study shows that we’ll actually save ten trillion over ten years with it in place. Premiums keep getting higher and higher. Healthy people are getting charged more every year for health care some can’t afford to actually use. Those who have insurance will always be paying for those who don’t so why is it so much to ask to do the right thing and give everyone access to health care? With regular checkups we can catch a problem before it gets too big."

Katie Porter has gone from being a long-shot to being a slight-front-runner in her Orange County district. I suspect a lot of that is because of messaging similar to what she told me today: "Mimi Walters," she said of her Trump-enabling opponent, "voted for Donald Trump's health care bill that would have gutted protections for pre-existing conditions, while allowing insurance companies to charge older Californians up to five times more. I will take on the big insurance companies and fight for a Medicare for All system that ensures every American has high-quality, affordable health care."

Another weak Republican incumbent whose reelection bid in Omaha is failing, is backbencher and Trump enabler Don Bacon. Ryan's SuperPAC, desperate to save the seat has been attacking progressive Democrat Kara Eastman, who is campaigning on issues that directly impact Nebraska voters, because she was in a punk rock band when she was in college, decades ago. That's what GOP desperation looks like. I asked Kara's communications director what they think of the pounding Ryan's SuperPAC is giving them with those personal, vicious ads. She told me that they "find it ironic that the opposition would want to attack Kara, and Beto, for doing something many American teens do-- join a band, sing songs about issues that matter to them, and express themselves through music. Congress would be a better place with more musicians, and while we were joking about a College Band Congressional Caucus, Kara is looking forward to working with politicians like Beto who lead with heart-- and music." Meanwhile, Kara's another candidate who doesn't have to spend time talking about Trump. Omaha voters don't like him at all and he lost the district in 2016. What Kara is concentrating on are the issues Nebraska voters care about: healthcare, education, jobs, the environment and getting dark money out of politics.

Kevin McCarthy, in laying out the Republican strategy for the GOP campaign to The Times reporters, said they plan to warn voters that if the Democrats win, they will "seek to enact universal health care." I guess he doesn't realize he will be helping Democrats, not hurting them, with that message.

Kendra Fershee doesn't mind that kind of advertising at all. She reminded us she's "running for Congress in West Virginia, home to the people whose backbreaking labor made it possible to build America. West Virginians got almost nothing in return. Healthcare is about freedom. You can’t live free if you can’t see a doctor when you’re sick. And our drug addiction crisis is bringing us to our knees. I don’t know what it looks like for a state to collapse, but I fear without universal healthcare, West Virginians may find out."

James Thompson, is appealing to voters in the Wichita Metro-- Koch country-- and he's making enough headway to scare the Republicans, even if the DCCC still refuses to notice. "Article I Section 8 of the Constitution," he told us, "states that Congress is to 'provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States.' If people in this country are unable to get healthcare then Congress is abdicating its role to provide for the general welfare of the United States. Healthcare must be available to every single person in this country and based on their healthcare needs not their ability to pay. Opening up Medicare to everyone is the answer. It allows for a greater pool of people paying in to Medicare making it more solvent while also making health insurance affordable for everyone at 1/3 of the costs of current private insurance companies. Healthcare decision should be made by patients and doctors, not  bureaucrats and politicians. Republicans are great at making suggestions for destroying healthcare but have yet to provide any reasonable alternative to our current system. One suggestion they make is health savings accounts, but what they forget, or often simply ignore, is that people have to have money to put it into savings. With wages remaining stagnant for the past 40 years while health costs have climbed exponentially, people in this country are broke, struggling to make ends meet, and simply need their government be responsive to the needs of the people rather than big corporate donors. People who are not rich deserve healthcare too. So Republicans need to either put up or shut up when it comes to healthcare in this country. All they have done since the passage of the ACA is complain and promise to provide alternatives. They have had 8 years to come up with a plan and failed to provide even one viable alternative that they could agree on. If Republican politicans cannot agree amongst themselves, then there is no hope that Republicans can fix this problem. Having said that, this is not a Republican problem or a Democrat problem, it is an American problem that must be solved. Everyday that we continue to argue, more people die because they do not have access to healthcare. As Americans, we are better than this and must answer the call of our citizens to provide a healthcare system for everyone and Medicare is the answer."

[T]here are already clouds forming over the Republican-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, the president sided with Mr. Putin over American intelligence services, and then showed little sympathy following the death of Senator John McCain, Republican strategists said Mr. Trump is alienating a sizable bloc of moderate and Republican-leaning voters who favor right-of-center economic policies but recoil from the president.

“There’s 15 percent of the electorate that’s happy with the direction of the country but angry with the president,” said Corry Bliss, who runs the Congressional Leadership Fund.

But this sort of talk infuriates Mr. Trump’s aides, and one senior White House official swiped back at Mr. Bliss, accusing him of attempting to lay the groundwork for deflecting blame for the loss of the House majority. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to be candid about the party’s predicament, said the Republicans were facing deep losses because of the 40 House Republicans who chose not to run again-- a list, the official pointedly noted, that includes Mr. Ryan himself.

Yet the intraparty finger-pointing goes beyond the 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. For example, the committee still has $8 million committed to two lawmakers, Representative Barbara Comstock of Virginia and Keith Rothfus of Pennsylvania, who many in the party do not think can win.

...Republican officials say privately that the performance of the economy under Mr. Trump has not been a major motivating factor for pro-Trump voters. For some Americans on the right, it may even be contributing to the mood of political apathy that has so alarmed G.O.P. leaders, since voters who are optimistic rarely vote with the intensity of those who are angry or afraid.

America First Action, a political committee aligned with Mr. 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,” an official familiar with the research said, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the data was not intended to be disclosed. Breaking that attitude of complacency is now the Republicans’ top priority, far more than wooing moderates with gentler messaging about economic growth.

...[T]he 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 President Trump. Mr. Carville, who fashioned Bill Clinton’s “It’s the economy, stupid” mantra in 1992, continued: “He’s made himself bigger than the economy. Every conversation starts and ends with Trump.”

I want to end with an example of what kind of thing Trump's chaos and dysfunction bring. Leslie Wexner has contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the political process-- all of it to Republicans and GOP organizations (except a few fat checks to Joe Lieberman, essentially a Republican masquerading as a Democrap). He gave lots of maxed out contributions to lots of Republicans-- including to far right extremists like Marsha Blackburn-- as well as $250,000 to a SuperPAC backing Romney and $500,000 to a SuperPAC backing Jeb. So... yeah, a high roller. One of his most recent was to the successful campaign of Troy Balderson ($2,700) in his home state of Ohio. That may be the last to a Republican for a while. According to the Columbus Dispatch Wexner, a billionaire and chairman and CEO of Limited Brands, renounced his affiliation with the Republican Party after hearing Obama's speech on the same Columbus Partnership panel Wexner was speaking at. He called Obama's speech a "great moment for the community. I was struck by the genuineness of the man; his candor, humility and empathy for others... I just decided I’m no longer a Republican."

He's the Ohio GOP's wealthiest contributor and losing his campaign cash will hurt. He says he's an independent now and he "won’t support this nonsense in the Republican Party."