As Donald Trump Incites Feuds, Other G.O.P. Candidates Flee His Shadow
Senator Patrick J. Toomey, center, Republican of Pennsylvania, at a campaign event last month. Mr. Toomey has said he expects his state’s voters to make separate decisions about his contest and whether to choose Donald J. Trump at the top of the ballot.
After a disastrous week of feuds and plummeting poll numbers, Republican leaders have concluded that Donald J. Trump is a threat to the party’s fortunes and have begun discussing how soon their endangered candidates should explicitly distance themselves from the presidential nominee.
For Republicans in close races, top strategists say, the issue is no longer in doubt. One House Republican has already started airing an ad vowing to stand up to Mr. Trump if he is elected president, and others are expected to press similar themes in the weeks ahead.
In the world of Republican “super PACs,” strategists are going even farther: discussing advertisements that would treat Mr. Trump’s defeat as a given and urge voters to send Republicans to Congress as a check on a Hillary Clinton White House. The discussions were described by officials familiar with the deliberations, several of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity about confidential planning.
For now, some of the party’s most vulnerable incumbents are simply hoping to avoid what they see as the taint of association with their standard-bearer.
Two members of Congress locked in competitive races made themselves scarce when Mr. Trump arrived in their states on Friday. The two, Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Representative David Young of Iowa, held events elsewhere.
Senator Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania, in a conference call with reporters the same day, was less subtle. “Donald Trump is in a category unto himself,” Mr. Toomey said, predicting that his state’s voters “will make a completely separate decision” between the top of the ticket and the Senate campaign this year.
That is increasingly the hope of nearly every Republican leader across the country.
Mr. Trump’s plunge in polls this week, along with his dual attacks on the family of a fallen American soldier and the leadership of his own party, has convinced veteran Republican strategists that most of their candidates must navigate around the presidential nominee.
Plans for ads that distance congressional candidates from the top of the ticket have accelerated. “You will see them by early to mid-September now,” even before the first debate on Sept. 26, predicted Scott Reed, the senior political strategist for the United States Chamber of Commerce.
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At a recent conference of Republican donors, Paul D. Ryan, the speaker of the House, warned that even the party’s substantial majority in that chamber might be in jeopardy.
“The conclusion has become that the guy is incorrigible,” said Thomas M. Davis III, a former House member from Virginia who is still close to many of the party’s leaders. “He’s going to leave our candidates with no choice but to go their own separate way.”
Mr. Trump’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment, but on Friday night he tried to calm angry Republicans by endorsing, belatedly, the re-elections of Mr. Ryan and Senators John McCain of Arizona and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire. Mr. Trump had been feuding with themafter they criticized his ridicule of the parents of Humayun Khan, a Muslim American Army captain killed in Iraq. Captain Khan’s parents had denounced Mr. Trump during the Democratic National Convention.
Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, had urged Mr. Trump to stand behind Mr. Ryan and the senators for the sake of party unity. Some leading Republicans have expressed hope that Mr. Trump can at least stabilize his campaign by Labor Day, when many voters begin paying attention to congressional races.
But with such an erratic and belligerent candidate leading their ticket, many in the party have long seen a go-your-own-way strategy as inevitable.
David McIntosh, the president of the Club for Growth, a group that advocates small government, said the organization was studying how to get Republican voters who may dislike Mr. Trump to turn out for the party’s down-ballot candidates. Mr. McIntosh said the Club for Growth intended to convince voters that they would need a “strong voice in the Senate and House,” regardless of their feelings about the presidential race.
“You hope Trump does well so that the base Republican vote comes out and is strong,” Mr. McIntosh said. “But you also have to plan for if he doesn’t do well.”
At the moment, that seems likely. Mrs. Clinton opened a large lead last week in national polls, with a handful showing her leading by double digits. Perhaps more significantly, new surveys indicate that she has staked out leads in states Mr. Trump most likely needs to win the White House, including Florida, Pennsylvania and Michigan, and that she is also close or edging ahead in Republican-leaning states such as Georgia, where at least one poll has her ahead.
Mrs. Clinton’s advantage may ebb. The surveys were taken soon after the Democratic National Convention and during Mr. Trump’s gaffe-filled week. But Republicans are planning for the worst.
Also under consideration is the possibility of a huge ad campaign to promote an agenda of conventional Republican positions, along the lines of economic proposals outlined by Mr. Ryan.Continue reading the main story
The point of such a campaign, one strategist said, would be to provide voters with a different, nonthreatening view of Republicans, so that the party is not wholly defined by Mr. Trump’s day-to-day pronouncements.
What stops Republicans from disavowing Mr. Trump en masse is that they fear alienating his voters, who may be crucial to the party’s efforts to retain its congressional majorities. In an era in which fewer voters split their tickets, it is important to Republican leaders that Mr. Trump at least run competitively with Mrs. Clinton to avert a down-ballot wipeout.
“Do we run the risk of depressing our base by repudiating the guy, or do we run the risk of being tarred and feathered by independents for not repudiating him?” asked Glen Bolger, a Republican pollster working on many of this year’s races. “We’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t.”
Republicans currently have a precarious hold on the Senate; Democrats would need just four more seats to gain control if Mrs. Clinton wins the presidency, giving the chamber’s tiebreaker vote to her running mate, Tim Kaine. Republicans enjoy a more substantial majority in the House, where Democrats must capture 30 more seats to take control.
But Mr. Trump’s difficulties have become so acute that there is rising concern that Republicans could lose enough House seats to loosen Mr. Ryan’s grip and, in subsequent elections, threaten his majority.
Speaking in private to a group of donors last week at a political conference in Colorado sponsored by the industrialists Charles G. and David H. Koch, Mr. Ryan expressed concerns that the House was increasingly at risk, according to a Republican who was present for the conversation.
Mr. Ryan implored the donors not to assume that the House was impregnable and not to entirely focus their efforts on retaining the Senate.
Among the party’s biggest contributors, there is a growing sense of alarm about defending control of Congress, now that Mr. Trump has proved resistant to correcting course in the general election.
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Republican donors had hoped that Mr. Trump would shed his practice, from the primary season, of seizing attention with incendiary remarks.
Jay Bergman, an Illinois oil executive and major Republican donor, said Mr. Trump’s clash with the parents of a slain soldier had been a sharp reality check. Mr. Bergman said he had previously viewed Mr. Trump as a “loose cannon like a fox” — calculating his inflammatory comments to drive his message. That view was harder to sustain after Mr. Trump’s latest eruption, he said.
With the presidential race looking so uncertain, Mr. Bergman said he was more focused on protecting the Senate. He said that donors at the Koch-sponsored conference had received a bracing presentation about just how difficult the political map was for Republican senators.
So far, Mr. Trump has faced disavowal from a modest array of congressional Republicans, nearly all of them dependent on the votes of moderate, suburban voters.
In the past week, the campaign of Representative Mike Coffman of Colorado, who represents suburban Denver, began airing a television ad in which he pledges to stand up to Mr. Trump if he becomes president. Other Republicans are expected to follow suit as early as this month.
But even that approach may be insufficient. House Republican officials were furious at Mr. Coffman for not being prepared to answer predictable follow-up questions about whether he still supported Mr. Trump. Democrats responded with an advertisement showing photos of Mr. Coffman and Mr. Trump side by side and urging voters to reject them both.
Representative Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico, the chairman of the House Democratic campaign arm, said his party was aiming to ensure that Republicans would be tarnished by Mr. Trump, even if they distanced themselves from him.
“A denouncement of Trump at this point is too little, too late,” Mr. Luján warned.
There is precedent for Republicans to ease away from a presidential nominee who appears unable to win. Late in the 1996 campaign, the party ran television ads explicitly urging voters to elect a Republican Senate as a check on President Bill Clinton’s power, even as its challenger, Bob Dole, fought to overcome Mr. Clinton’s lead.495COMMENTS
Former Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, who was the majority leader at the time, said such cold-eyed measures had been necessary and effective — and may be once again.
“There are a lot of people saying we want to save the majority in the House and defend the Senate,” Mr. Lott said. “What I would say is: Clinton may be president, and we’re certainly going to need the Senate. And by the way, if Trump is president, he’s certainly going to need the Senate, too.”
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