After everything we’ve heard about Trump-humpers winning the GOP primaries, it’s no surprise that His Immenseness is using this as an excuse to feed his narcissistic personality disorder with tons of rallies across the country under the pretext of helping Republicans in the midterms.
The question is: is he really helping them? TPM reports that a growing number aren’t too sure about that.
President Donald Trump’s strategy of becoming aggressively involved in the midterm elections is prompting concern among some Republicans who worry he’s complicating the political calculus for GOP candidates trying to outrun his popularity.
Those Republicans worry their statewide candidates may rise or fall based on Trump’s standing, muddling their path to maintain control of Congress.
Consider the case of Ohio. Trump held a rally there today in order to prop up the sagging Congressional campaign of Troy Balderson, who finds himself with a miniscule one-point lead over Democratic challenger Danny O’Connor in a special election for a seat that the GOP should have locked down ages ago. But before Trump set foot in the state today, he’d spent much of the past week engaged in a Twitter war with none other than Lebron James.
You know, King James?
The fella who despite heading out west is still a god in Ohio sports circles, especially after funding and opening the “I Promise” school in Akron and helping out the pupils’ parents as well as the kids themselves?
The fella who his peers past and present have rallied around in a stunning rebuke to Trump?
Yeah, that fella.
Special elections are tricky things. Typically, turnout is low and confined to the base voters, so whatever energizes the base voters for your team is considered a good thing. The problem for Republicans is that turnout in the elections (special and otherwise) held since November of 2016 has tended to be quite high in general, and that’s led to some upsets by Democratic candidates, including in Memphis last night where they nearly swept the Republicans clean off the map. Trump may be energizing the GOP base, but he seems to be energizing the Democratic base even more.
This is all playing out at the same time that the Republican Party’s most influential donors, the Kochs, are feuding against Trump and by extension the rest of the GOP.
The Republican National Committee is diving into President Donald Trump’s battle with Charles Koch, warning GOP donors to stay away from the conservative billionaire.
"Some groups who claim to support conservatives forgo their commitment when they decide their business interests are more important than those of the country or Party," RNC chair Ronna Romney McDaniel wrote in a Thursday afternoon email to contributors. “This is unacceptable."
The letter also made a point to underscore that the GOP is the president's party, in a potential warning shot to other conservatives who might be considering publicly distancing themselves from Trump during the midterms
The implied threat to GOP candidates – the RNC "is the only entity which can be trusted with the data" needed to win, Romney McDaniel wrote – follows a week-long exchange of critical comments between Trump and Koch officials.
(Did you notice the words I put in bolded font? I bolded those words because Romney McDaniel, who uttered those words, was making a reference to the Koch family efforts over the past few years to create a voter data enterprise, i360, to match if not exceed the quality of both Republican and Democratic voter data enterprises. As of this Ronna Romney McDaniel quote, the RNC’s now telling Republican candidates to stay away from i360. This part of the Koch-GOP divorce deserves its own diary.)
One of the things Trump and the Republican Party are doing to motivate the GOP base is dangling the perceived threat of impeachment should Democrats win one or both houses of Congress. If Trump causes a number of Republicans to lose their races, and control of Capitol Hill, over the next three months, what’s left of the GOP might decide that impeaching the man is a good idea after all.