Republican Candidates Can’t Keep Trump Out of Their Districts
When Donald Trump told Sean Hannity not long ago that he was tanned, rested, and ready for the midterm-campaign trail—“I’ll go six or seven days a week when we’re 60 days out, and I will be campaigning for all of these great people that do have a difficult race”—the response from virtually all those candidates was silence.
And who can blame them? A president saddled with a 39 percent approval rating is not a guaranteed asset, especially in the dozens of competitive House districts where Republicans risk being drowned in a blue wave. Party strategists worry that Trump will do more harm than good, ginning up his foes more than his friends, and that his presence or endorsement may well have negligible value even in reliably red enclaves—as most recently evidenced in Ohio’s special House election and the Kansas GOP gubernatorial primary.
