Senate GOP candidates in tight races avoid any mention of the president in campaign ads [Washington Post]

GOP Senate candidates made a political calculation not to hold the president accountable and it’s backfiring now in their increasingly tough elections. The new “strategy” to claim they’re independent won’t fool voters, who know these Republican incumbents have consistently put their party ahead of doing what’s right — which is why they were vulnerable in the first place. 

Washington Post: Trump who? Senate GOP candidates in tight races avoid any mention of the president in campaign ads.
By Seung Min Kim 

Key Points: 

• Republican senators up for reelection this fall in tight races have been unwilling to publicly criticize Trump as he continues to fan racial tensions and struggles to control a pandemic that has devastated the economy and killed close to 130,000 Americans. But they are being careful not to embrace him either.

• This deliberate approach underscores the difficult position Republicans find themselves in as they head into an election season that looks increasingly grim for the party. The senators don’t want to clash with Trump and rile up his stable of loyal supporters whose votes they will need to be reelected, but they also don’t want to hug him tightly and turn off more moderate voters whose views of the president have turned negative.

• Trump’s sagging popularity is one of several challenges confronting Senate Republicans as they face a dire outlook in their bid to retain the majority this fall. Forecasts by nonpartisan analysts have shifted several campaigns in Democrats’ favor, with states previously considered in a lower tier of competitive races now showing up on the national political radar.

• Democratic challengers in key Senate races have also shoveled in campaign cash at a massive, record-breaking pace, continuing to outraise Republicans with sums that strategists say is powered by grass-roots donors who are enthusiastic about ousting GOP senators from office.

• Despite that outlook, Republicans working on Senate races say it’s nearly inconceivable that GOP senators will break from Trump.

• In a closed-door party lunch last week, veteran GOP pollster Frank Luntz advised Republican senators to not disavow the president, but to put some daylight between themselves and Trump.

• In a CNN interview this week, Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) couldn’t escape questions about Trump and was reluctant to directly criticize him when asked. Though she was quick to chastise President Barack Obama over his handling of the Ebola outbreak in 2014, Ernst declined to do the same with Trump and the coronavirus, noting that he was “stepping forward” despite the far higher death toll.

• In several states, Republicans are also largely unknown despite spending several years in federal office.

• In an increasingly nasty Republican primary in Kansas — where the president has not officially endorsed — the candidates tout their allegiance to Trump, with Rep. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) noting in an ad that the president has called him a “great friend” and Kris Kobach saying he’s “always stood with” Trump in an immigration-themed ad.

• And in a special election in Georgia, recently appointed Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler has used her campaign ads to tout her Trump bona fides as she faces not only Democrat Raphael Warnock but Rep. Douglas A. Collins (R-Ga.), an ardent Trump ally who was one of the president’s biggest defenders in his impeachment fight.

• “Republicans in the Senate might be trying to disappear Donald Trump from their campaign ads, but they can’t erase their records in Washington of enabling the White House’s attacks on health care in the middle of a pandemic or their refusal to hold the president accountable as he divides a nation in crisis,” said Stewart Boss, a spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

Read the full report here.

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