Top Republicans have an unusual argument underpinning their quest to keep the Senate: that presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, whose mere tweets generate their own national news cycles, will have virtually no effect on how voters consider down-ballot Republican candidates this fall.
And three and a half months from Election Day, the GOP can take comfort in polling that shows its most endangered senators outpacing Trump in state surveys. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton’s own popularity is near an all-time low for a presidential candidate, barely beating Trump. Instead of pouring energy into running as a ticket or even actively repelling Trump, most Republican Senate candidates are focusing on local strategies and topics — health care in Arizona, water in Nevada, national defense in North Carolina, and fighting heroin addiction in Ohio.
“We’re not running presidential races,” said Ward Baker, the executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “We’re running sheriff races.”
So far, the divide is holding. Sen. Marco Rubio polls about 5 percentage points ahead of Trump in Florida, Sen. Rob Portman is 4 points up on him in Ohio, and Sen. Pat Toomey has a 6-point edge over the nominee in Pennsylvania, according to RealClearPolitics rolling averages. Those numbers alone wouldn’t guarantee Republicans stay in the majority, but they certainly don't yet point to the sweeping losses that Democrats believe are brewing.
Patient Democrats privately admit that the looming anti-Trump wave won't crest until September, when the campaigns really kick into gear. And publicly, they say the GOP tactics of trying to localize races and break with their party’s standard bearer smacks of Democrats’ own ineffective campaign strategy in 2014.
During that election, red-state Democrats tried to distance themselves from President Barack Obama, but voters dealt the party a nine-seat loss, handing the GOP the Senate majority.
In Democratic strategists’ view, every Republican — except for Trump-opposing Sen. Mark Kirk of Illinois — now owns Trump’s policies and all of his rhetorical baggage.
“The mere fact that they’re bringing that up shows you how paranoid they are about Donald Trump. For good reason,” said Democratic Sen. Jon Tester, the Montana farmer and blunt-spoken Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee chairman. “That’s not a campaign strategy.”
Still, Democrats have yet to run millions of dollars in ads explicitly linking Trump to vulnerable senators. Much of it is out of Tester’s hands: The DSCC’s independent ad unit and the super PAC Senate Majority PAC are expected to do much of the anti-Trump pummeling of vulnerable Republicans. SMP has reserved $45 million in fall TV ads, while the DSCC has reserved nearly $50 million.
“Different groups can do shit you just can’t stop them from doing,” Tester said. “Ads linking them to Trump — if he continues doing what he's done for the last two years, I think will be helpful.”
So far, Senate Majority PAC has run a single ad linking Trump to a vulnerable senator and the DSCC has run none. The super PAC’s ad targeted New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte, accusing her of doing the bidding of Trump and "party bosses" by not pushing for a vote on President Barack Obama's Supreme Court nominee. "Kelly Ayotte. Ignoring the Constitution. Not doing her job," the ad's narrator concluded.
The outside groups may have good reason for not linking Republicans to Trump just yet. Democratic groups have only just started attacking Trump in the presidential and Senate swing states. Trump is already unpopular, but once those ads begin taking their toll, the DSCC and Senate Majority PAC may begin a campaign of connection between GOP senators and Trump.
Yet Republicans wager that Clinton will be as much a drag on Democrats as Trump is on Republicans, given her low public standing. And Democrats also admit that the GOP is likely to have a major spending advantage. The conservative One Nation, a Senate focused non-profit, has already spent $22.5 million and the Senate Leadership Fund has reserved $40 million of TV for the fall, while incumbent senators like Portman and Toomey have amassed huge financial leads over their Democratic opponents.
Until their perceived advantage with Trump on the ticket is evident, Democrats concentrate their boasting on candidate recruitment rather than their standing in Senate surveys. That now includes former Sen. Evan Bayh’s late comeback attempt in Indiana, which Democrats say opens a new path to the majority that doesn’t depend on winning all of the traditional battleground states.
Democratic strategists are now talking up not only Illinois and Wisconsin but also Indiana as easy wins, a scenario which leaves Democrats just one seat short of Senate control if Clinton beats Trump. Republicans fear their party could be letting one go if it doesn’t respond to Bayh and the $10 million he already had sitting in his old campaign account when he announced his new run last week.
“It’s hard to believe we let Indiana lie,” said a top Republican working in competitive states.
Bayh’s recruitment was an exclamation point on a slate that includes New Hampshire Gov. Maggie Hassan, former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, former Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold, Reps. Patrick Murphy of Florida and Tammy Duckworth of Illinois and former Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto. It’s not yet evident in the polls, but Democrats have put themselves in a position to retake the Senate by finding candidates who can conceivably defeat incumbent senators if the political winds are blowing their way on Election Day.
“We’ve got some great goddamn candidates,” Tester said.
Republicans take a dimmer view of the clutch of former statewide elected officials and members of Congress.
“They have no message,” said Baker, pivoting into attacks on the candidates in Ohio and Wisconsin. “What’s Russ Feingold’s message? What’s Ted Strickland’s message?”
The contrasting styles of the two Senate campaign arms were on display in interviews in their respective offices on Capitol Hill. Tester is a plainspoken, crew-cut centrist who peppers his speech with mild expletives, while his DSCC executive director, Tom Lopach, is low-key and relaxed, waiting for gaps in conversations to quietly raise his point that Democrats won’t only make their campaigns about Donald Trump’s toxicity.
“It depends on the state and the race and what the issues are. If you look at Rob Portman, who has made a long career of support and aiding trade agreements that send jobs overseas, that’s something to talk about,” Lopach said.
Baker is an outsized presence who frequently talks over his chairman, Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, a genteel southerner who generally avoids attacking Senate Democrats. At one point in the interview, as Baker argued that Hillary Clinton will cripple Strickland in coal country, Wicker tried to calm his emotional staffer.
“Deep breaths. Deep breaths,” Wicker said.
But Baker believes intensity and work ethic will drag his party across the finish line. The former Marine is a regular presence in the hallways of the Capitol, checking in on the campaigns of everyone from his at-risk incumbents to safe Republicans like Richard Shelby of Alabama.
“We know what the numbers are in every single precinct in every single county in every single state,” Baker says.
Democrats, who just fought through a midterm election on the other side of a bad environment and unpopular party leader, say there’s only so much the NRSC can do.
“They have made an assessment that supporting Trump is positive for them in the election, I assume, or they really like his policies. There’s only two reasons,” Tester says. “Would I rather be us or them?”