Many Republican leaders have
concluded that Donald J. Trump is a threat to the party’s fortunes and
its candidates for Congress.
Some strategists are preparing
ads that treat Mr. Trump’s defeat as a given and urge voters to choose
Republicans as a check on a Hillary Clinton White House
As Donald Trump Incites Feuds, Other G.O.P. Candidates Flee His Shadow
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.
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 them after 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.
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.
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.
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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