Sen. Joe Donnelly, a vulnerable Trump Country Democrat up for reelection in 2018, is already fundraising off his resistance to the president’s agenda. Donnelly for Indiana, the senator’s re-election campaign, sent supporters an email on Tuesday boasting that he’s “fighting back against Trump’s extreme agenda.”
“Six months in,” the email said, “Joe’s shown that when it’s right for Hoosiers, he’ll push back against the Trump Administration.”
The campaign listed several specific policies Donnelly plans to oppose under Trump, continuing, “He’ll fight against a plan to cut $9.2 billion in education funding, a bill that would strip 22 million Americans of their health care, and efforts to create huge new tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy.”
“President Trump has made it clear that his administration has one goal: To take from the poor and middle class, and give to the rich,” the email claimed. “On everything from plans to gut Medicaid, to decimating public education, to slashing tax rates for the very wealthiest, he’s put wealthy Republican elites before Hoosier families.”
For a senator running in a state where Trump beat Hillary Clinton by nearly 20 points, earning more than 57 percent of the vote last November, Donnelly’s harsh evaluation of the president’s performance six months into his term could backfire. Lashing out at Trump, even considering his low approval rate, with class warfare language almost indistinguishable from that favored by Northeast liberals like Elizabeth Warren is a gamble in Indiana. Positioning himself as an opponent of Trump also gives Republicans the ability to more easily align him with the far-Left “Resistance” movement that’s sprung up since election day.
Donnelly was one of three centrist Senate Democrats who voted to confirm Justice Neil Gorsuch in April, a move that appeared to signal an awareness of his precarious position. But fundraising emails like this one won’t help the senator maintain a reputation for bipartisanship.
Of course, fundraising emails are not campaign speeches and they typically target different audiences. But the Donnelly campaign’s decision to use such sharp rhetoric against Trump — calling his agenda “extreme,” accusing him of having a singular interest in taking from the poor and middle class — could come back to haunt him as he works to keep a Democratic seat in a state that overwhelmingly favored the Republican president.
Emily Jashinsky is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
