Republican officeholders, including the party’s 2008 presidential nominee and the third-ranking Republican in the Senate, are abandoning Donald Trump as uproar spreads over his lewd video. The next 24 hours will tell whether the significant but still manageable number of defections will turn into a stampede, or whether Trump can find a way to contain the damage and keep the rest of his congressional support on board.
Beyond that, even if a full-scale GOP stampede away from Trump breaks out, it remains unclear precisely what that would mean. Would it end Trump’s days as a viable candidate? Or would it actually strengthen his support with a core of Republican voters that will never be big enough to win a general election but would be big enough to cause trouble for those GOP lawmakers who ran away from the party’s nominee?
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Some of the Republican defections were both damaging and unsurprising. On Saturday morning, Sen. Kelly Ayotte, locked in a tough re-election fight, announced that she would not vote for Trump but would instead write in running mate Mike Pence for president. Republican Rep. Barbara Comstock, also in a tough re-election fight in the increasingly blue Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC, called on Trump to withdraw from the race.
Two Republican representatives from Alabama, Martha Roby and Bradley Byrne, announced that they will not vote for Trump, which is remarkable mostly because Alabama is the home state of Sen. Jeff Sessions, Trump’s earliest and most influential supporter.
There were more: Senators John McCain, the 2008 nominee; John Thune, the number-three GOP official in the Senate; Rob Portman; Mike Crapo; Shelley Moore Capito; Dan Sullivan; and Mike Lee. On the House side, there were Reps. Fred Upton, chair of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee; Jason Chaffetz, chair of the House Oversight Committee; Scott Garrett; Jeff Fortenberry; Joe Heck, who is running for Senate from Nevada; and more.
Thune’s was the highest-ranking defection, and one of the clearest. “Donald Trump should withdraw and Mike Pence should be our nominee effective immediately,” Thune said in a tweet a little before 1:00 p.m. eastern time on Saturday. It seems highly unlikely Thune would have made such an announcement without consulting his fellow Senate GOP leaders.
All the defectors decided to move before seeing any polling on how voters are reacting to the Trump video scandal, and before seeing what happens at Sunday night’s second Republican debate in St. Louis. Other lawmakers, more cautious or less focused on self-preservation, will likely wait to weigh those factors.
They’ll have to factor in the strength of Trump’s support in their states and districts. And there might be some clues about that support in the absence of large-scale defections among some of the evangelical leaders whose opinion matters greatly to Republican politicians.
As the defections were building Saturday morning, evangelical leader Gary Bauer sent a mass email headlined, “Gary Bauer Says Values Voters Continue to Support Trump-Pence Ticket.” “The ten-year old tape of a private conversation in which Donald Trump uses grossly inappropriate language does not change the reality of the choice facing this country,” Bauer wrote.
Franklin Graham, who has not officially endorsed Trump, wrote a Facebook post that seemed to suggest evangelical voters should stick with the Republican nominee. “The crude comments made by Donald J. Trump more than 11 years ago cannot be defended,” Graham wrote. “But the godless progressive agenda of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton likewise cannot be defended…The most important issue of this election is the Supreme Court. That impacts everything. There’s no question, Trump and Clinton scandals might be news for the moment, but who they appoint to the Supreme Court will remake the fabric of our society for our children and our grandchildren, for generations to come.” The message was clear: Stick with Trump.
Whose reasoning, Graham’s or the Republican defectors’, will prevail among the GOP electorate? (Of course, in a general election, the general electorate is what’s important, but at the moment GOP leaders are simply trying to prevent their party from falling apart.) In other words, will the Republican defections really matter?
I asked several top Republican strategists who have worked on presidential campaigns but are not involved in this one. None believes Trump will win, but most thought a congressional stampede would not be decisive, or even terribly important.
“It is not going to become unsurvivable for Trump,” wrote one. “It already is unsurvivable for Trump.” Nevertheless: “I don’t think congressional defections matter in terms of Trump’s fate one bit. The die is now cast for him. Congressional defections are all about the defectors trying to save themselves from the flying shrapnel.”
“This is not about whether it is survivable for Trump,” wrote another. “Much of this is already built into his stock price. He may not win, but he’s driving the wagon and will continue to do so. Others riding in his wagon may not be so lucky. They are bailing because they can’t afford to go down this road with him.”
One good sign for the party, some believe, is that voters don’t really see Trump as a Republican, or at least as a Republican like the Republicans they support for House and Senate. Perhaps it’s a comforting bedtime story Republicans tell themselves, but many believe the voters will distinguish between Trump and the rest of the party on election day, and those down-ballot Republicans will do well even as Trump fails.
“I think there will be plenty of folks who split their tickets and not take out their ire against Trump on other Republicans,” wrote one of the strategists.
Hanging over all the calculations is the fear of new, and even more damaging, revelations. Trump is who he is, worried Republicans know, and it seems unlikely he has been caught on tape just once. As bad as the current video scandal is, they fear worse.
And if that happens, there will be yet another mass re-calibration among Republican officials — if, that is, Trump manages to survive his current mess.
Some of those GOP leaders abandoning Trump hope that Trump will quit or somehow be removed from the ticket, and Pence, or some other top Republican, will take Trump’s place on the ballot. It won’t work that way. The deadlines to get onto state ballots passed a long time ago. No matter how unhappy GOP politicos are, there’s no chance that a new Republican presidential candidate can be instantly inserted in the place of Trump’s name.
“People in the GOP are understandably nervous. People are looking for an escape,” Ben Ginsberg, the Republican lawyer who is widely recognized as a leading expert on the party’s rules, told National Public Radio. “The rules don’t provide a ready-made escape. Nor do ballot rules, nor the electoral college. While people are looking for an out, this die was cast in Cleveland.”
