The battle for Congress unfolding 100 days before the midterm elections is a tale of two campaigns
, playing out in two contrasting Americas that hold conflicting opinions of President Trump.
In the affluent suburbs, where educated professionals will decide control of the House, antipathy for Trump and flat-out exhaustion with his antics threaten to sink the Republican Party’s 24-seat majority. The Democratic Party that would snatch the speaker’s gavel, bolstered by a diverse array of candidates, is fueled by women and an unapologetic liberalism long relegated to the margins of the left-wing base.
The fight for the Senate runs right through the ruby red heartland. There, a firm appreciation for Trump has only strengthened amid a cascade of scandals, putting Republicans in a remarkable position to pad their 51-49 majority. To survive, or possibly flip the chamber, Democrats are relying on a handful of pragmatic progressives, once the foundation of the party but whose influence is waning.
“House and Senate campaigns are, seemingly, existing on different planets this year,” a Democratic operative involved in the midterm elections told the Washington Examiner.
The party that holds the White House historically loses seats in a midterm election. With Trump’s job approval rating trapped near 40 percent for much of his presidency, that trend appears set to continue on Nov. 6 — at least in the House. The Senate could see Republican gains, a byproduct of the regional polarization and hardened tribalism that lately predominate in American politics.
The suburbs hold the key to victory in the House. Reliably Republican voters for decades, nearly two-dozen districts in suburbia defected to Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016. Views of Trump in these enclaves have only have deteriorated since, especially among college-educated women, a critical voting bloc. They don’t like the tweets; they don’t like the provocative behavior; and they like culture-war politics.
House Republicans are nearly guaranteed to lose seats. But to hang onto the majority, they’re going to have to minimize casualties in seats like Rep. Mike Coffman’s in suburban Denver; Rep. Erik Paulsen’s in suburban Minneapolis; Rep. Barbara Comstock’s in suburban Virginia, plus as many as a half-dozen in suburbs across California.
If Republicans are really in trouble, they’ll bleed second-tier targets such as Rep. Dave Brat in suburban Richmond; Rep. Kevin Yoder in suburban Kansas City; and Rep. Tom MacArthur in Southern New Jersey’s Philadelphia suburbs. It all depends on suburban voters, traditionally fiscally conservative. Will they rebuke Trump for bad behavior, or reward congressional Republicans for the $1.3 trillion tax overhaul and robust economic growth
?
“To keep the majority, we have to persuade women suburban voters that the Republican candidate is different from what they see out of the White House,” said Liesl Hickey, a GOP strategist and former executive director of the National Republican Congressional Committee, the party’s House campaign arm.
“You have a lot of people out there living paycheck to paycheck, trying to assess whether things are getting better or not,” Republican pollster David Winston added. “Are things improving so that they’re breaking out of that cycle? If that’s the case then things look positive for Republicans. If that doesn’t happen, then voters could be looking to just shake this up again.”
On the eve of the 100-day mark before the midterm elections, Trump’s average job approval rating stood at 43.3 percent, and Democrats led the generic ballot gauging which party voters preferred be in charge on Capitol Hill by more than 7 points. That’s just good enough to win the House. It’s largely irrelevant to figuring out which party is on track to finish on top in the Senate.
The Senate majority runs through the exurbs and rural communities of culturally conservative America, territory where Trump performed better than Republican nominees before him precisely because of the jagged edges that have repelled so many suburbanites. Among the Republicans’ top pick-up opportunities, only Florida is a traditional swing state with significant blocs of suburban voters.
The GOP’s top Democratic targets in the Senate, ranked in order of how Republicans view their prospects of turning the seat, are:
· Sen. Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota, where Trump won by 36 points.
· Sen. Joe Donnelly in Indiana, where Trump won by 19 points.
· Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida; where Trump won by 1.2 points (
of all the Senate races ranked most likely to flip by the GOP, Florida is one Democratic insiders take issue with.)
· Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri, where Trump won by 18.5 points.
· Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, where Trump won by 42 points.
The possibility exists that the international trade disputes instigated by Trump in his attempt to extract fairer terms for American products could backfire, damaging Republican prospects in these otherwise favorable battlegrounds.
Just last week, the Trump administration, perhaps seeing the danger
, proposed an emergency $12 billion aid package to keep an anxious farm country afloat while the president negotiates trade deals. Heitkamp’s challenger, Rep. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., was among the biggest proponents of the bailout.
Some Republican strategists, unfazed, believe that the party’s target list should be even bigger, possibly even twice as big. But that can only happen if the GOP’s power brokers and wealthy donors are more ambitious, one GOP consultant said.
“Right now, we are at risk of not playing in enough states in the Senate because donors are too passive and decision-makers too timid,” this Republican insider said, requesting anonymity in order to criticize the party.
The Democrats’ strategy to hold the line is to win the communications war, while capitalizing on their few offensive chances: an open Arizona seat; another in Nevada against Sen. Dean Heller; and a third, an open seat in Tennessee, where Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn is running against Democrat Phil Bredesen, a popular former governor.
Instead of campaigns about the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, immigration, the national anthem, or loyalty to Trump, Democrats aim to make the central issues the failure of the tax overhaul to deliver significant increases in hourly wages; and voters’ insecurity about healthcare and the opposition that has built up, ironically, to the Republican Party’s unrealized promise to repeal and replace Obamacare.
“We are working to make this the central issue in every race and we think, for voters, it will be what they cast their ballots on,” David Bergstein, spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said.
Disclosure: The author’s wife is an adviser to Florida Gov. Rick Scott, the Republican challenging Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla.
