Donald Trump’s decision to openly fight Republican leaders just a month before the election is leaving pollsters in the dark about how the unprecedented move will affect House and Senate races.
“It’s hard to know,” Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac Poll, admitted to the Washington Examiner.
Trump on Tuesday launched a Twitter attack against Republican lawmakers who he thinks are abandoning his bid for the presidency, after the revelation of Trump’s lewd comments caught on tape 11 years ago.
The tweets followed a Monday conference call between House Republicans and Speaker Paul Ryan, who said lawmakers can do what they want when it comes to Trump, and that he would not campaign with Trump or defend him for the next month.
Trump’s support started tanking, and in a half-dozen tweets, Trump took on Ryan and the Republican Party. “Our very weak and ineffective leader, Paul Ryan, had a bad conference call where his members went wild at his disloyalty,” Trump tweeted Tuesday.
Trump’s supporters say the move will only hurt other Republicans. On Laura Ingraham’s popular conservative radio show Tuesday, Ingraham said Ryan made a “really dumb move,” and predicted that anyone on the ballot under Trump is “going to get crushed in this election” by an angry Trump base.
But political experts who closely follow the polls say it is not at all clear how those running under Trump will be affected. “It’s too early to know,” Jennifer Duffy, senior editor at the non-partisan Cook Political Report, which rates political races.
Ryan and other Republicans think that the best they can do now is to distance themselves from Trump, and avoid big House and Senate GOP losses that some have predicted would accompany a presidential candidate who loses by ten points or more.
But there are some signs that Trump’s supporters might be stronger, and that Trump might be on his way to significantly hurting the down-ballot candidates. At a rally in Las Vegas last week, GOP Senate candidate Joe Heck was booed after he called on Trump to drop out of the race.
“There are clearly lots of voters who see Donald Trump as their guy and that is how he won the Republican nomination,” Brown said. “And there are lots of other Republicans who have been disenchanted with him from the get-go. You can’t please one without alienating the other.”
Brown and other race watchers note as a result of the strife, there’s a real possibility of Republican voters not showing up, which would deliver what some say Trump is after: a complete and humilitating defeat for the GOP.
“Booing Joe Heck at a rally is different than not voting in the race,” Nathan L. Gonzales, editor and publisher of the non-partisan Rothenberg & Gonzales Political Report, told the Examiner. “If Republicans can be unified they might have a bad night but it won’t be a disaster. But if it’s divided and Republican turnout is down, then things go south quickly.”
