{"id":51143,"date":"2017-11-08T05:07:16","date_gmt":"2017-11-08T05:07:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.biphoo.com\/bipnews\/?p=51143"},"modified":"2017-11-08T05:07:16","modified_gmt":"2017-11-08T05:07:16","slug":"trump-just-made-a-bad-night-for-republicans-much-worse-for-himself","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.biphoo.com\/bipnews\/politics\/trump-just-made-a-bad-night-for-republicans-much-worse-for-himself.html","title":{"rendered":"Trump just made a bad night for Republicans much worse for himself"},"content":{"rendered":"

Trump just made a bad night for Republicans much worse for himself<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n

By embracing the political priorities of President Trump, he figured, he could help bolster enthusiasm from Trump-supporting voters who had nearly blocked his nomination to be the Republican nominee for governor in Virginia. Those voters had apparently preferred Corey A. Stewart, a candidate who had internalized Trump\u2019s politics in a way that Gillespie hadn\u2019t. So, as Election Day approached, Gillespie ran ads highlighting immigration, \u201csanctuary cities\u201d and gang violence, despite the fact that crime is much lower in Virginia than in most of the rest of the country.<\/span><\/p>\n

It was a gamble, but polling suggested it might be working. His opponent, Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam, saw his lead over Gillespie erode over the past few weeks. Trump weighed in for Gillespie in a series of tweets and with automated Election Day phone calls encouraging turnout.<\/span><\/p>\n

On Tuesday night, the bottom fell out. Largely on the strength of an unexpected surge in turnout, Northam won easily. Expected to prevail by a bit over three points, he\u2019ll end up with a victory of at least twice that size. After a close loss in a Senate race in 2014, Gillespie lost again, this time by much more.<\/span><\/p>\n

Trump wasted no time in distancing himself from Gillespie, enjoying the spaciousness of his now-280-character tweets.<\/span><\/p>\n

We\u2019ve noted before that Trump has an insurance premium against any calls for his impeachment. His popularity with Republicans has slipped since the beginning of his presidency, but he\u2019s still very popular with them, particularly more conservative members of his party. (Per Gallup, more than 9 in 10 conservative Republicans approve of Trump.) Because Republican Party primaries see an overrepresentation of conservatives, that meant that Republicans eager to win reelection to Congress were less likely to turn on the president.<\/span><\/p>\n

What happened after those primaries, though, was anyone\u2019s guess. Tuesday night offered some sense of what that might be.<\/span><\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s tweet distancing himself from Gillespie sugarcoats the election in a way that may make Trump feel better but probably isn\u2019t fooling anyone on Capitol Hill. His claim that the GOP won four of four federal races misses a few important points. The first is that those races were in Republican-held districts. The second is that the Democrats saw big gains in most of those races relative to past elections. The third is that the figure is actually four of five; Trump likes to ignore a race in California won by the Democrats.<\/span><\/p>\n

But it also does something very dangerous for Trump right now. It shows, yet again, that he isn\u2019t loyal to his political partners.<\/span><\/p>\n

We\u2019ve seen this before. When Trump backed the House effort to repeal and replace Obamacare (having no plan of his own), he responded to its passage by declaring the bill to be \u201cmean\u201d \u2014 as though he hadn\u2019t previously claimed it was nearly without flaws. (It was health care, not immigration, that was the big issue in Virginia, according to exit polls. Northam won among voters concerned about health care by a more than 3-to-1 margin.) Even before Election Day in Alabama earlier this year, Trump began to distance himself from his preferred candidate Republican Senate primary, Luther Strange, hinting that he had perhaps made a mistake \u2014 a shift that was certainly informed by polls showing a likely Strange loss. When that happened, Trump deleted some of his tweets of endorsement.<\/span><\/p>\n

Strange\u2019s campaign, unlike Gillespie\u2019s, didn\u2019t embrace Trumpist politics such as the threat of the gang MS-13. He tried to win as a more typical establishment conservative, to no avail. Gillespie tried to more directly embrace Trump politics \u2014 and lost badly. And then saw Trump turn on him.<\/span><\/p>\n

Think of the message that Trump has sent to Republicans. Stand with him on policy and have him bad-mouth what you passed. Embrace his endorsement and see a loss followed by Trump playing down his support. Embrace his endorsement and his politics, and see a loss followed by actual criticism. These are all one-offs \u2014 but politics generally suffers from a small sample size from which to draw conclusions, and no one spends more time trying to draw conclusions than politicians.<\/span><\/p>\n

What\u2019s the upside? There is no race in which one can say that Trump helped the Republican win. In Georgia\u2019s 6th District, for example, the Republican prevailed \u2014 but by about the same margin that the Republican candidates had enjoyed in the primary.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s not only Trump who was proved to be disloyal Tuesday night. Stephen K. Bannon told The Washington Post this week: \u201c[I]t was the Trump-Stewart talking points that got Gillespie close and even maybe to victory. It was embracing Trump\u2019s agenda as personified by Corey\u2019s platform. This was not a competitive race four weeks ago. You could have stuck a fork in Gillespie.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Four weeks ago, Gillespie trailed by about six points in the RealClearPolitics average. He lost by more than that. And after he lost, Bannon\u2019s Breitbart, the site he manages, declared in a main headline that Gillespie was a \u201cRepublican swamp thing\u201d who, it was implied, deserved to lose.<\/span><\/p>\n

Bannon\u2019s track record in electoral politics? He helped Trump lose the popular vote and win the electoral college in 2016. He embraced Luther Strange\u2019s opponent after Strange was trailing. And now he watched the \u201cTrump-Stewart talking points\u201d lead nowhere.<\/span><\/p>\n

On its home page, Breitbart also championed Trump\u2019s argument that Gillespie should have embraced him more robustly. That\u2019s a flawed theory. Trump is very unpopular in Virginia, and Northam won among those who disapprove of Trump by a 7-to-1 margin, according to preliminary exit polls. A third of voters said their vote in the race was meant to send a message of opposition to Trump \u2014 twice as many as said it was a message of support.<\/span><\/p>\n

What\u2019s more, Trump made his feelings clear. Those who wanted to vote for Trump\u2019s candidate knew who that candidate was. As in Alabama, voters went in another direction.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s critical to remember that Democrats were supposed to win this race, albeit not necessarily by as wide a margin as they did. Democrats hold the governor\u2019s mansion and Hillary Clinton won by five points last year. Trump could have congratulated Gillespie on a hard-fought race and noted the uphill battle. Instead, he decided to try to spin the loss to his advantage.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s unlikely that many Republicans worried about next November will be convinced by Trump\u2019s argument. Instead, they\u2019re likely to take another lesson: Trump can\u2019t deliver a victory for you when you\u2019re trailing, and neither can Trumpism. (In fact, there\u2019s every reason to think that Trump was the liability that his poll numbers would suggest, with Gillespie doing fine in western Virginia but getting beaten badly in more-Democratic Northern Virginia.) Nor will Trump stand with you should things go south.<\/span><\/p>\n

If, next summer, the question of Trump\u2019s fate as president is raised, how might Republicans in center-right districts be expected to evaluate that decision?<\/span><\/p>\n

Source:-\u00a0https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/news\/politics\/wp\/2017\/11\/07\/trump-just-made-a-bad-night-for-republicans-much-worse-for-himself\/?utm_term=.4edb8d676be5<\/span><\/p>\n

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