“These races are like canaries in the coal mine,” Steve Israel, a former New York congressman and chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told me last week. “For Republicans, the canaries are dying.”
The day before we spoke, Democrats had picked up a statehouse seat in a deep red district in Missouri, the latest in a series of electoral upsets the G.O.P. has suffered across the country in recent months. After a string of special election victories in South Carolina, Montana, and Georgia last spring, the Republican Party has had a reversal of fortune—losing gubernatorial races and dozens of state legislature seats in Virginia and New Jersey, and suffering defeats in traditionally red districts in Florida, Wisconsin, Alabama, Oklahoma, and elsewhere. Ten months out, strategists see the trend as a potential harbinger of the legendary blue wave in the 2018 midterms that could rob of the G.O.P. of its majority in the House—and possibly, the Senate.
For the G.O.P., these midterms are a puzzle box of a kind that they haven’t faced in several cycles, if ever. “Republican consultants in the last eight years have had a very easy job—that’s running against Barack Obama. . . . Now we have to do things differently and nobody is used to it yet,” a G.O.P. strategist, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told me. “That boogeyman is gone.”
And arguably, the new Republican boogeyman is the leader of the party. Since he ascended to the Oval Office, Donald Trump has maintained a vice-like grip on the base of the Republican Party. And yet, while Trump’s popularity has largely proven to be non-transferable, his flagging approval rating—which, despite a recent uptick, is still hovering in the low 40s—augurs suppressed Republican turnout and heightened energy on the left in the midterms.
So Republican candidates are facing an impossible strategic choice, one that is to some degree independent of the president’s approval rating or any economic factor: tack toward Trump, and potentially lose the center, or forgo Trumpian red meat and watch the base stay home. “What you do when you appeal to that 33 percent is you peel off another 50 percent of the voters who will go, ‘Fuck you, I will crawl over broken glass to vote against you because you are a goddamn Donald Trumper,’” Rick Wilson, a G.O.P. strategist and vocal Never Trumper, told me, adding that without Clinton, Trump “has to stand on his own two feet.” And although Trump won’t be on the ballot in 2018, every Republican candidate this fall will be viewed as a Trump proxy. Meanwhile, Democrats will have the luxury of focusing their energy elsewhere. “They get to do that because they’re out of power. That’s a big advantage to them,” the Republican strategist told me. “They let the national environment take care of it and they run on issues that are local and important.”
The G.O.P. challenge is not unlike what Democrats grappled with during the Barack Obama era. “You can approach it by hugging the incumbent president, or you can try to run away from them,” a Florida-based Democratic strategist Steve Schale, who directed Obama’s 2008 campaign in the Sunshine state, told me. “In reality, I am not sure it makes a huge amount of difference—and certainly in 2010 it didn’t.” Of course, the Democratic Party’s electoral success during Obama’s eight years in office certainly doesn’t instill much confidence. The former Illinois senator may have won the White House twice, but Democrats lost more than 1,000 electoral seats under his leadership.
The anonymous G.O.P. strategist argues that the best route for Republican candidates is not to retreat, but to press forward regardless of Trump. “I think they ought to continue to be bold to get people fired up to vote in the election,” they told me. “No matter what, the clock is ticking on how long we have the majority . . . it doesn’t matter if it’s two more years or ten months or four more [years]. Whatever it is, this is their shot. That might not happen again.”
Since Donald Trump took office, Democrats have flipped 36 statehouse seats from red to blue—a solid down payment on the the ones they lost under Obama—and are aiming to rob the G.O.P. of 24 House seats to secure the majority in the lower chamber. Holding the upper chamber, however, is a lighter lift for the G.O.P., which enjoys several structural advantages. Despite its slim two-seat majority, Republicans are only defending eight of 34 open Senate seats in 2018—and only two Republican seats, in Nevada and Arizona, are seen as in play. And yet, Democrats remain hopeful and Republicans are hesitant. “It’s a poor environment for us. I think the real question is, do we hang onto the Senate?” Terry Sullivan, a G.O.P. strategist who served as Senator Marco Rubio’s 2016 campaign manager, told me. “I don’t think it’s a guarantee. I know the math is in our favor, but I don’t think it is a foregone conclusion that we do.”
A string of Democratic upsets in conservative strongholds in special elections since the New Year have opened G.O.P. eyes to the challenge. Last month, Democrat Patty Schachtner secured a nine-point victory in a contentious battle for a state Senate seat in Wisconsin’s 10th District, which Mitt Romney and Trump won by 6 points and 17 points, respectively. Trygve Olson, a G.O.P. strategist who previously managed campaigns in the district, warned on Twitter, “A wave is coming . . . This a suburban-rural district. If the G.O.P. is losing WI-10 lookout!” Even Republican Governor Scott Walker took to Twitter to express his concern about the seat flip. “Senate District 10 special election win by a Democrat is a wake up call for Republicans in Wisconsin,” he wrote.
Republicans were similarly rattled by the Democratic performance in two Missouri special election races. Democrat Mike Revis edged out his opponent by three points in Missouri’s 97th District, which Trump won by 28 points and Romney won by 12 points. Strategists have also noted a trio of elections for bellwether seats in Florida—the state’s 40th Senate District in Miami-Dade, the St. Petersburg’s mayoral race, and Florida’s 72nd House District—in which Democrats triumphed. “This is beyond a trend. The results are in. Republicans have a real problem in this state,” Tom Eldon, a Democratic pollster who surveyed the race, told Politico.
Also troubling for the G.O.P. is the rate at which Democrats are outraising Republicans. In the final quarter of 2017, more than 40 House Republicans were outraised by at least one, if not multiple, Democratic opponents. The fear is that the Republican Party will be forced to defend traditionally safe states, such as Texas where Democratic Congressman Beto O’Rourke outraised Senator Ted Cruz last quarter in the race for the former presidential hopeful’s Senate seat. “If the [National Republican Senatorial Committee] and outside groups are going to have to worry about playing in states like Texas . . . those are resources they’re not spending to win in Wisconsin or Montana, or defend in Arizona or Nevada,” Sullivan told me. “Those are some signs of concern.”
The Democratic Party is also recruiting higher quality candidates than in past cycles. “One of the effects of the Trump administration’s negativity is that [there is] a record-breaking number of people who want to run for office—whether it is local, state, or federal,” Israel said. “When you have to get people to run, you’re just not going to have a good cycle. When your phone rings off the hook from people who want to run, you’re going to have a very good election day.” And, Israel noted, whether it’s a result of higher quality Democrats or Trump fatigue, Republican incumbents are bailing.
Thirty-five House Republicans have called it quits—roughly half of whom are vacating vulnerable seats—and three G.O.P. senators, Bob Corker of Tennessee, Jeff Flake of Arizona, and Orrin Hatch of Utah, have announced plans to retire. “It’s not just that the election is about Trump in some sort of metaphorical way,” Sullivan said. “No, every day you are going to be asked about Donald Trump and these guys are like, ‘Why would I want to do this?’”
While the political environment may seem primed for a blue wave in the fall, anti-Trump sentiment alone won’t be enough to flip the House. And, fortunately for Republicans, Democrats have struggled to coalesce around a party message. “The mood might help get a few points, but you still have to close the deal on things that are important in your own communities,” Schale said in reference to tight Congressional races, drawing on Jon Ossoff’s special congressional election loss in Georgia as evidence of the limits of anti-Trump enthusiasm on the left. “One of the reasons he lost was he was just another guy who happened to be a Democrat. . . . Ossoff, for all the money he raised, is still a young guy who didn’t have a lot of currency in the district and the race turned on national issues. That wasn’t good enough to close the deal.”
The G.O.P. has also received a handful of signs that the climate might not be as unfavorable as previously believed. Trump’s polling has been on the uptick and the Democratic Party’s edge in the generic Congressional ballot polls is shrinking. According to Israel, every point Democrats are up or down in the generic ballot polls, roughly translates to winning or losing three seats in the House. In other words, to flip 24 seats in the House, Democrats would want to hold about an eight-point lead in mid-October. The most recent RealClearPolitics polling average pegs the Democratic advantage on a generic ballot at just shy of seven points. “Republicans, frankly, do a better job at circling the wagons than we do—and always have,” Schale told me. “Democrats are always capable of screwing up—they do it a lot,” Wilson cautioned. “They are spectacularly bad at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.”
For Republicans, meanwhile, the political calculus becomes whether Trump suppresses turnout, or whether voters—Republican women, in particular—ignore the current White House occupant and vote on other issues. “I think [suburban Republican women] voters are critical in order for Republicans to win their seats because it’s whether they turn out or not. It’s not that they’re going to necessarily vote for the Democrat, it’s whether they stay home,” Sullivan said. “It’s a demographic that Donald Trump did not do well with at all. We’ve got to. The ones we see in the exit polling . . . were voting against Hillary [Clinton], not really for Trump.”
The contours of any potential blue wave will begin to show over the summer. Wilson says Republican lawmakers will begin putting daylight between themselves and the president around August, while television-advertising buys closer to the election will reveal where both parties are focusing their efforts. “You will start to see some Republicans finally start to discover that they weren’t Donald Trump sycophants all along—they were actually strong, principled Republicans,” he said, the sarcasm palpable.
This article has been updated.
