That’s what a Brooking Institute poll seems to find….
There have been hints about this for a while…
But those hints have been countered by polls showing Trump’s approval in the 70’s to 80’s percent range..
Hmmmmm?
President Donald Trump is the leader of the Republican Party, but a new report from the Brookings Institution analyzing Republican candidates in the 2018 midterms indicates that the GOP doesn’t want to talk about him.
The majority of Republican nominees in the 2018 midterms don’t mention Trump on the campaign trail, according to Brookings’ analysis. Of all non-incumbent Republicans running for the House, 53 percent don’t talk about the president at all. Just 37 percent of Republican candidates talk of Trump positively. And among Republican nominees, who have already won their primaries, a slimmer 33 percent talk of Trump in a positive light.
On one hand, this makes sense; Trump has had a consistently low approval rating, and the political party in power is usually disadvantaged in the midterm elections. In that regard, it’s easy to see why it would be politically expedient for candidates to distance themselves from both a controversial president and an unpopular Republican-led Congress.
We’ve already seen some high-profile examples of this in contested Republican primaries. Two pro-Trump House Republican candidates in the Indiana Republican Senate race fell short of business-minded outsider Mike Braun. In Tennessee, Rep. Diane Black, who had billed herself as the president’s pick also lost to a more traditional business-minded Republicancandidate, Bill Lee. In both those cases, House Republican candidates lost to outsiders.
On the other hand, this finding is somewhat at odds with how we have seen the Republican Party behave under Trump….