These Republican lawmakers believe that the Mantattan Criminla Trial will be a help in defining Donald Trump in way that on the fence votes will turn against him come November….
They see todays polling….
But they worry about how Trump will be seen come the fall when they know Democrats will be screaming everyday about Trump’s miscues….
They also think that Donald Trump’s Republican support is SOFTER then the polls seem to show….
Some Republican lawmakers think Trump needs to step up his appeals to disaffected GOP voters, especially women, after Nikki Haley won 128,000 votes in solidly Republican Indiana despite ending her presidential campaign in early March.
GOP senators also are cringing over some of the salacious details being aired in Trump’s Manhattan hush money trial, where porn actor Stormy Daniels testified at length about her sexual encounter with the former president and described how she spanked him with a magazine.
Daniels’s testimony has put their relationship back in the media spotlight and underscored Trump’s challenges with women voters, which some GOP lawmakers view as his biggest liability heading into November.
“It says a lot about the need for an engagement strategy,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said of Haley winning 21 percent of the vote in the Indiana Republican primary, even though she’s no longer in the race.
“Indiana is going to vote for Trump and vote large, but I think that the Republicans would be well served to dig into that and address it,” he said, noting a substantial portion of the GOP base still has reservations about Trump.
A troubling sign for Trump is that Republicans who show up to vote in primaries tend to be consistent voters, and as such are a key piece of the GOP base. While they are unlikely to vote for Biden, many of them may simply stay home in November.
“My guess is you’re talking a good number of that 20 percent are people that vote consistently. Those folks that vote consistently in the Republican primaries are not going to vote for Joe Biden. They may not vote,” Tillis said.
Tillis said Republicans would be “crazy” to discount the problem and fail to consider ways to address it.
An AP VoteCast found a significant percentage of Republican voters in the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries would be so dissatisfied with Trump as their party’s nominee that they wouldn’t vote for him in November.
Specifically, 20 percent of Republican caucusgoers in Iowa, 34 percent of GOP primary voters in New Hampshire and 25 percent of GOP primary voters in South Carolina said they were so dissatisfied with Trump that they would not vote for him in the general election.
Trump has his biggest problems with college-educated and suburban women voters, and some GOP lawmakers worry the high-profile rehashing of Trump’s alleged affair with a porn actor while he was married to Melania Trump will only further hurt him with that key demographic.
A New York Times/Siena College nationwide poll last month found that only 31 percent of registered women voters think Trump respects women. And the survey found 78 percent of women voters have felt offended by what Trump has said — including 43 percent who said they were recently offended.
Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), who spent 15 years as the director of student ministry at the Baptist Convention of Oklahoma before coming to Congress, said he is dismayed that Trump’s alleged affair with Daniels, including graphic details, are back in the spotlight.
He said it reminded him of the sex scandal that engulfed then-President Bill Clinton in the late 1990s, when independent counsel Ken Starr reported the details of his affair with a White House intern, leading to Clinton’s impeachment by a GOP-controlled House….