LOL.
During Troy Nehls’ recent bid for the Republican nomination in one of Texas’ battleground congressional districts, the Fort Bend County sheriff prominently displayed his support for President Trump across his campaign website.
“In Congress, I will stand with President Trump to defeat the socialist Democrats, build the wall, drain the swamp, and deliver on pro-economy and pro-America policies,” Nehls said under the top section of his issues page, titled “Standing with President Trump.”
Within two days of Nehls’ lopsided runoff victory, that section had been removed, along with a paragraph from Nehls’ bio page that stated he “supports President Trump” and wants to “deliver President Trump’s agenda.” Fresh language now focuses on his record as sheriff during Hurricane Harvey and managing the agency’s budget.
Nehls’ abrupt shift in tone captures the challenge facing Republican candidates in suburban battleground districts up and down the ballot, including Nehls’ district and two neighboring ones, where polling suggests Trump’s coronavirus response has alienated voters and, for now, created strong headwinds for his party’s congressional hopefuls.
In those contested districts, which even Republicans acknowledge Trump may lose, GOP candidates are navigating the choppy political waters by emphasizing their personal backgrounds and portraying their Democratic foes as too extreme. Most have dropped the enthusiastic pro-Trump rhetoric they employed during the primaries.
It is not uncommon for candidates to tailor their messages to the far ends of their party bases during the primaries before tacking back toward the center for the general election.
Still, it remains a unique challenge for Republicans in competitive races to distance themselves from the president and his lagging poll numbers without angering their supporters, said Jim Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin.
“I think how you do that is still not quite clear, but I also think the ground is really shifting,” Henson said. “(Trump’s) overall favorable-unfavorable numbers are going down, he’s losing ground among independents, and we see glimmers — but just glimmers — of doubt among some Republicans in some suburban areas.”
Hilarious. The story also notes the Republican challenger in CD07, who was endorsed by Trump in the primary but would prefer that you not talk about that, and the CD10 race where Democratic challenger Mike Siegel is working to tie Trump to longtime incumbent Mike McCaul. We’ve seen this movie before, though in years past it had always been Democrats attempting this tightrope act, either by emphasizing their close personal friendship with Dubya Bush or their many points of disagreement with Barack Obama. It worked better in the former case than the latter, as anyone who remembers 2010 can attest.
The main advantage the Republicans running now have is that the districts they’re in are (for the most part, CD07 being an exception) still Republican, at least as of 2018. Those Democrats of yore had been running in districts that were often 60% or more red, and they depended heavily on folks who were willing to split the ticket for them – until they didn’t, of course, which is what happened en masse in 2010. The challenge today is holding onto the folks who had been fairly reliable Republican voters before 2016. Donald Trump (and to a lesser extent his acolytes like Dan Patrick) are the reason these voters are turning away, which is why the strategy of pretending that Trump doesn’t exist is so compelling. The problem with that is that Donald Trump is the Republican Party these days, and the Republican Party is Donald Trump. That presents a bit of a conundrum for the likes of Troy Nehls, himself a longtime Republican officeholder. He may yet win – maybe the district won’t have shifted enough, or maybe enough people will vote for him because they liked him as Sheriff regardless of other factors, or whatever. But I’m pretty sure this isn’t the campaign he thought he’d be running when he first entered the race.
More chuckles for you:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/house-gops-pleas-to-republican-national-committee-for-financial-help-go-unanswered/2020/07/24/01cf57f4-cddd-11ea-89ce-ac7d5e4a5a38_story.html
Trump grifts the RNC, and parasites like Parscale and Javanka grift him.