Trump wants MAGA rallies. Many Republicans in swing races want him to stay away. Both may get their wish.
Donald Trump has promised to campaign in the 35 most competitive races before Election Day. But his midterm blitz opens this week in friendly territory — Texas, Oklahoma and Alabama — and that may be by design.
Trump visiting a swing district would “be a net negative for the candidate there,” said a White House official, granted anonymity to discuss political strategy candidly. “The closer the race, the more the [Republican candidate] is trying to break from President Trump.”
Others inside and around the White House describe the same logic: keep Trump away from contested races, where moderate voters who are unenthusiastic about him cast the decisive ballots.
I still would not be at all surprised to learn, sometime down the road, that all the advice Hillary was getting was actually correct, and that things were rigged in donnie’s favor.
And that all the chattering classes reacting with “golly gee, we had no idea just how popular donnie really is/was, we have to move even further to the right and bend over backwards to not show the least bit of ‘liberal bias’ (meaning, reporting the facts)” and “Hillary really bungled this” and “we need to find a lot of maga-whisperers to parachute into flyover country to learn what the average American is really thinking”, etc. were not at all the correct takes.