Veteran Republican strategist Karl Rove warned that President Donald Trump’s plan to headline the midterms himself will backfire on the GOP.
In a Wednesday op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, Rove laid out the case. Trump announced during a Rose Garden Dinner on Wednesday that he plans to spend thirty days leading up to the midterms rallying for candidates narrowly behind or ahead or tied in the polls.
Trump’s pitch is to lean into his own record, Rove noted, based on reporting by The Atlantic and Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy. Trump will build ads from his on-camera statements and barnstorm toss-up districts himself, Rove predicted. Trump’s reasoning is that since Democrats will make November a referendum on him regardless, he might as well own it, Rove wrote.
Rove’s objection is a numbers problem. Trump is at 39.6 percent approval against 56.9 percent disapproval in the RealClearPolitics average. Rove argued that when a president is that unpopular, “making the election even more about you only helps the opposition.”
Midterms are almost always a choice between more of the same and change, and “plastering his face on every screen in every toss-up race will make the midterms even more about him and tie those candidates to an intensely unpopular status quo,” Rove argued.
A rally a day compounds the risk because an unscripted Trump would “dominate the news,” Rove warned.
“Republican candidates will constantly have to fend off questions about whether they agree with his latest insult or half-baked idea,” Rove wrote. “The narrative won’t be on anything positive about them or the GOP.”
Rove asked, “Given all this, why is Team Trump talking about giving Democrats what they want?” They’d be making him the face of the GOP campaign ahead of the midterms, Rove warned.
“The answer: narcissism,” Rove wrote. “Mr. Trump believes that in 2024 ‘the beauty’ was ‘that we won by so much.’ He thinks ‘the mandate was massive,’ the biggest in ‘129 years in terms of the overall mandate.’ Not so much…that support has rapidly eroded.”
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