WASHINGTON • Sen. Roy Blunt’s backing of the parents of a dead Muslim soldier in a scrap with Donald Trump illustrated the biggest challenge facing Republicans as they struggle to hold the Senate this year.
How do Republican incumbents, like Blunt, make peace with Trump’s anti-Washington supporters without alienating the independents and conservative Trump doubters necessary for a winning Republican coalition? How do incumbents run with a presidential nominee who has been raging against every hue of the status quo for 14 months?
Blunt, who faces Missouri Secretary of State Jason Kander in the Nov. 8 election, is one of a dozen Senate Republicans facing this challenge. State-by-state, their individual fortunes will greatly shape the state of American governance starting next January.
Irrespective of who wins the presidency — Trump or Democrat Hillary Clinton — control of the Senate will determine how much the next president can get done.
Republicans now hold a 54-46 majority, and Blunt is a member of his party’s leadership. But Republicans are defending 24 Senate seats to the Democrats’ 10 — bad math in any election year, but especially so in one so defined by the chaos surrounding Trump.
Polls show Trump’s popularity has been in a national free-fall in the wake of his extraordinary — and some say inexplicable — public spat with the parents of a soldier killed on duty. His support has also plummeted in presidential battleground states with close Senate races.
That’s why Blunt’s attempt to separate himself from Trump without a total divorce was telling.
At the Democratic National Convention, Khizr Khan, the father of Capt. Humayun Khan, an Army captain killed in Iraq, criticized Trump’s proposals to temporarily halt Muslim immigration.
After he and Trump traded shots in separate interviews for several days, Blunt urged Trump to “continue to focus on jobs and national security and stop responding to every criticism, whether it’s from a grieving family or Hillary Clinton.”
Did that advice provide a shield from anti-Trump fallout for Blunt, who is attacked by Kander as an entrenched Washington insider?
“Right now we are picking up some evidence that Trump is cratering nationwide, but voters are still making a distinction between the presidential races and the Senate races,” said Nathan Gonzales, editor and publisher of the nonpartisan Rothenberg-Gonzales Political Report. “Trump is having a negative impact on these vulnerable senators, but their fates are not so tied together that they are both going to win or both going to lose.”
But, Gonzales added: “Republicans need Trump supporters in order to win re-election so there is a risk of attacking their own presidential nominee too far.”
The nonpartisan Cook Political Report lists eight Senate races as tossups, with seven of those now held by Republicans: Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Florida, Indiana and Illinois (where Mark Kirk faces Democratic U.S. Rep. Tammy Duckworth). The only Democratic-held seat considered highly competitive is the Nevada one held by retiring Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid.
Blunt and Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Richard Burr, R-N.C., are given “lean Republican” status. Republican senators in Iowa, Alaska and Georgia are rated “likely” to win re-election by Cook.
The GOP Senate has not had the 60 votes needed to procedurally beat back Democratic opposition on consequential issues like anti-Zika disease funding, which House Republicans tied to ideologically combustible issues like abortion rights and the Confederate flag. But the Republican-led Senate has passed some legislation — on mental health and opioid abuse — in which Blunt has been an instrumental legislator.
Absent Trump, Blunt could more cleanly and clearly hammer on these to point to how he gets things done in Washington, and to answer Democratic criticism that he is deeply embedded in Washington special interests. But with Trump sitting at the top of the ticket and making news almost daily, down-ballot Republicans are more on the defensive than they’d like to be.
“We have more paths” to control of the Senate “than Republicans do, and their paths are especially cut down when, every day, instead of talking about the stuff they want to talk about, they are trying to defend or do a dance around Donald Trump,” said Lauren Passalacqua, national press secretary for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which has given financial aid to Kander’s campaign.
“For Sen. Blunt and the rest of the Republican (Senate) class that he is running with, if they try to distance themselves from (Trump) now, it is going to look politically motivated” instead of “taking a principled stand,” she said.
But Greg Blair, deputy communications director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said Republican incumbents like Blunt long prepared to run individualized campaigns, regardless of the presidential nominee.
“The strategy for running as a Republican in this cycle in a down-ballot race is to localize, localize, localize,” Blair said, adding that Republicans “are running for the Senate like they are running for sheriff.”
In reality, Blunt is running on two re-election tracks. He is trying to hyper-localize the race in his defense, while trying to nationalize it by tying Kander to Clinton and President Barack Obama (who lost Missouri by more than nine percentage points to Republican Mitt Romney in 2012).
Blunt’s campaign and the NRSC are now running TV ads attacking Kander as a Clinton acolyte and a defender of Obamacare. Concurrently, Blunt tries to highlight his work in the Senate that he says benefits Missouri. He chairs a key Senate subcommittee that shapes government funding on mental health and opioid abuse funding, and he led negotiations on Zika spending.
Democrats have attacked Blunt as failing to get the job done on Zika funding. Late last week, Democrats assembled Missouri doctors and nurses to urge Blunt to get Congress to end its summer recess and pass anti-Zika funding.
But Blair said he believed Blunt is viewed in Missouri as a fighter on this issue, despite Congress’s inability to come to an agreement.
Gonzales cites Blunt’s long history of electoral success and Missouri’s recent Republican presidential leanings as why he does not consider it in the “top tier” of potential Democratic Senate takeovers.
“If we get to October, and Jason Kander is in a prime position to pick up the seat, then Democrats are already winning the majority, and we are just talking about how big the majority is,” Gonzales said.
Chuck Raasch • 202-298-6880
@craasch on Twitter
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