Our sense is that given Trump’s deep unpopularity with the larger electorate, he would become his own radioactive island, and GOP candidates in swing states and districts would have no choice but to refuse to endorse him and run for cover. However, it’s possible that Trump is so over-the-top in his antipolitical celebrity and his rejection of party etiquette that voters wouldn’t even draw a connection between him and their local, run-of-the-mill GOP member.
Fewer voters outside the GOP primary electorate have fully-formed opinions of Cruz at this point, but our hunch is that many of the same swing-district Republicans would also need to renounce him to survive. Democrats are eager to define Cruz as a rigid ideologue who has enthusiastically taken positions well outside the mainstream, serving as an architect of the GOP’s 2013 government shutdown and supporting Kentucky clerk Kim Davis’s defiance of the Supreme Court’s ruling on same-sex marriage…
Since 1960, there have only been three elections in which one candidate prevailed by double digits: Lyndon Johnson beat Barry Goldwater by 22.6 percent in 1964, Richard Nixon beat George McGovern by 23.2 percent in 1972, and Ronald Reagan beat Walter Mondale by 18.2 percent in 1984. Despite the Democrats’ drubbings in the latter two races, they maintained control of the House and, curiously, even increased their share of the national House vote over the previous presidential cycle. In both 1972 and 1984, a whopping 44 percent of voters split their tickets between the presidential and congressional ballots.
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