Downballot Republicans are hanging in there

So personal factors and local peculiarities are shaping Senate races as in pre-Trump years. That’s apparently happening, too, in House races, to judge from the sparse publicly available polling.

Republican incumbents in districts heavy with college graduates have been catering to them since before Trump appeared; those with many Hispanics have learned enough Spanish to debate en español. And Republicans running in districts with many non-college-educated whites (a demographic with whom Trump has been outperforming Romney) — the plains of Iowa, the north woods of Maine and Minnesota — may face no downdraft at all.

One big risk for Republicans generally is that Trump’s talk of a rigged election may discourage Republican-leaning constituents from voting. And some down-ballot Republicans’ adaptations to local terrain may not get noticed amid the media hubbub over the latest Trump outrage.

But so far, down-ballot contests look less like the straight-ticket battles of recent years, in which few candidates ran significantly ahead of or behind party nominees. Instead, they look more like 1970s and 1980s contests, in which many incumbents and challengers, mostly Democrats but also Republicans, continually improvised and created individual personas tailored to their constituencies and capable of distinguishing them from unpopular national party leaders.