In competitive Senate races across the country, including states where Trump remains popular, Republican incumbents are facing a conundrum: how to prove their pro-Trump bona fides to a MAGA movement that sees many longtime Republicans as insufficiently pure while stopping the hemorrhaging among suburban moderates who wonder why they have enabled the president.
The result for Ernst and as many as a half-dozen of her GOP colleagues may be the worst of both worlds, in which they risk alienating energized Trump backers if they criticize the president but then, if they stick with him, lose some centrist voters who have soured on Trump and are open to voting for a Democrat…
While there have been a few minor suggestions of incumbents trying to separate themselves from Trump, one GOP consultant privately dismissed that as a “fever dream” of Washington pundits. Instead, most incumbents are publicly tethering themselves to Trump in the hope that they can win over those last remaining pro-Trump voters to eke out victories next month.
