Senate Republicans see some warning signs flashing after an embarrassing week for former President Trump, despite his strong poll numbers in swing states against President Biden.
Some Republican lawmakers think Trump needs to step up his appeals to disaffected GOP voters, especially women, after Nikki Haley won 128,000 votes in solidly Republican Indiana despite ending her presidential campaign in early March.
Republican senators are also cringing at some of the salacious details being released at Trump’s secret trial in Manhattan, where porn actress Stormy Daniels testified at length about her sexual encounter with the former president and described how she beat him with a magazine .
Daniels’ testimony put their relationship back in the media spotlight and underscored Trump’s challenges with female voters, which some GOP lawmakers see as his biggest responsibility in November.
“It speaks volumes about the need for an engagement strategy,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said of Haley winning 21 percent of the vote in the Indiana Republican primary even though she is no longer in the race.
“Indiana is going to vote for Trump and vote in a big way, but I think Republicans would be well served to look into this and address the issue,” he said, noting that a substantial portion of the Republican base still has reservations about Trump.
A worrying sign for Trump is that Republicans who show up to vote in the primaries tend to be consistent voters and, as such, are a key part of the Republican base. While they are unlikely to vote for Biden, many of them may simply stay home in November.
“My guess is that you’re talking about a good number of that 20% being people who vote consistently. People who vote consistently in Republican primaries are not going to vote for Joe Biden. They can’t vote,” Tillis said.
Tillis said Republicans would be “crazy” if they disregarded the problem and didn’t consider ways to solve it.
An AP VoteCast found that a significant percentage of Republican voters in the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries would be so dissatisfied with Trump as their party’s candidate that they would not vote for him in November.
Specifically, 20 percent of Republican primary voters in Iowa, 34 percent of Republican primary voters in New Hampshire, and 25 percent of Republican primary voters in South Carolina said they were so dissatisfied with Trump that they would not vote for him in the general election.
Trump has his biggest problems with suburban and college-educated women voters, and some GOP lawmakers fear that a repeat of Trump’s alleged affair with a pornographic actor while married to Melania Trump will only hurt him further with that demographic. key.
A New York Times/Siena College national poll last month found that just 31 percent of registered female voters think Trump respects women. And the poll found that 78% of female voters were offended by what Trump said — including 43% who said they had been offended recently.
Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), who spent 15 years as director of student ministry at the Oklahoma Baptist Convention before coming to Congress, said he was dismayed that Trump’s alleged affair with Daniels, including graphic details, to be back. the spotlight.
He said it reminded him of the sex scandal that engulfed then-President Bill Clinton in the late 1990s, when independent lawyer Ken Starr reported the details of his affair with a White House intern, leading to Clinton’s impeachment by a House controlled by the Republican Party.
Lankford said it is “hard to say” what impact Daniels’ testimony will have on voters in the fall, but acknowledged that “it is hurtful and salacious.”
“It reminds me of the Clinton administration and all the conversations that were going on at that time with Ken Starr and all the things that came up,” he said. “I hate that this is on TV because there is a younger generation watching TV and it becomes a problem. We’ve seen this for decades. We will see this again. Just based on cultural values, this is important to our culture.”
A Republican senator who strongly supports Trump said that values voters, who make up a significant portion of the Republican base, don’t necessarily believe what prosecutors are claiming about Trump’s relationship with Daniels or what the media is reporting about the trial, but the lawmaker acknowledged that a significant portion of voters do not approve of Trump’s conduct, in general.
“I bet if you did a survey, if you did a focus group of, say, evangelicals, certain Catholics, I bet a lot of them would say, ‘Ehh, I don’t believe in that stuff.’ But if you ask them if you’re comfortable with some of their behavior, they’ll say no,” said the lawmaker, who requested anonymity to discuss Trump’s public relations problems.
But the senator predicted that the overwhelming majority of conservative evangelicals and Catholics will still vote for Trump over Biden because “it’s a binary choice: it’s Biden or it’s Trump, and they vote like any other voter, strategically.”
Some of Trump’s previous critics in the Senate GOP, who have expressed anxiety about his ability to appeal to independent and swing voters, are doing their best to ignore Daniels’ testimony and the impact it could have on voters.
“I think it’s all included,” said Senate Republican leader John Thune (S.D.), voicing the GOP’s oft-repeated defense that Trump’s alleged marital infidelity with Daniels and allegations that he paid her $130,000 to to remain silent are well known.
But other Republicans concede that Daniels’ sworn testimony in court breathed new life into the story.
“I think the testimony became more real,” Tillis said.
Tillis said the decision by Trump’s legal defense to request an additional day to question Daniels reflects that his lawyers likely found her testimony prejudicial.
“The only reason I believe — I’m not a lawyer — that defense counsel would take the risk of doing this is that they felt they had some ground to catch up on,” he said. “I think if they didn’t think it was harmful, either politically or for the case, why would they do the interrogation?”
Hope Hicks, who served as White House communications director under Trump, testified at the trial last week that Trump himself acknowledged to her in 2018 that his former fixer Michael Cohen’s claim that he paid Daniels had hurt him on the campaign trail. 2016.
“I think Mr. Trump’s view was that it was better to deal with this now and that it would have been bad for this story to come out before the election,” Hicks testified regarding Cohen’s statement to The New York Times in 2018 that he made payment with Trump’s knowledge.
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story
