"The Canaries Are Dying"...How Trump Is Making Republicans Pick Their 2018 Poison

[Miles Archer]

“The Canaries Are Dying”: How Trump Is Making Republicans Pick Their 2018 Poison

Caught between the president’s rabid, loyal base and suburban women, Republican candidates may not survive a blue wave election.

by Abigail Tracy

February 18, 2018 5:40 pm

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/02/the-canaries-are-dying-how-trump-is-making-republicans-pick-their-2018-poison

“These races are like canaries in the coal mine,” Steve Israel, a former New York congressman and chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told me last week. “For Republicans, the canaries are dying.”

The day before we spoke, Democrats had picked up a statehouse seat in a deep red district in Missouri, the latest in a series of electoral upsets the G.O.P. has suffered across the country in recent months. After a string of special election victories in South Carolina, Montana, and Georgia last spring, the Republican Party has had a reversal of fortune—losing gubernatorial races and dozens of state legislature seats in Virginia and New Jersey, and suffering defeats in traditionally red districts in Florida, Wisconsin, Alabama, Oklahoma, and elsewhere. Ten months out, strategists see the trend as a potential harbinger of the legendary blue wave in the 2018 midterms that could rob of the G.O.P. of its majority in the House—and possibly, the Senate.

For the G.O.P., these midterms are a puzzle box of a kind that they haven’t faced in several cycles, if ever. “Republican consultants in the last eight years have had a very easy job—that’s running against Barack Obama. . . . Now we have to do things differently and nobody is used to it yet,” a G.O.P. strategist, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told me. “That boogeyman is gone.”

And arguably, the new Republican boogeyman is the leader of the party. Since he ascended to the Oval Office, Donald Trump has maintained a vice-like grip on the base of the Republican Party. And yet, while Trump’s popularity has largely proven to be non-transferable, his flagging approval rating—which, despite a recent uptick, is still hovering in the low 40s—augurs suppressed Republican turnout and heightened energy on the left in the midterms.

[beachbum bob]

1. I gotta say I rather enjoy watching the destruction of the GOP

they have trump and themselves to blame. They have unified the opposition party like no other time in our history and November 2018 will be brutal awakening as republicans go down in defeat all across our country as we take america back and make our country america once more.

accept the fact this is no possible way to compromise with today's republicans and we just need to ignore them as they have have ignored nearly 60% of america. Once you realize its a waste of time to present facts and reality to republicans in "hope" of somehow changing their views, its way easier to move forward with the agenda that benefits 99% of america.

[zipplewrath]

2. The hatred seems very transferable.

And yet, while Trump’s popularity has largely proven to be non-transferable,...

His popularity may be not-transferable, but his unpopularity seems to be HIGHLY transferable to other candidates.

[bearsfootball516]

3. It's like a reverse Obama for the Republicans

We ran into the same problem 2010-2016. Obama was popular himself, but his popularity didn't transfer to other Democrats and in a lot of cases, Deplorables took their anger against him to the polls and voted for Republicans they had never even heard of, just to spite Obama.