GOP Senate candidates race to align with Trump By Ben Kamisar - 07/29/17 09:44 PM EDT GOP Senate candidates across the country are battling to emerge as the pro-Trump candidate in contested primaries.
President Trump’s approval rating might be stagnant nationally, but he still enjoys strong support with many of the GOP primary voters who will decide crucial Senate primaries ahead of the 2018 midterm election.
So GOP candidates in states that Trump carried in November are beginning to hammer their opponents as unfaithful supporters of the president to gain an edge in their primaries.
One clear example of this trend is in Indiana, where fellow Indiana Republican congressmen Luke Messer and Todd Rokita are poised to clash in what’s already become a nasty primary. Messer jumped into the race this week, with Rokita all but assured to follow.
Rex Early and Tony Samuel, who served as the top leadership on Trump’s Indiana campaign operation, penned a letter on Thursday hailing Rokita as a loyal Trump supporter throughout the election. While the men wrote the letter in their personal capacity — the dormant Trump campaign hasn’t weighed in — the letter was clearly meant to give Rokita room to claim the pro-Trump mantle.
“Of the members of Indiana’s congressional delegation, Todd Rokita is the only one that actively and specifically campaigned for candidate Trump — never wavering and never jumping on and off the Trump Train,” they wrote.
Rokita’s campaign manager, Bryan Reed, took the issue further in his own statement that noted The Hill’s reporting that in April 2016, Messer floated the possibility that a white knight candidate could emerge if no candidate won the majority of GOP convention delegates.
“Despite his efforts to fool Hoosier Republicans and cozy up to President Trump now, what is very clear is that Messer was less than enthusiastic, and even openly critical of Donald Trump even as he ran against Crooked Hillary, the media establishment and the beltway elite,” Reed said.
A Rokita ally told The Hill that the campaign would “no doubt” bring up the issue in advertisements if he decides to run.
But Messer’s camp swatted aside the characterization. Greg Pence, Messer’s finance director and the brother of Vice President Pence, praised both Early and Samuel as friends but said that there’s been a “misunderstanding.”
“Rex and Tony don’t speak for the Trump campaign ... it’s not a correct statement and it was made by two individuals who, at this point, are no longer affiliated with the Trump campaign,” Greg Pence told The Hill.
Pence went on to note that Rokita had first endorsed Rubio and added that many members of Messer’s finance committee are longtime allies of the vice president’s.
“Luke voted for Donald Trump in the primary. From my perspective, he’s been standing by him since then,” Pence added.
Trump is still extremely popular among Indiana Republicans — 83 percent of state Republicans approve of his job performance, according to an internal Messer poll published by Howey Politics earlier this month. That’s far higher than Trump’s job approval rating in the state, which Gallup recently found to be 47 percent.
That’s why one unaffiliated Indiana Republican told The Hill that right now, “aligning with Trump is a no-brainer strategy.”
“Who's to say where the trend lines will be come [the day of the Indiana Senate primary], but right now it's where the smart money sits,” he said.
But he noted that Rokita’s release tarred John Hammond, Indiana’s Republican National Committeeman, and warned that pressing the issue too hard could backfire.
“The question becomes how far will the game of one-upmanship go and to what end?”
Similar battles are playing out in other states too.
Support for Trump has become the defining issue in Alabama’s upcoming Senate primary, where Sen. Luther Strange (R-Ala.) and his allies are pummeling Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) for critical comments he made about Trump during the 2016 primary.
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http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/344393-gop-senate-candidates-race-to-align-with-trump
