I spoke with Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Martin of The New York Times about President Trump’s decision to wade into off-year red state gubernatorial contests:
Mr. Trump, of course, is not the first president to be faulted for his party’s losses. But few have so openly invited the risk of being blamed for them.
“Donald Trump just happens to relish this centrality more than most,” said Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist, “and has a tendency to say the quiet part loud, sometimes to his detriment.”
Read the full piece here.
My two cents? The President was going to own these red state losses whether or not he got involved personally. His team wagered that the upside of intervention was worth the risk of any additional fallout. That calculation may not have been borne out, but the upshot is that our politics have already been so nationalized that President Trump’s explicit presence is something of a formality. For better or worse, politics in 2019 is all about the current occupant of the White House. This is the Trump Show after all–elections are just sweeps week.