I spoke to Susan Milligan of US News about President Trump’s effect on the down-ballot races.

On the House side, Democrats hold 31 seats in districts Trump won in 2016, notes GOP operative Liam Donovan, and the GOP’s plan to retake the House hinges on picking up those seats.

“Trump is the linchpin of this plan and, if he can reprise his 2016 performance, it’s very much in play. But in an environment where Biden wins by 9 or 10, as polls currently show, Trump may only carry a handful of them at best. In that scenario, not only does he lack coattails, but he could cost Republicans seats they managed to hang onto during the 2018 wave,” adds Donovan, a former finance director at the National Republican Senatorial Committee who is now a principal at Bracewell LLP, a legal and government relations firm.

But the map for Biden is widening, making such scenarios harder for Republicans, experts note. Early this year, it appeared that Wisconsin was going to be tough for Biden, with Michigan and Pennsylvania still battlegrounds and Florida more favorable to the GOP. Republicans had hoped their own map would expand to include Minnesota and New Hampshire, states Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton won in 2016.

But now, polling and political handicappers have broadened the battlegrounds to include North Carolina, Arizona, Georgia, Iowa, Ohio and even the GOP’s longtime behemoth, Texas.

“At the end of the day, a rising presidential tide lifts all boats – and the same is true in the other direction. With Arizona and North Carolina as toss-ups, those senators need to hold virtually every Trump voter to have a chance,” Donovan says.

“And with states like Iowa, Georgia and Texas showing signs of being in play, the next tier of Senate races is starting to come online. In virtually all of these instances, the president and down-ballot Republicans will be politically co-dependent.”

With a president himself desperately in need of a boost, the Senate boats are in rough waters.

Read the full piece here.

I spoke to TIME‘s Molly Ball about the politics of school re-openings and the President’s decision to wade into the fray.

Trump has squandered an opportunity to tap parents’ frustration, says GOP strategist Liam Donovan. “There’s a nonpolitical sense among working parents of all kinds that they can’t send their kids back to school soon enough,” Donovan says, “but the President has bigfooted it, and not in a thoughtful way.” As usual, Trump has polarized the debate. The result may be angry parents flooding local school-board meetings this fall to yell at one another about mask requirements.

Read the full piece here.

I also had Molly on the podcast to discuss the issue along with her new book, PELOSI.

Listen here.

I spoke to Morning Consult‘s Eli Yokley about the voters who dislike both candidates and how they compare to last time.

“I view these gains as addition by subtraction for Biden,” said Liam Donovan, a Republican consultant and former finance strategist for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Many of the voters with unfavorable views of both Clinton and Trump were conservatives who disliked him because they were bearish on his chances, Donovan said, but that changed once he won.

“Having consolidated the low-hanging fruit,” he said, “the remnant is bound to be skeptical of Trump, unpersuaded by the mere fact of his win, and more open to Biden as a non-Hillary alternative.”

Read the full piece here.

I spoke to Sam Stein of the Daily Beast about the down-ballot dynamic in the 2020 Senate races and messaging around the pandemic.

The down-ballot Republican Senate candidates seem aware of those risks. In their ads—many of which were released before the most recent jobs report—they often acknowledge the economic hole the country is facing before spotlighting their efforts to help pull their states out of it. In a spot she released earlier this month, Collins called the current situation an “economic crisis” and touted the work she’s done to expand small business loans. In an ad he put out earlier this month, Gardner described the current landscape as “America’s fragile environment” before going through a list of bills he’s helped pass. And in his most recent spot, Tillis explicitly noted that one million North Carolinians are out of work.

“You absolutely need to be careful not to spike the football in the second quarter of the pandemic, with five months and several jobs reports left to go,” said Liam Donovan, a veteran of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “If people need to be convinced of how great things are, the recovery probably hasn’t caught up to them yet, so effective messaging has to be more circumspect.”

Read the full piece here.