Trump steamrolls red-state GOP primaries — but sour voters will have the final say

President Donald Trump’s meddling has delivered a distilled crop of Trump clones in Indiana Republican primaries Tuesday. But the problem for many Republicans, is that few people outside Republican primary voters even like Trump anymore, or his clones.

“Indiana Republicans who defied Donald Trump’s gerrymandering scheme paid for it Tuesday, as primary voters ousted five of the seven state senators the president targeted with primary challenges after they voted against his redistricting push — a decisive show of force that suggests his hold on the GOP base remains firm even as his approval rating has hit a new low,” wrote MS NOW reporters Hunter Woodall and Ebony Davis.

These contests, for state Senate seats in Indiana’s part-time legislature, would ordinarily draw little national attention, reported MS NOW. But after a December vote in which a bloc of Indiana Republicans resisted the White House’s pressure campaign and voted against an unpopular gerrymandering of the state’s two Democratic-held congressional districts out of existence, Trump set out to make examples of them. And his vindictive war on state legislative GOP proved a success in the primaries.

Trump endorsed challengers against seven of the eight sitting GOP state senators who voted against his gerrymandering scheme: Jim Buck, Spencer Deery, Dan Dernulc, Greg Goode, Travis Holdman, Linda Rogers and Greg Walker, reports MS NOW. However, Trump’s iron hold on Republican voters in the GOP primaries may not reflect an advantage in many general elections.

“Beneath that is a larger question, one that will only sharpen as his second term wears on: whether a president who is constitutionally barred from running again and whose approval ratings are the lowest of his tenure still commands the fear that built his hold on the GOP in the first place,” said Woodall and Davis.

And while Republican voters set the scale for which Republican run in general elections, Trump’s poll numbers are so low that only three out of eight Americans support him, compared to five out of eight who oppose him. This bodes poorly for Republicans in the upcoming midterm elections — and it could be an additional anchor when Democratic opponents begin quoting Republican primary winners’ sycophantic claims of support for an unpopular president to independents and Democrats in a few months.

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