Ohio Republican Sen. Rob Portman might be deriding the same "dysfunctional Washington" that's driven Donald Trump to the top of GOP polls, but he's running like hell from Trump himself.
“I’m not a rabble-rousing, red-meat Donald Trump guy,” he said, not that anyone would mistake the mild-mannered Ohio Republican for a Trump clone.
We can expect to see a lot more of that from a slew of GOP senators who rode 2010’s anti-Obama wave into office and now face the prospect of having a bombastic, racist boob at the top of the Republican ticket during their re-election bids. You can add New Hampshire's Kelly Ayotte, Pennsylvania's Pat Toomey, Wisconsin's Ron Johnson, and Illinois's Mark Kirk to that list.
Now, in the twilight of the Obama era, the five must navigate sweeping unrest in the country about the terrorist threat, stagnant wages and cascading cultural changes; a roiling Republican base fed up with elected leaders; the prospect of high Democratic turnout to elect the first woman president; and, even if a more mainstream candidate is the GOP nominee, the likelihood that Trump still will be shouting from the sidelines. [...]
“It’s really hard to see Republicans keeping the Senate if Trump is the nominee,” said Jennifer Duffy, a Senate analyst at the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. “Portman and Ayotte could run perfect campaigns, their challengers could run lousy campaigns, and they’d still lose.”
To say Republicans are panicked doesn't quite capture the urgency. Even though the Republican National Convention is being held in Cleveland in Portman's home state, his campaign is promising to stage its "own kind of little convention” separate from the GOP. And the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Ward Baker, is warning candidates to stay away from Trump lest "we have to engage in permanent cleanup or distancing maneuvers.”
They can try to run from Trump all they want, but as long as their base demands a Trump brand of candidate, everything he represents will be the face of the GOP for years to come.