Rank-and-file House GOP will shift away from Donald Trump after last night’s disastrous special election

| 11:36 pm EDT June 21, 2017
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If you fell for the fictional cable news narrative that the GA-06 was some kind of moderate district that’s generally up for grabs by both sides, you may have mistakenly viewed Republican Karen Handel’s narrow win as a victory for her party. But the factual reality is that the GA-06 is a +21 Republican district, and her four point win was a disastrous sign for the GOP in the midterms. And everyone in the Republican Party knows it, except for Donald Trump.

When Republican candidate Tom Price won the GA-06 in November, he won it by twenty-one points. Last night Handel won it by four points. That means the GOP plummeted by seventeen points in that district. It was a similar story in the less publicized special election last night in South Carolina; another extremely red district in which the GOP plummeted by a huge margin. What this means is that any sitting House Republican who won by less than seventeen points in November is now vulnerable in the 2018 midterms – and that’s the majority of them.

Donald Trump is too politically clueless to understand this, too arrogant to allow political strategists to explain it to him, and too narcissistic to accept the idea that he’s so unpopular he’s weighing down his own party. But most Republicans in Congress are either politically savvy enough to understand what a 17 point dropoff for their party means for the midterms, or they’re sensible enough to listen to political strategists who understand what it means.

So whether it takes three days or three weeks to filter out to them, rank-and-file House Republicans will get the message that Donald Trump’s toxic unpopularity is now set to wipe out most of them in the midterms. Look for some of them to begin incrementally distancing themselves from Trump, once they figure out that last night was a historic disaster for the Republican Party.