Ask a vulnerable Republican senator on the ballot this fall about Donald Trump, and chances are you’ll get an uncomfortable pause, or perhaps some mild criticism paired with a promise to “support the nominee.”

Ask about Hillary Clinton, though, and the straitjacket vanishes.


“Hillary Clinton is definitely going to be a major problem for Katie McGinty,” Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), who has left the door open to abandoning Trump, said of his Democratic foe. “They’re in lockstep, in unison on everything.”

With all the talk of Trump potentially dragging down Republicans and costing the GOP the Senate majority, Republicans say everyone’s overlooking the damage that Clinton — whose high unfavorables rival Trump’s, according to a slate of recent polls — could do to down-ballot Democrats. Republicans believe voters will chafe at candidates aligned with the former secretary of state, and they’re laying the groundwork to make Clinton’s high negatives a centerpiece of their strategy to defend their narrow 54-seat majority in purple and blue states.

Republicans may need more than an unpopular Clinton to hang on: The Senate map tilts heavily against them, with 24 GOP seats up for bids this election, compared with just 10 for Democrats. The anti-Clinton effort is also a tacit admission by the GOP that, despite its efforts to parochialize Senate races by focusing on state-level issues and the qualities of its individual candidates, control of the Senate will be dictated largely by national forces, namely a presidential race between two very unpopular figures.

But as Senate Republicans try to gain unity in the face of Trump’s divisive candidacy, the best bet may be to rekindle their role as an opposition party — in this case, to a decades-old foe.

The focus on Trump’s unpopularity “is simply trying to take attention away from the fact that Hillary Clinton is the biggest liability the Democrats have had on a ticket in decades,” said Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), a key player in the effort to unseat Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) in November.

National Republicans are setting the tone with D.C. cable and digital ads linking the entire Democratic slate to Clinton’s “toxic” persona, arguing Clinton is a “burden” for Democrats due to her long history in politics and baggage from Bill Clinton’s presidency. But each GOP candidate is handling Hillary Clinton in a different manner: She is outpolling Trump in some battleground states, but has lost to Bernie Sanders in others.

Even the most enthusiastic Clinton bashers are trying to have it both ways: Senate races can both be about local issues and just how terrible Clinton is.

“In my state, she didn’t win the primary. … I’ve seen her favorability numbers. I think that there are challenges for her,” said Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) of Clinton. But asked whether she’s going to explicitly link Gov. Maggie Hassan to Clinton as a campaign tactic, Ayotte responded: “I’m going to be focusing my campaign on what I’ve done for New Hampshire and what I plan to do to serve people in New Hampshire.”

RNC Chairman Reince Priebus said what is on many Republicans’ minds this month when he told radio host Hugh Hewitt that vulnerable senators seeking to outperform Trump could be in for a tough time.

“As the presidential goes, so goes the Senate races. It’s very difficult to win Senate races if you’re not doing well at the top of the ticket,” Priebus said.

Indeed, some Senate Republicans privately admit that local issues will be secondary to voters in many states — unless the GOP can make Clinton as much a liability as Trump.

“They’re going to both take a lot of oxygen out of the air,” said one Republican senator of the presumptive nominees. “The only reason she’s not overwhelmingly the most unpopular candidate running for president is because Trump is running.”

In states like Wisconsin and Illinois where Clinton is favored to win, Republicans will attack her selectively. Asked whether Clinton will hurt Democratic Senate candidate Tammy Duckworth in Illinois, Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) replied: “No, ” before an aide interrupted him and swept him away. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said he aims to “outperform” the top of the ticket and help pull a Republican presidential candidate to a win in the state for the first time since 1984.

“I have no idea how any of this plays out. But as you know, [Clinton’s] singularly unqualified to be president of the United States based on her record,” Johnson said of Clinton. “If I win a Senate seat, hopefully it goes a long way toward delivering the 10 electoral votes of Wisconsin to a Republican nominee.”

Rolling averages of polls show that Clinton is, by and large, leading Trump in Senate battlegrounds. She’s up 5.3 percentage points in Pennsylvania, 1.4 percentage points in Ohio and 2 percentage points in Florida.

“There is a reservoir of goodwill for Hillary, and there always has been in Florida,” said Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), where there are contested primaries in both parties for retiring Sen. Marco Rubio’s seat. “You saw that in the primary in Florida. Hillary basically didn’t have to campaign.”

Still, Democrats acknowledge that Clinton has likability problems and would have glaring problems in battleground states if not for Trump’s similar ratings. Trump has a 57 percent unfavorable rating and Clinton about 55 percent, according to The Huffington Post’s rolling averages. Trump’s favorablility numbers are trending up, while Clinton’s are falling. Over the weekend, a national poll by The Washington Post found both were viewed unfavorably by 57 percent of respondents.

Separately, a Wall Street Journal poll found that while Clinton fared better than Trump, only a third of those surveyed viewed her favorably.

Despite those marks, Democratic candidates seem comfortable with Clinton as their standard-bearer, particularly in contrast to the legions of Republicans who speak of supporting the “nominee” without naming Trump. When asked by reporters in New Hampshire about Clinton dragging down her own candidacy last week, Hassan said comparing the two is “completely inappropriate.”

“Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. That’s my comment,” said Montana Sen. Jon Tester, chairman of Senate Democrats’ campaign arm. “Hillary’s got a proven background of leadership and getting things done and public service.”

Still, some Democrats are subtly angling for some daylight from Clinton. Hassan opposes President Barack Obama’s plans to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, which Clinton supports. Jason Kander, who is challenging Sen. Roy Blunt in Missouri, opposed the nuclear deal with Iran that most Democrats reluctantly accepted. Former Sen. Russ Feingold, who is taking on Johnson in Wisconsin, refuses to say whether he voted for Clinton or Sanders in his state’s primary.

And McGinty is more open to fracking than Clinton, given Pennsylvania’s abundance of energy resources. McGinty’s campaign dismissed out of hand the comparison between Clinton and Trump, with spokeswoman Sabrina Singh calling his attacks on Clinton a “distraction from an increasingly worried Toomey.”

But most Republicans say they don’t have to explicitly say Clinton’s name while attacking their opponents. Voters’ impressions of her, they say, already are baked into the electorate, while Trump has room to redefine himself for a general election.

“It’s nothing that I’m asserting. I’m just looking at the numbers. [Clinton’s] numbers are not good,” said Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), who’s facing off against former Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland in one of the most competitive Senate races this year. “She hurts rather than helps right now.”

