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Don’t mistake all the standing ovations on Tuesday night for House Republicans wanting to be anywhere near President Donald Trump between now and November.


A new Morning Consult/POLITICO poll found that just 27 percent of registered voters believe that Trump’s support will have a positive impact on Republicans running for Congress this year, and 40 percent believe he’ll have a negative impact.

Stuck in the middle is Ohio Congressman Steve Stivers, chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, who in an interview for the latest episode of POLITICO’s Off Message podcast could not name a single battleground district where he’d send Trump, despite the president’s promise earlier this month to campaign for Republicans four or five days a week into the fall.

“He will be helpful in many, many places,” Stivers said. “In almost every district, there are chunks of voters that he can be helpful with.”

Asked to name one such district, Stivers pointed to the March 13 special election in the Pennsylvania 18th, a heavily Republican open seat outside of Pittsburgh, where Trump traveled this month for an event he said was to support the Republican candidate (though White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders later maintained that the taxpayer-funded trip was all official business).

The Pennsylvania district is heavily Republican, and while Democrats have started advertising there as the polling has tightened, they still consider the district, in which Republicans had an 11-point advantage in 2016, a long shot.

That’s as specific as Stivers would get.

“You know, I think we need to be smart about how and where we use everybody, every surrogate, whether it’s the president, vice president, you know, other members of Congress, other folks who want to help,” he said. “We’re not going to give our battle plans to everybody, but we’re going to make sure we’re smart about the way we use folks.”

Stivers noted that in last year's special election in Georgia, when Republicans squeaked past a massively well-funded Democratic challenge in a longtime Republican district, Trump appeared at a fundraiser for his party's candidate as a way of showing support.

"We proved in Georgia 6 that the president can campaign in districts that he barely won and make a difference for us to motivate the voters," he said.

Stivers’ case that Republicans will hold the House is a mix of determined optimism and cold calculation—though one that, in the face of the Democratic wave most assume is coming, can strike people as either compensation for panic or straight-up denial. The case: “Battle-tested” incumbents and benefits from the tax bill will feed an overall positive sense of the economy—they’re branding it “the Great American Comeback”—helped along by a massive outside money advantage and beating up on House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

But the first reason, he says, is a factor everyone knows about, but which Republicans rarely tout out loud: “I think it starts with the congressional lines,” Stivers said, pointing to the successful gerrymandering after 2010. Later, asked whether that validates Democrats’ argument that Republicans have tilted elections to their advantage, Stivers shrugged off the criticism: “You can say that, but the people elected them.”

Come on, say most people watching the races take shape. Trump and the reaction to him dominate everything; of course he will define the midterms, too.

The easiest measure for how worried House Republicans are: On Monday, New Jersey Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen announced he’d become the 20th House Republican to retire without running for another office, after raising the hopes of Stivers and other party leaders just last week with a big campaign fundraising filing. That’s on top of the unexpected retirement in Pennsylvania by Rep. Pat Meehan, revealed to have settled a sexual harassment case against a young female aide whom he called his “soul mate” and allegedly grew hostile against when she did not reciprocate.

The NRCC wouldn’t share its polling on how voters in battleground districts view Trump. But the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee gladly shared some of its own: In the 23 districts that Hillary Clinton won but are represented by Republican members of Congress, Trump averages a 37 percent approval rating; in the 12 open districts currently held by Republicans, Trump averages a 41 percent approval rating; and in the over 60 other districts Democrats are trying to make competitive, Trump also averages a 41 percent approval rating.

It’s not a topic that the Republicans running are eager to discuss.

An aide to Rep. Barbara Comstock, who represents D.C. suburbs in Virginia, didn’t respond to the question of whether she’d want Trump to campaign for her.

Rep. John Faso, from the Hudson Valley of New York, punted questions to an aide who said he was too busy to talk, then didn’t respond to questions about Trump.

An aide to south Florida Rep. Carlos Curbelo said he also happened to be too busy to discuss Trump, but pointed out that the congressman had previously appeared with Trump and former President Barack Obama. Curbelo doesn’t invite politicians to campaign with him, but anyone who wants to support “his bipartisan approach to public service is welcome to do so,” the aide said.

Young Kim, the congressional candidate Ed Royce (R-Calif.) endorsed for the seat he ducked out of trying to defend, said she hadn’t considered the possibility that Trump might campaign for her.

“I’m going to talk to my consultants,” she said. “That’s not an issue that I’m considering.”

The consultants aren’t recommending it in Colorado, where Mike Coffman is again defending a seat to which he was reelected in 2016. During that election, he released an ad in which he looked straight into the camera and said, “People ask me, ‘What do you think about Trump?’ Honestly, I don’t care for him much.”

That was when Trump was a candidate most observers expected to lose. Now he’s the president.

Doesn’t matter, Coffman consultant Tyler Sandberg said: Coffman would still do it.

“I could absolutely foresee an ad where he highlights the fact that when he disagrees with Trump, he says so vociferously,” Sandberg said. As for welcoming Trump to the district for a stop, “I think he’s more interested in campaigning on his own record,” said Sandberg. “I don’t think the president would come out to campaign for him. I don’t think we’d ask him.”

Stivers’ take on whether he’d tell others to do ads like that: “I advise every candidate to represent your district. Mike Coffman knows how to represent his district better than I would ever know how to do.”

Click here to subscribe and hear the full podcast, including Stivers’ assessment of his state’s governor, John Kasich: “He means what he says, or he wouldn’t say it. But you know, sometimes there are things that he says that I wish he wouldn’t say.”

Not everyone is so standoffish. In Nevada, former Rep. Cresent Hardy, running for the seat he lost last cycle, said he supports Trump’s policies despite how frustrated he is with some of Trump’s comments. Hardy said he would welcome the president to the district, though “I don’t know if it would be helpful or not.”

New York Rep. Dan Donovan, who has a Democratic challenger trying to make the race competitive in the only Republican-held congressional district in New York City—albeit one in which voters bucked the rest of the city and went heavily for Trump in 2016—said he knows that even there, the atmosphere has changed. “You can’t be naïve to think that some of what’s happening in our nation isn’t going to have some effect on some of our voters,” Donovan said.

Voters are too smart to vote based on whether Trump does or doesn’t show up in person, Donovan said, or the minutiae of endorsements or anything else. His own message to Trump: “Come campaign with me.”

“The president traveling across the country, with how unpopular he is, is something Republicans are more focused on than we are,” said New Mexico Rep. Ben Ray Luján, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “A lot of districts that would have been extremely tough for us to win are now open seats. That was not part of the original Republican calculus, or, I would argue, part of the original NRCC budget.”

What voters want Congress to do about their dissatisfaction with Trump isn’t a clear picture. The new Morning Consult/POLITICO poll found that 32 percent of all registered voters surveyed said that Democrats pushing impeaching Trump would make them much more likely to support a Democratic candidate, while 29 percent said it would make them less likely to support a Democrat.

But voters are clearer on what they feel about Trump’s influence on the Republican Party. Overall, 43 percent say they have a less favorable view of the GOP under Trump, compared to 31 percent who say they have a much more favorable view of the party.

I asked Stivers whether Trump makes him proud to be a Republican. He avoided answering directly.

“I’m proud to be a Republican every day, no matter what. I believe in the principles of the Republican Party,” he said. “I didn’t come to the party because some other person was a Republican. I came to the party because of what the party stood for, and that’s why I’m still a Republican.”