President Donald Trump and his allies have crafted a face-saving plan if Democrats trounce their way to a House majority — tout Trump as the savior of Republicans in the Senate. | Carolyn Kaster/AP photo white house White House prepares to spin defeat as victory The White House is planning to tout Trump as the savior of Republicans in the Senate, even if the Democrats retake the House.

President Donald Trump and his allies have crafted a face-saving plan if Democrats trounce their way to a House majority — tout Trump as the savior of Republicans in the Senate.

In public and private, Trump and advisers are pointing to the president’s surge of campaigning on behalf of Republican Senate candidates — 19 rallies alone since Labor Day — as evidence that nobody else could have had a bigger impact in the states. The argument is classic Trump, who despite making the midterms a referendum on his own presidency, has a history of personalizing and then dwelling on his victories while distancing himself and diverting attention from his losses.


Should Republicans pick up Senate seats, “that’s all they’ll talk about,” said Barry Bennett, a presidential adviser on Trump’s 2016 campaign. “That’s where the math is in our favor.”

Even in the House, where Republicans are laboring to sustain their 23-seat majority, the White House is already dismissing any notion of a Democratic wave election on par with the Republican midterm pickups under former presidents Barack Obama or Bill Clinton.

Counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway this week on “Fox & Friends” pointed to the 43 Republican House retirements as a major reason the GOP was likely to lose seats. She also tried to contrast the expected GOP losses with drubbings previous Democratic presidents have received. “No nonpartisan, sane prognosticator right now is predicting the 63 House seat losses that President Obama suffered in his first midterms in 2010, or even the 54” that Clinton lost in his first midterms in 1994, which gave Republicans the House for the first time in 40 years, she said.

A recent internal memo by White House political director Bill Stepien similarly contended that House Republicans’ goal this year is to minimize their losses.

“We do what we can with the situation,” a White House official said, using language similar to the memo, which cast the scenario for House Republicans as “challenging.”

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Trump himself has even tempered expectations about the House in his remarks, often quickly pivoting to talk about the Senate.

“I think we’re doing well with the House,” he told reporters on Wednesday. “We’re going to have to see. I’ve campaigned for a lot of candidates that were down a little bit and now they're up,” he said.

Then, Trump added: “I think we're doing really extraordinarily well in the Senate.”

It’s not unusual for White House officials to lower expectations ahead of the midterms. Prior to the 2010 elections, Democratic leaders like then-DNC chairman Sen. Tim Kaine warned early about the “tough” year ahead. Obama at times seemed exasperated by what he referred to as a “big, messy democracy” while campaigning for fellow Democrats. Top aides said Obama would not personalize expected losses, but the president nonetheless limped out of what he called a “shellacking,” saying he felt “humbled” by his party’s worst showing at the polls in decades.

Sitting presidents’ parties have collectively picked up just seven Senate seats over the last 80 years in midterm elections. So Trump confidants have been arguing that because these Senate gains have been so infrequent, boosting the Republican majority in the Senate would be meaningful enough to blot out Democratic gains in the House.

“If the president picks up Senate seats, they’ll be no honest people talking about a ‘blue wave,’” Matt Schlapp, a Trump ally and chairman of the American Conservative Union, told POLITICO.

Another reason some think the Senate argument will stick is because of what’s at stake: The Senate approves Supreme Court justices, federal judges and confirms appointees, so retaining the majority will allow the GOP to pursue major parts of the Trump agenda even under a divided government.

Republicans say they are also preparing to cast their hold on the upper chamber as a setback for the Democratic senators who are likely to run in 2020, especially after some of them were weaved into GOP ads targeting their red-state colleagues.

One Republican ad against Democrat Phil Bredesen in the Tennessee Senate race featured clips of Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts with the word “ANGRY” on the screen, casting her and Democrats as “RAGING” and “HUNGRY FOR POWER,” using the fight over Trump’s newly minted Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh as an example.

“A Republican gain in the Senate is a rebuke of Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Cory Booker,” said Brad Todd, a GOP consultant working on the midterms, citing the Democratic senators frequently being floated as 2020 presidential hopefuls. “The Democrats in the Senate became the face of the opposition to Trump’s agenda.”

The strategy dovetails with anticipation in the White House that Trump will quickly shift into reelection mode after Election Day, assailing his opponents before they can get out of the starting blocks. He has already spent months going after Warren and Booker, as well as former Vice President Joe Biden. Current and former presidential aides said Trump has been rearing to shift to 2020 attack mode on a full-time basis.

“In the mind of the president, 2018 is simply an extension of 2020,” a former White House official said. “The reelection campaign began long ago, whether the press and the public realized it, or not.”