WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Republicans need to embrace Trump

Need a reason? Two words: Richard Nixon. At the height of the Watergate scandal, Jeet Heer notes in The Nation, pundits wondered why Gov. Ronald Reagan of California fervently defended the embattled president. But Mr. Reagan’s steadfast partisanship fueled his rise within the Republican Party after Mr. Nixon resigned in disgrace. This same dynamic, Mr. Heer writes, is playing out again between rank-and-file Republicans and Mr. Trump:

The incentive structures in the Republican Party are clear. Criticizing Trump will make you a pariah. Sticking with Trump gives you a future in the party, perhaps even a presidential nomination one day. Mitt Romney is likely to be a lonely man for the foreseeable future.

In Mr. Trump’s case, loyalty pays — literally. The president is tapping his fund-raising network to reward cash-strapped senators who stand on the barricades against impeachment, Alex Isenstadt reported for Politico last month. “The donors listen to the president, and he has the most capacity to energize small-dollar contributions by making the case that he needs a Senate majority to be successful,” Scott Jennings, a former political aide in the George W. Bush White House, told Mr. Isenstadt. Another party official told him that Mr. Trump “has the ability to turn on the money spigot like no one else.”

The benefits of standing against Mr. Trump, meanwhile, are not so clear. Impeachment is relatively unpopular in the swing states. And his poor reception at recent sporting events notwithstanding, Republicans still like the president: Their approval of him has never dipped below 79 percent, according to Julie Pace at The Associated Press (a recent A.P. poll put his approval rating at 85 percent). In the end, Liz Peek argues for Fox News, the base knows best:

Voters know what President Trump has done for them. They see it weekly in their paychecks, they see it when it comes time to sell their house and the price has gone up. They see it when they want to switch jobs, and find plenty to choose from, or when it comes time to tap their IRAs. In November 2020, voters will be asked again: Are you better off than you were four years ago? And then they will re-elect Donald Trump.

Republicans should keep their distance

Aligning entirely with the president is a death sentence for the Republican Party, argues Timothy P. Carney in The Washington Examiner. While Mr. Trump may be popular, Mr. Carney says, Tuesday’s election proves his appeal doesn’t extend to the Republican Party as a whole:

Trump’s core supporters — the type of people he brought out of the political woodwork to give him victories in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, Iowa, and Wisconsin — still aren’t Republicans. They’re just Trump voters. And that doesn’t mean they’ll listen to Trump’s endorsements, either. It means they’ll vote for Trump, and that’s it.

That’s a problem, Mr. Carney says, because while the president hasn’t added people to the party’s long-term roster, he has pushed people off it — particularly white suburban women. Ryan Costello, a former Republican congressman from the Philadelphia suburbs, went so far as to call President Trump “not a benefit but a burden” with such voters, warning that “there appears to be an electoral realignment in the suburbs.”