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| ... unless 53.4% of the country is "the left" |
A pair of top Republicans acknowledged in a private meeting on Saturday that the party was battling serious vulnerabilities in the midterm elections, including what one described as widespread “hate” for President Trump, and raised the prospect that Senator Ted Cruz of Texas could lose his bid for re-election because he is not seen as “likable” enough.
The two Republican leaders, Mick Mulvaney, the federal budget director, and Ronna McDaniel, the Republican National Committee chairwoman, assured party officials and donors at a closed-door event in New York City that the right would ultimately turn back a purported “blue wave” in November. Mr. Mulvaney also questioned whether Democrats could marshal support from outside the left, criticizing them as a party defined solely by opposition to Mr. Trump.
But Mr. Mulvaney and Ms. McDaniel also offered an unusually raw assessment of their own party’s strengths and weaknesses in the midterm elections. They pointed to the burning energy among Democratic voters and the dozens of open House seats, where Republican incumbents decided not to seek re-election, as fearsome obstacles to retaining control of Congress. And Mr. Mulvaney suggested Republicans would fare better if they could “subtract” the president’s divisive persona from voters’ minds, and stress instead that the country is in a “pretty good” condition.
“You may hate the president, and there’s a lot of people who do, but they certainly like the way the country is going,” Mr. Mulvaney said, adding of voters: “If you figure out a way to subtract from that equation how they feel about the president, the numbers go up dramatically.”
Mr. Mulvaney reminded his audience of the party’s shocking defeat in a special election for the Senate in Alabama last year, and seemed to imply that Mr. Trump remained bewildered by the victory of Senator Doug Jones, a Democrat.
Mr. Jones won in an upset over Roy S. Moore, the former chief judge of the Alabama Supreme Court, who confronted multiple allegations of sexual predation and child sex abuse in the final weeks of the race.
“The president asks me all the time, ‘Why did Roy Moore lose?’” Mr. Mulvaney said. “That’s easy. He was a terrible candidate."
Mr. Mulvaney’s comments about Mr. Cruz represent perhaps the most candid admission by a senior Republican that Mr. Cruz, a first-term lawmaker who battled Mr. Trump for the presidential nomination in 2016, is actually facing a fight for his political life. He is being challenged by Representative Beto O’Rourke, a maverick Democrat who has raised enormous sums of money online.
Public polling has shown the two men locked in a close race, but with Mr. Cruz holding a consistent advantage.
Other Republicans have been just as hopeful about the election in Florida, where the party has nominated Gov. Rick Scott, a former hospital executive with a vast personal fortune, to challenge Senator Bill Nelson.
The two men have been effectively tied in the most recent polls.
Still, Mr. Mulvaney’s freewheeling comments appeared intended more to reassure allies than to alarm them, and he insistently played down the possibility of a Democratic takeover. “Wave elections are extraordinarily rare,” he said, though there have been several in the last dozen years.
At the same conclave of Republicans on Saturday, one of the party’s key Senate candidates, Mike Braun, a wealthy former Indiana state legislator who is running against Senator Joe Donnelly, a Democrat, framed the stakes of the election in grimmer terms.
At a forum for Senate candidates, Mr. Braun pleaded with party donors to put up the money needed for Republicans to defend their control of the Senate, warning that if the party did not govern successfully under Mr. Trump it could face a long political winter.
“We’ve got four to six years to get this right, and if we don’t, it’ll go the other direction, demographically and all those other things that point negatively for us,” Mr. Braun said, in comments captured on a second recording. “We’ll be miserable for 15 to 20 years.”