Doubling down on a losing strategy

One senior administration official described their shutdown comms strategy as a “caravan redo”—in reference to how Republicans spotlighted and demonized a group of migrants coming traveling to the U.S. southern border in the lead-up to the midterm elections. (The strategy failed to stop the blue wave that occurred.) The official said that Trump and the Republican Party would “draw contrasts” between their draconian immigration policies and the Democrats’ more inclusive approach.

According to two administration officials, the White House intends to send advisers and surrogates throughout the shutdown standoff out on national television to hammer Democrats and to accuse them of wanting illicit drugs, terror, and “trafficking” pouring over the southern border.

“I think the key for the president is to make it abundantly clear to the incoming [Democratic] majority in the House that he is going to blame them for each and every [migrant] caravan, for each and every rushing of the border, for the violence that occurs as a result of illegal immigration” Matt Schlapp, a prominent Trump surrogate and lobbyist whose wife Mercedes Schlapp is a senior White House official, told The Daily Beast. “The game is on. He is going to go after them… It is going to be their fault and they will own all of it.”

The midterm elections were just a test about whether Trump could use harsh immigration rhetoric to rally voters to his side. Immigration may have saved Republicans a deep red Senate seat for the Republicans, but in the House (where all voters got to cast ballots) it was a disaster.

According to a report compiled by David Winston, a Republican pollster, the focus on immigration instead of the economy resulted in late deciders breaking for the Democrats by double-digits points in 2018. Winston's findings line up with what Democrats saw in their own polling per the Washington Examiner's David Drucker.

Trump may like to believe that the midterm outcome was somehow not a reflection on his policies. Remember, though, that the 2018 midterm was the most presidential-centric in modern history. A higher percentage of those who approved of the President's job performance voted for the President's party than ever before in a midterm. A higher percentage of those who disapproved of Trump's job voted for the opposition party than ever before in a midterm.

The overall House result was that Democrats won a plurality of the vote in states, making up 329 electoral votes to the Republicans' 206. This calculation, done by Catalist, a data company that works with Democrats and others, importantly takes into account how seats where there was either no Democrat or no Republican on the ballot would have voted if there had been one. Democrats "won" a plurality of the House vote in almost all the swing states that Trump won in 2016, including Florida, Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

I wouldn't expect the shutdown to play out differently with regard to immigration. In the Quinnipiac poll, only 34% of voters favor a shutdown because of disagreements over funding for the wall. When asked who would get blamed for a shutdown, 51% said congressional Republicans and the President, compared with 37% who said congressional Democrats. A Suffolk University poll out this week came up with similar results

The shutdown may please the base. It looks like a political loser overall, however. Perhaps more worrisome for Republicans, it doesn't look like Trump learned a single thing from Republicans losing in the midterms.