“If I didn’t do those stops we would definitely not have control of the Senate. It would be a question, so what are we up, three? Two or three. We would be down five or six or seven. And they know that. Nobody has ever had a greater impact.” — President Donald Trump, interview with the Daily Caller, Nov. 14, 2018
A bright spot for Republicans in an otherwise disastrous 2018 midterm election was their success in maintaining control of the U.S. Senate. In fact, Republicans ended up adding two seats to their Senate majority by picking up seats in Florida, Indiana, Missouri, and North Dakota even while losing seats in Arizona and Nevada. …
Perhaps no president in the modern era has put more effort into campaigning for his party’s candidates in the run-up to a midterm election than Donald Trump. But did Trump’s campaigning actually have the sort of positive impact on the results that he claimed? CONT.
Alan I. Abramowitz (Emory), Sabato’s Crystal Ball