The scramble

Inside the scramble to save the GOP from Trump

A portrait of a party in meltdown.

By Katie Glueck and Kyle Cheney

Matt Borges had had enough.

The Ohio Republican Party chairman had spent a crazed Saturday on the phone, inundated by demands to respond to newly leaked audio of Donald Trump bragging about sexual assault, and by questions about whether Trump was even staying in the race. So early Sunday morning, Borges called the Republican nominee himself.

“Are you considering withdrawing from the race?” Borges asked Trump, fearful that there might be more devastating revelations about his party’s nominee still to come.

“Absolutely not,” Trump replied, a rebuke to the slew of spooked Republican lawmakers who were calling on him to quit. According to Borges, he warned Trump that he needed to “knock it out of the park” at the presidential debate that night to survive—and they hung up agreeing to talk after the contest.

But by Monday, Trump surrogates—and increasingly the candidate himself—seemed just as focused on tearing into the Republicans defecting from Trump as they did on talking up Trump’s debate performance. That prompted Borges to send an email to the other 167 members of the Republican National Committee.

“Those candidates and officeholders deserve the leeway to follow their conscience without fear of retribution from the party,” wrote the swing state party chair and former Kasich supporter. “And the criticism of these folks from our nominee, his campaign, and others within the party needs to stop immediately.”

A half-hour after sending the letter, he took a call from Trump, who wanted to discuss the debate—and Borges gave the candidate the same message.

“You are the person who put these people in this position,” Borges said he told Trump, describing himself as “pissed off.” “You did that. Not them. These are your words. You need to own that.”

“OK, OK,” Trump replied in a noncommittal way, according to Borges.

Yet on Tuesday, in the culmination of a four-day horror show, Trump was back at it, going nuclear on those who abandoned him over the tape. He tweeted that “the shackles have been taken off me” and warned that “Disloyal R’s are far more difficult than Crooked Hillary.”

With just weeks to go until Election Day, it’s as close as it gets to a nightmare scenario for battleground state Republicans. Pro-Trump loyalists have declared war on those who have renounced their presidential nominee, candidates can’t get their message out because of the din, and Democrats are milking it for all it’s worth, with some even rethinking shifting resources to down-ballot contests that previously looked out of reach. And it's all due to Trump's meltdown.

New Hampshire GOP operative Tom Rath, traveling in Bermuda, said his phone blew up with calls and messages just moments after the news broke Friday night—he spent the weekend fielding frantic messages from allies worried about the fate of Sen. Kelly Ayotte and GOP gubernatorial candidate Chris Sununu. Val DiGiorgio, GOP chairman of Pennsylvania’s pivotal Chester County, said he immediately called the 28 local GOP leaders in his area to gauge the depth of the damage from the remarks, which were already beginning to play on a non-stop loop on cable television.

Democrats, meanwhile, were glued to the carnage. David Pepper, the Ohio Democratic chairman, was on a train with his wife and toddler Saturday, and to their dismay, he couldn’t put down his phone. He plumbed Sen. Rob Portman’s Twitter feed — it took until 8:30 P.M. on Saturday, he accurately noted, for Portman to fully disavow Trump — and Pepper closely monitored the Republican statements that poured in all afternoon.

New Hampshire Democratic Party Chairman Ray Buckley said he was traveling around the state with interim DNC Chairwoman Donna Brazile when the news broke. “We really weren’t near any computers. So we were just kind of hearing it over the phone and seeing what was going on on Twitter,” he said. But by the end of the weekend, he was already contemplating whether to move resources away from the state’s most high-profile races and toward state legislative races that are often decided by a few dozen votes.

“If the apparent trends continue, [New Hampshire] Democrats are cautiously making contingency plans for last-minute shifting of additional resources to some of our normally marginal down ballot races,” he said. “Dozens of races are routinely decided by less than a hundred votes, any little bit of help can increase our win column by a good number.”

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

The timing of the Trump’s debacle could hardly have been worse, coinciding with the most vulnerable point in the election cycle: the heart of debate season in many contests and the start of early voting, which in Ohio begins Wednesday.

“To have that hit at the time it did, to have Trump fighting with Paul Ryan and Portman…at the very time you need energetic, unified volunteers, we have them in huge amounts, I think the Republicans are literally going to see a real waning in energy,” Pepper said. “An event that can really sap one side of energy, give another a lot of energy, to have it come the Friday before early voting starts, couldn’t be better timing for us or worse for them.”

To that end, Ted Strickland, the former governor of Ohio whose Senate challenge to Portman has been given up for dead by some -- national Democrats have largely withdrawn funding for his race – sprang into action. The Strickland campaign blasted out statement after statement, and by Monday announced a new TV ad, titled “Coward,” linking Trump to Portman, who until the tape had quietly backed the GOP nominee.

“The spot highlights how Senator Portman continued to endorse Donald Trump for President, even after learning about Trump’s derogatory comments bragging about sexual assault — a failure of leadership of historic magnitude,” a statement from the campaign said (Portman condemned the tape when it was released, then withdrew support from Trump a day later). “Portman then panicked in a transparent attempt to try and save his own political ambitions.”

In Florida, where Rep. Patrick Murphy has likewise struggled to gain traction in his race against GOP Sen. Marco Rubio, Murphy’s campaign is following a similar tack. Though Rubio condemned Trump’s crude remarks Friday evening, Murphy has ripped his Republican opponent as a “coward” for his silence since then and has busily pumped out statements tying Rubio to Trump.

Adding to the challenge for down-ballot Republicans, especially in more competitive races, is the increasingly bellicose tone Trump and his allies are taking toward defectors – from House Speaker Paul Ryan to the vulnerable candidates he’s trying to protect, like Nevada Senate contender Joe Heck and Rep. Cresent Hardy.

At a rally Saturday morning in Summerlin, Nev., Heck, a congressman, read his denouncement of Trump off a piece of paper, to a mixture of light applause, boos and cat-calls.

Heck, along with Hardy, kept his comments short amid audible jeers, but both said they could no longer vote for Trump. Heck called for Trump to withdraw from the race, which ended up sparking sharp condemnations on conservative talk radio. Callers reamed out the Republican congressman on Monday, with one saying on air: “As soon as it got hot in the kitchen, Joe Heck jumped out. That’s not leadership.”

Kevin Wall, a Republican talk show host, said Heck’s “incredibly bad decision” has “irreparably harmed his own campaign.”

Their decisions to abandon Trump has hastened a split within Nevada’s GOP leadership.

“Joe Heck and Cresent Hardy are weak Republicans here in the state,” said Diana Orrock, a Nevada RNC member. “And I think they shot themselves in the foot badly over this weekend in the statements that they made.”

Orrock, who said she intended to resign from the RNC if Trump loses the election, said Republicans are forgetting the lessons they’ve been beaten over the heads with their entire careers.

“All of our lives as Republicans, we’ve been admonished going into a general election in particular to get on board with voting for all the Republicans up and down the ticket to get as many Republicans into office,” she said.

To the south in Arizona, Sen. John McCain is also catching it from both sides. A Trump tweet lambasting McCain for abandoning him on Saturday became an anti-McCain press release issued by his Democratic opponent, Ann Kirkpatrick, within a half hour.

But few candidates have it worse than Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey who’s caught in a vise. Toomey, who has long refused to endorse either presidential candidate, blasted Trump’s remarks over the weekend. But Democrats have nevertheless aggressively pursued Toomey, labeling him “Fraidy Pat” for ducking chances to clarify his stance on Trump’s candidacy. Since 2 p.m. on Sunday, the McGinty campaign, the Pennsylvania Democratic Party and the DSCC have sent out at least 24 press releases using the phrase.

Toomey’s not the only one facing blowback from the leaked audio. Pennsylvania Republican sources say they expect several congressional races to feel the impact of the Trump tape, especially in moderate Philadelphia suburbs where independent-minded voters found it particularly distasteful.

GOP Rep. Pat Meehan, who represents the Philadelphia suburbs, has called for Trump to exit the race, a sign of how toxic he is in that part of the state. Brian Fitzpatrick, a congressional candidate in nearby Bucks County, said in a statement Saturday that he would not vote for either presidential candidate.

“Being a nominee for president is such an awesome responsibility, not only to your own campaign, but to the party,” said Kevin Madden, a veteran national Republican operative. “That depressive effect is being felt down-ballot…when you’re knocking on doors for swing votes, you’re not just getting Republicans. When [an incident] turns off so many suburban voters, suburban women voters, you’re knocking on doors and getting it slammed in your face, people don’t want to go out and get doors slammed in the face.”

Still, DiGiorgio, the Chester County GOP chair, said he surveyed local party committee members and found the remarks haven’t shaken Trump’s core support.

“People that are sticking with Trump even if they didn’t like his comments and view it as being blown way out of proportion,” he said.

As the shock of the news fades somewhat, Borges says he’s now more focused on the newest threat -- the stream of comments coming from Trump’s Twitter feed and from his surrogates, attacking other Republicans.

“Whether he listens to me or not, as a leader in the party I feel I need to say this,” said Borges, who insisted that he was speaking out for the good of Trump’s campaign, not just for down-ticket candidates. “I don’t want to wake up on Nov. 9 and say, ‘I wish I had called him.’”

He and Trump have another call scheduled for Wednesday morning.

“I think I have some reinforcing to do,” he said.