Still, Mr. Trump made heavily promoted visits to the states and touted the candidates on Twitter, personalizing the races almost every time he talked about them.
A loss would be damaging, Mr. Trump told the crowd at a rally in Kentucky the night before the election. “You can’t let that happen to me!” he implored.
Some of Mr. Trump’s advisers say they see fund-raising benefits in the president’s traveling to those states, even with the losses. And they believe that even if he had stayed out of the races, political reporters would have described them as losses for Mr. Trump.
But senior Republicans acknowledge that Mr. Trump still doesn’t understand the nuances between the types of races run by governors, who have to tend to voters back home, and senators and representatives, who must survive in Washington and have a different political balancing act.
Former Gov. Pat McCrory of North Carolina, a Republican, said that Mr. Trump shared something in common with his predecessor, Barack Obama, in that neither one had significant coattails in off-year elections. The two men developed a “personal relationship” with voters who turned out only for their presidential elections and could not be cajoled into supporting other candidates, he said.
Some Trump advisers have questioned why his aides have not pushed back more forcefully against his desire to inject himself into contests in solid-red states like Kentucky and Louisiana where there is no electoral benefit to him in 2020.
“The curse of Donald Trump is that he can’t help himself, and he always makes it about him,” Mr. Sanford said.
Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/07/us/politics/trump-ron-desantis-brian-kemp.html
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