Today, this point of view has radically changed.
"In other words, I am very happy that my boss is not on the ballot this cycle," said a senior GOP official in the Senate.
Republican strategists are increasingly worried that Trump is headed for defeat in November and that he can drag other Republicans with him.
Seven GOP agents not directly associated with the president's re-election campaign told CNN that Trump's response to the pandemic and the ensuing economic fallout significantly damaged his candidacy for a second term - and that the effects are starting to hurt Republicans more broadly. Some of these officers asked not to be identified in order to speak more frankly.
Many say that public polls showing Trump behind the alleged Democratic candidate Joe Biden reflect what they find in their own private polls, and that the trend is spreading across the major races in the Senate. The GOP already had a difficult task of defending 23 seats in the Senate in 2020. The work of protecting its slim majority of 3 seats has only become more complicated with the development of the pandemic. States like Arizona and North Carolina, once considered the seat of winning Senate races, now appear to be at risk.
See Trump and Biden's one-on-one pollsTrump himself is alerted to the problems. Politico reported this week that two of Trump's external political advisers, Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie, warned the president last week that his support was waning in some swing states.
All of this shows how difficult it is to run as a Republican president almost anywhere in 2020. The strategists who spoke to CNN fear that Trump has become a responsibility for the Republicans who need to expand their coalition beyond from the President's supporter base.
While a few months ago, they were confident about the chances of the party at all levels, many strategists who spoke to CNN lowered their expectations, and are now talking in terms of understating what might worry the GOP. This leaves them hoping for a minor rather than devastating defeat, something that resembles the close loss of Mitt Romney in 2012, when the Republicans lost two seats in the Senate, rather than the performance of John McCain four years later. early, when they lost eight.
"Republican candidates need something more like Romney in '12 and less like McCain in '08," said Liam Donovan, a GOP strategist in Washington.
The broader fear among Republicans is that the election will become a referendum on Trump's performance during the pandemic. Coupled with a crater economy, the effect could be devastating both by depressing loyal Republicans and discouraging swing voters.
This punch could knock the GOP out of power in Washington - and that's what strategists hope the President's re-election team can successfully turn the race into a choice between Trump and an obnoxious Biden.
But this effort has become increasingly difficult in the context of a pandemic that has destroyed many of the economic gains that Republicans hoped to base on their re-election argument.
"It's the only thing he (Trump) can't change the subject," said a Republican strategist. "He is not a political opponent, it is not like that and he never had to face anything like that."
There is evidence that Trump is not largely responsible for the economic downturn. In the last CNN poll, since early May, Trump has an overall approval rating of 45%. While only 42% approve of the way he handled the pandemic, 50% still said they approve of Trump's management of the economy.
The Trump campaign has argued that Americans trust the president to manage the economy and will choose him to be the person who will lead the recovery.
"The economic message resonates strongly, especially at a time like this," said Trump campaign director of communications Tim Murtaugh. "President Trump is clearly the one who brings us back to this position. He did it once, he will do it again."
Still, the concern for Republicans beyond Trump's orbit is that if there is no sign of an economic downturn by November, this will be an impossible argument for the Trump campaign.
"In the absence of some sort of V-shaped recovery, many people think he died in the water," said the Republican strategist.
Trump's party
In the four years since the GOP nomination, Trump has solidified his position within the party. This made it more difficult for Republicans in Congress to distance themselves from him without upsetting his base. This, Republican officials say, risks driving away voters who may consider the GOP but dislike the president.
"It's a very, very difficult environment. If you have a university degree and you live in the suburbs, you don't want to vote for us," said a longtime Republican Congress campaign consultant, who added that there was serious concern about bleeding support for both the elderly and self-described men.
The main concern of the party, according to some of these Republicans, should be to maintain a majority in the Senate. The task demands that Senate candidates appeal to suburban voters who turned to Democrats in the 2018 midterm elections in reaction to Trump.
But that goal is complicated by the way dependent Republican candidates are at the maximum voter turnout for the President, even in the States, the Trump campaign doesn't expect to win. The GOP Sens. Cory Gardner in Colorado and Susan Collins in Maine cannot afford a depressed Trump base in their states, even if they are playing their independent identity to win swing voters.
And the concern for Republicans goes beyond the endangered incumbents - including Sens. Martha McSally from Arizona and Thom Tillis from North Carolina. There is even a chance, in a bad year for Trump, that the GOP's Senate seats in Georgia and Montana will be in trouble, said Donovan.
Distance from the President
In the meantime, the crater economy has heightened the need for Republican senators to subtly differentiate themselves from Trump and his balance sheet. Scott Reed, political director of the American Chamber of Commerce and veteran of Republican campaigns, said that a presidential re-election campaign is "always" a referendum on the outgoing president and his party.
While it doesn't bode well for Republicans if the economy doesn't improve or another wave of viruses emerges this summer, Reed said the GOP was not necessarily doomed. Congress, he noted, is experiencing a relative popularity boom - 31% support in the latest Gallup poll, the highest in more than a decade - thanks in part to the passage of economic aid.
Reed says the incumbents should also trump their personal and localized accomplishments and the areas in which they have been independent of Trump without expressly alienating pro-Trump Republicans in their states.
Gardner, for example, claimed to be the "chief architect" of the relocation plan for the headquarters of the Federal Land Management Office in Colorado, which the Trump administration announced last year. The GOP's first senator described the decision as a bipartisan victory for the western states, where the vast majority of land is managed by the federal government, and Gardner's victory over the bureaucracy in Washington. It also has the advantage of having little to do with Trump himself or the economic crisis.
And in his campaign for the fifth term, Collins relied heavily on his established political identity as an independent centrist. Her most recent television commercial claims that she has been named "the American bipartisan senator" for the seventh consecutive year by the Lugar Center at Georgetown University.
The line aims to fight the Democrats' most consistent line of criticism - that Collins voted to agree to with the Trump administration on everything from judicial appointments to health care to the President's acquittal on dismissal - without have to disown Trump himself.
Republicans point out that while Democrats and progressive interest groups have already spent millions on television and digital ads against incumbent operators, the GOP and its own allied PACs have yet to fully engage in air warfare against challengers Democrats.
"The truth is that despite being massively spent by dark money Liberal groups, Republicans are still in a good position to hold a majority in the Senate in the fall," said committee spokesperson Jesse Hunt. national republican senatorial.
The Trump campaign downplayed the concerns of low-ball Republicans, pointing out that a unified GOP offers the best chance of winning at all levels in November.
"Any candidate who wants to win will run for president," said Erin Perrine, deputy director of communications for the Trump campaign. "He has the energy, the enthusiasm and the basic infrastructure. If you are a candidate, you will want to be part of this movement."
But what Republican professionals are saying would be extremely helpful if the President stood by an encouraging message to bring the country back from the pandemic.
"When he does it right three days in a row, it really boosts his numbers," said Reed. "We need command performance on the discipline of the message."
