Suddenly, some GOP candidates are maintaining social distance from President Trump

Grocery stores across the country are telling customers to keep a social distance of two shopping carts. Some Republicans across the country are taking that advice even farther when it comes to associating with President Donald Trump in this chaotic, unpredictable election year.

There will likely be even more wary GOP members drifting away from this president in the coming weeks. Already in tight Senate races, Republican incumbents are steering clear of any campaign association with Trump. Indeed, it’s the party association that makes these races seemingly close so far.

Come fall, watch for any GOP voter warnings against giving Democrats control of both houses of Congress. That’s the giveaway the party’s given up on a Trump reelection, as it did late in the 1996 Bob Dole campaign against Bill Clinton.

However, recent political history suggests that’s a dangerous decision with this man, at least among Republicans.

It’s a long ways out still — 16 weeks from Election Day, perhaps only 12 if you’re voting early. Trump, never strong in polls anyway, has sagged further in recent weeks. Joe Biden, Trump’s virtually certain Democratic opponent, will surge in the polls in a couple weeks when he announces his female running mate.

Additionally, the benchmark right track-wrong track poll ominously shows that less than a quarter of Americans think the country is on the right track.

That could be understandable for any president enduring a historic pandemic, with 40-plus million suddenly unemployed and most everyone’s daily and family lives somehow uprooted along with a wave of urban unrest and more than 135,000 virus deaths.

Either through clever strategy or dumb luck, the 77-year-old Biden has laid very low down in his Delaware basement most days so far. Politically, this is smart — let your opponent flail around in the quicksand of his angry tweets.

That lets a hostile media spotlight shine solely on Trump’s troubles. And it simultaneously keeps a muzzle on Biden, who’s prone to publicly revealing his mental confusion. Earlier this month, the wannabe commander-in-chief introduced himself to a teacher’s convention with “I’m Joe Biden’s Husband, Joe Biden.”

For the July Fourth holiday, Biden began quoting the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident. All men and women created by the you know, you know the thing.”

To be sure, Hillary Clinton was also ahead substantially at this stage of 2016, and standard polls often still miss the breadth of Trump’s stolid supporters, who generally prefer to go silent around strangers.

You may also have missed the glaring absence of expressed support from GOP leaders during the latest waves of Trump turmoil, including statue-toppling and yet another book painting Trump’s alleged private life in dark details. Here’s the problem for them: They may not be fond of Trump or his sometimes erratic behavior. They may hope that come January, the man who placed them in the swamp with Democrats in 2016 becomes a bad memory.

And they may fear that Trump atop the 2020 ticket could cost them their slim control of the Senate, where the GOP has a steep hill defending 23 of the 35 seats on ballots.

But they can’t count on any of that. Remember in October 2016 when the tape of Trump talking lewdly about women emerged, surely ensuring his defeat? And a number of Republicans headed for the exits on the Trump-Pence ticket?

Most politicians are like most professional football players. They can try to take your head off with a fourth-quarter tackle and then after the game, bump shoulders and ask about your family. Trump is not like that. He has the political memory of, well, an elephant.

Jeff Sessions risked his 20-year Senate career as the first to endorse Trump at a 2016 Alabama rally. Trump named him attorney general. Three months in, Sessions recused himself from the investigation of Russian collusion, saying reasonably, “I should not be part of an investigation of a campaign I was a part of.”

Trump was furious, openly criticizing his Cabinet member for disloyalty and firing him eight months later. That wasn’t sufficient. When Sessions sought to regain an Alabama Senate seat, Trump loudly endorsed his primary opponent, former Auburn University football coach Tommy Tuberville, who surged in the polls. The two face off in a runoff this week. As intended, such retaliation gives pause to other party members.

But not all. They do not yet openly criticize the head of their party. They just discover that, golly, their impossible late-summer schedules won’t allow them to attend the party’s national convention next month for Trump’s official second nomination.

Trump endorsed Mitt Romney for president in 2012 and flirted with inviting him into his Cabinet. But Romney, the new Utah senator from one of the most Republican states in the union, will not be at the convention. Same goes for Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, an abortion supporter who was named to a vacant seat in 2002 by her father.

Her criticism and votes have prompted Trump to suggest he’d campaign against her in 2022. She had nothing bad to say about the president now, but won’t attend the convention. Sens. Chuck Grassley and Lamar Alexander also find themselves unable to make it to the Republican National Convention.

And Susan Collins, a GOP moderate from Maine who was mum about Trump, cited her hotly-contested reelection campaign as the reason for her inability to attend. By the way, she also mentioned it will be impossible for her to speak out against the Democratic ticket this fall.

This, Collins explains, is because she does “not campaign against colleagues in the Senate.” Joe Biden has not been a Senate colleague of anyone’s for more than a decade.

This story was originally published July 14, 2020 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Suddenly, some GOP candidates are maintaining social distance from President Trump."