How Trump Is Undermining GOP Incumbents

Jonathan Bernstein: “Members of Congress typically work hard to represent their districts. In particular, they try to secure benefits that they can bring home and brag about. Constituents wind up hearing good things about their representatives, and therefore tend to vote for them, all else equal. Thus the advantage of incumbency. In the era of partisan polarization, however, that ‘all else equal’ applies less and less because voters mostly support their party’s candidate, so much so that the incumbency advantage seems to be close to disappearing.”

“But what happens when incumbents actively support policies that take valuable projects away from their districts? That’s what’s going on with President Trump’s decision to transfer appropriated military funds to pay for his border wall (yes, the one that Mexico was supposed to pay for and that Congress has repeatedly failed to fund).”

“For now, these transfers appear to be getting plenty of press in the affected states– including some with potentially vulnerable Republican senators. If this was a normal failure to win funding for projects, I’d say it’s not a big deal; certainly not something that voters would hold against their representatives. But we can’t really say that here. This isn’t a missed opportunity – it’s a deliberate effort to take something away that had previously been secured.”