Start with the week before the gavel. On September 8th The Hill found Republican senators and candidates split over whether to show up at Donald Trump's first-ever midterm convention, worried about being tied to a slumping approval rating even as party officials promised a big turnout. The next day The Hill called it a dilemma: candidates wanted Trump's blessing and feared what came with it.
They went anyway, and so did a Democrat. A pre-recorded video from a sitting Democratic senator played at the Republican convention, endorsing the GOP's Pennsylvania Senate candidate while the senator kept his seat in the Democratic caucus — two documents, one tape, exactly the kind of appearance a Republican committee is glad to run.…
…(cont) On opening night Trump delivered the keynote himself: "Pretend that I'm on the ballot," he told the hall, promising to beat the midterm curse by campaigning in every swing district.
In the same stretch, Rhode Island's Democratic primary voters delivered their own verdict: a sitting governor lost renomination 62.5 to 37.5.
Now the newest filing. CBS reports that Ken Paxton, Trump's own endorsed Senate candidate in Texas, told donors after the convention that "everybody's numbers are down." The remark reached CBS by way of a New York Times leak, not a press release, and it says the thing the convention was staged to prevent: the rally did not lift the numbers it was built to lift. It lowered them, in the words of the man the party is running to win with.
Asked about the tape, Trump deflected. The complaint, on the record, was with the leak, not with the leaked sentence. Declining to dispute a word of it is as close to confirming it as a denial would be.
So the record now carries two accounts of one convention: "electrifying," filed by the Examiner the week it happened, and "everybody's numbers are down," filed by the candidate the party nominated to prove it worked. The party has not reconciled the two. The closest it has come is changing the subject.
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“They throw a pep rally, call it electrifying, put the president's own face on it, and the guy running on the ticket turns around and tells donors it tanked his numbers. That's not a gaffe, that's the stagecraft failing in real time — the show was the product, and the product didn't sell. Nobody's denying the tape. They're just mad somebody heard it.”
“Look, the energy in that room was undeniable, the Examiner said it themselves, electrifying, and when the base sees the president fighting for them that moves numbers — well, it's supposed to move numbers, that's the whole — did Paxton actually say that? I mean he didn't mean it like that, every candidate has off days with donors, that's not — okay, we're not disputing what he said, we're disputing why anyone's listening to a private call, that's the real scandal here.”
Texas Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton reportedly told donors "everybody's numbers are down" after the recent GOP midterm convention. Paxton's comments were leaked to the New York Times. Republican strategist Tricia McLaughlin and Democratic strategist Chuck Rocha join "The Takeout" to discuss.
Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton reportedly told donors that "everybody's numbers are down" after a midterm convention in Dallas that touted both Paxton's campaign and President Trump's record.
Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton can be heard in a leaked audio recording observing that President Trump's GOP midterms convention was politically harmful for the GOP. CBS News' Zak Hudak has more.
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