Down Ticket #18: Republican Senate candidates are terrible at dodging Donald Trump. Here’s what they could learn from Mike Pence.

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Running for Senate as a Republican? Don’t want to get dragged down by Donald Trump? Just pull a Pence.

Roughly 40 million Americans watched Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate between Tim Kaine and Mike Pence. But the viewers who had the most to gain from those 90 minutes of thrust-and-parry at Longwood University may have been this year’s embattled Republican Senate candidates.

The GOP had better hope they tuned in.

Whether you agree with Down Ticket’s assessment that Kaine and Pence “both did well, because they both did what they came to Farmville to do” — whether you insist, instead, that your preferred candidate “won,” for whatever reason — most reasonable observers will likely agree that the Indiana governor was very good at deflecting Kaine’s frenetic jabs, nearly all of which boiled down to “Donald Trump said [insert offensive thing here]. Can you defend that?”

Again and again, often with a rueful chuckle and a sad shake of the head, Pence dismissed, ignored, brushed off or erased from existence his running mate’s most shocking remarks.

Kaine quotes Trump saying “if I run for president, I will absolutely release my taxes,” then accuses him of breaking “his first promise.” Pence’s response? “He hasn’t broken his promise.”

Kaine quotes Trump saying women should be punished for getting abortions; Pence claims “Donald Trump and I would never support legislation that punished women who made the heartbreaking choice to end a pregnancy.”

Kaine quotes Trump calling for more nuclear weapons in South Korea, Japan and Saudi Arabia; Pence insists that Trump “never said that.” And so on.

Eventually, Kaine threw up his hands. “Six times tonight, I have said to Gov. Pence: I can’t imagine how you can defend your running mate’s position on one issue after the next,” the Virginia senator said near the end of the encounter. “And in all six cases, he’s refused to defend his running mate, and yet he is asking everybody to vote for somebody that he cannot defend.”

The reason we bring up Kaine’s debate strategy is simple: It’s the exact same strategy Democratic candidates around the country have been deploying against their Republican rivals as they campaign to win back the Senate. It is frankly head-spinning, when you step back for a second, to see how thoroughly Trump has supplanted traditional subjects like, say, the economy as the defining issue of this year’s down-ballot races.

To choose but one example, nearly at random, here’s Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren campaigning in Las Vegas Tuesday for Democratic Senate nominee Catherine Cortez Masto, who’s competing against GOP Rep. Joe Heck to succeed retiring Democratic Minority Leader Harry Reid:

The problem for the GOP is that none of their Senate candidates are as artful as Pence at dodging the Donald — and given that their own poll numbers are currently moving in lockstep with Trump’s, this is a skill they may need to hone if the nominee continues to falter in the final days of the campaign.

So what can the Republican Party’s 2016 Senate lineup learn from the governor of Indiana?

It might be instructive to begin with some examples of what not to do when asked about Trump. The freshest — and most mortifying — comes from New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte. In a debate Monday night against her Democratic opponent, Granite State Gov. Maggie Hassan, Ayotte fielded a question about whether she would tell children to “be like” Donald Trump and “point to him as a role model.” Stammering and seemingly caught off-balance, Ayotte eventually cobbled together a reply.

“I think that certainly there are many role models that we have, and I believe he can serve as president, so I absolutely would do that,” she said.

Her response triggered a national (and mostly negative) response on social media — and a couple of hours later, Ayotte’s press office released a whiplash-inducing statement claiming that it was all just a slip of the tongue.

“I misspoke tonight,” Ayotte said in the statement. “While I would hope all of our children would aspire to be president, neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton have set a good example, and I wouldn’t hold up either of them as role models for my kids.”

To be fair, Ayotte isn’t alone on the Trump tightrope; nearly all of her fellow GOP Senate candidates are teetering up there with her. Worried that Democrats will make them own every radioactive thing Trump says if they back him unequivocally — or, conversely, that a public break will enrage his passionate, plentiful base — Republicans such as Pennsylvania’s Pat Toomey, Arizona’s John McCain, Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson, Nevada’s Joe Heck, and Florida’s Marco Rubio have tried to have it both ways on the Manhattan mogul, allowing that they will “vote for him but not endorse him” and/or that they “support the [unnamed] nominee” while also reserving the right to chide or avoid Trump whenever it serves their immediate purposes.

But the real risk for Trump tightrope walkers isn’t so much that they’ll end up looking like a) Trump clones or b) Trump turncoats. The danger is that, by hemming, hawing and trying to save their own necks by having it both ways, they’ll end up looking like c) typical politicians — which, unlike option a) or b), is something that alienates voters on both sides of the aisle.

In Tuesday’s debate, Pence took a different tack. Unlike Ayotte, he didn’t try to signal his ambivalence about the man at the top of the ticket. (Open secret: almost every Republican politician feels ambivalent — or worse — about Trump.) Instead, Pence — calm, cool, collected — did the opposite: He displayed no misgivings about Trump whatsoever. And then he changed the subject: to Clinton, to Kaine, to policy — to anything but Trump. And he did it again and again and again.

One exchange — about ISIS and foreign policy in general — stood out. After Kaine battered Trump relentlessly on the subject — “He does not have a plan. He trash-talks the military, ‘John McCain is no hero,’ ‘The generals need to be fired,’ ‘I know more than them,’ ‘NATO is obsolete’” — Pence laughed it off.

“That had a lot of creative lines in it,” he said.

Then Pence pivoted to a generic conservative attack on Obama’s foreign policy, complete with an anecdote about how his “heart breaks” for a fallen soldier named Scott Zubowski, whose “sacrifices” were “squandered” because “Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama failed” and “we are back at war in Iraq.”

This is not to say that Ayotte & Co. should simply celebrate Trump (like Pence) or condemn him (like a Democrat). But Republican Senate candidates should know where they stand on their party’s nominee — no ambivalence, no equivocation — and they should stick to that stance whenever the subject comes up. Then they should change the subject, because, in a Senate race, other subjects matter more than Donald Trump.

The reason Ayotte’s 180 was such a big story is that she made it one. Trying to have it both ways on Trump simply means that whenever you lean one way or the other, it’s breaking news. You’re raising questions — about your sincerity, your strategy, your skill as a communicator — rather than answering them. You’re feeding the fire, not putting it out.

In contrast, pushing Pence to defend every outrageous thing Trump says is unrewarding. You already know the answer. In this year’s pitched battle for control of the Senate, his fellow Republicans could benefit from a similarly clear-cut approach.

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Follow the money: On TV, the race for the Senate is now more expensive than the race for the White House

$561 million: The amount of television time that candidates, parties and outside groups battling for control of the U.S. Senate have reserved or purchased across 27 states with five weeks to go before Election Day.

$346 million: The amount of television time that the two presidential campaigns and their outside affiliates have reserved or purchased so far. For the first time in recent history, more ad money is flowing into the race for the Senate than the race for the White House.

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Dabbing for votes in California

Here in California — Down Ticket’s home base — the two candidates vying to succeed retiring Democrat Barbara Boxer in the U.S. Senate met last night at Cal State Los Angeles for their one and only debate. Attorney General Kamala Harris and Rep. Loretta Sanchez — both Democrats themselves, thanks to the Golden State’s “jungle primary” system — discussed plenty of weighty subjects: escalating crime rates, marijuana legalization, ISIS.

But only one of them dabbed.

After running over her allotted time, Sanchez, a veteran congresswoman from Orange County, concluded the debate by dropping her head, throwing up her left arm, and bending her right elbow across her chest — a gesture that somewhat resembled the dance move propelled into the mainstream by Carolina Panthers quarterback Cam Newton.

Harris — by far the more strait-laced of the two — was momentarily stunned.

“So,” she said, “there’s a clear difference between the candidates in this race.”

“There certainly is,” Sanchez replied.

Post-debate, the campaigns took to Twitter to tussle over What It All Meant.

Here’s Sanchez’s spokesman claiming that the dab explains “why millennials support” his candidate:

And here’s Harris’ spokesman with a somewhat harsher assessment:

As a millennial myself — albeit an elderly millennial born on the borderline of Generation X — I’m going to have to go with Harris’ guy here. Memo to Sanchez: you’re supposed to lean into your elbow “like you’re sneezing.”

Oh, and Sanchez is currently trailing Harris by more than 13 percentage points, on average. Dabbing might earn her a few extra Twitter mentions — but she’ll need a lot more than a dance move to catch up.

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