Down Ticket #8: The wild theories that Republicans are relying on to save the Senate — and win back the White House

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Could split-ticket voting save the Senate for Republicans? And could the reverse-coattail effect really help them win back the White House?

Unlike some past presidential nominees — Ronald Reagan comes to mind — Donald Trump is unlikely to sweep down-ballot Republicans into office on his coattails this November.

That much we know. In January, before the nominations were decided, 46 percent of voters said that they were planning to vote Republican for president; 39 percent said they were planning to vote Democrat. By the end of July, however, the Democratic number had shot up to 44 percent, and the Republican number had plummeted to 36 percent. The reason? Someone clinched the GOP nod in May — and his name was Donald Trump.

“As it became clear that Mr. Trump would be the nominee, the pattern changed and the [generic] Democratic candidate went ahead,” Lynn Vavreck, a professor of political science at UCLA, recently explained. “One way to view this reversal is as the price for nominating Mr. Trump.”

Republicans appear to be accepting this reality; a majority now say Trump wasn’t the party’s best choice for president.

Yet some are also beginning to argue that the situation isn’t as dire as it seems.

Trump may not help the rest of this year’s Republican candidates win on Election Day, they concede. But because he is who he is — a sui generis figure unlike any other major-party nominee in recent memory — he may not wind up hurting them, either. In fact, down-ballot Republicans could even help Trump do better in November than the naysayers expect.

To support these silver-lining arguments, Republicans are pointing to a pair of established concepts from political science. The first — split-ticket voting — is what happens when a voter chooses one party’s candidate for president and another party’s candidate for some lower office. The second — the reverse-coattail effect — is what happens when the popularity of a particular down-ballot candidate boosts the party’s presidential nominee as well.

Is this just spin? Or do these people have a point? Could split-ticket voting actually help Republicans keep control of the Senate? And could the reverse-coattail effect really help them win back the White House?

“Down Ticket” is skeptical.

Let’s start with the reverse-coattail effect. On Wednesday, CNN’s Dana Bash and Abigail Crutchfield reported that “Republican operatives” are starting to wonder, as their headline put it, whether “Donald Trump [might] ride GOP senators’ coattails” to victory in places like Ohio and Florida.

“The long-time concern among many Republicans who are very nervous about losing GOP control of the Senate, is that Trump will drag other Republicans down,” Bash and Crutchfield wrote. “The worry is that Republican voters who are turned off by Trump won’t show up on Election Day, and that will hurt GOP Senate candidates.”

“Yet others studying the data say they’re seeing something different,” they continued. “In states where the GOP senators are well-known and well-liked, especially among Republicans, it could end up drawing GOP voters to the polls, even if they’re skeptical of their presidential nominee. … And once they’re there, [they’ll] feel compelled to vote for the guy at the top of the ticket, too.”

In their story, Bash and Crutchfield went on to speculate that there are enough GOP senators currently outperforming Trump in enough key battleground states — Rob Portman in Ohio, Marco Rubio in Florida, John McCain in Arizona, Johnny Isakson in Georgia, Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania — to pave the way for some real reverse-coattail action on Nov. 8. A USA TODAY/Suffolk poll out Thursday noted 52 percent of Clinton supporters saying they were at least “somewhat” likely to split their vote.

In some cases, Republicans told CNN, hatred for Hillary Clinton could be the deciding factor. “There are a lot of Republicans who think Trump is crazy,” Sen. Lindsey Graham said. “But once they get in [the voting booth]” — to vote for Congress — “they will be driven by their aversion to [Clinton].” The hope is that they would then reluctantly pull the lever for Trump.

In other cases, geography could make the difference. In Florida, the thinking goes, Rubio could bolster Trump in the southern part of the state; Toomey could do the same in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley and Philadelphia suburbs.

The only problem? Reverse coattails aren’t really a thing.

The dream of a reverse-coattail effect is nothing new. In 1956, Adlai Stevenson’s presidential campaign manager, James Finnegan, noticed that when Stevenson had run for president four years earlier, he’d consistently received fewer districtwide votes than the incumbent Democratic congressmen running down-ballot. To Finnegan, the ‘‘answer was obvious,” Time magazine reported. “Stevenson must associate his campaign more closely with those of the state candidates and attract voters to himself through their local popularity.’’ Unfortunately, “Operation Reverse Coattails” failed to propel Stevenson to the presidency; he lost that November to Dwight D. Eisenhower by 384 electoral votes.

In 2008, political scientist David E. Broockman, now a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, set out to answer a simple question: “Do congressional candidates have reverse coattails?”

His findings were unambiguous. By feeding congressional district-level data from 1952 to 2004 into a sophisticated statistical model, Broockman discovered “no evidence that presidential candidates perform better when they appear on the ballot with more popular congressional candidates.”

Incumbent congressmen “can expect much higher vote shares” than their rivals when running for reelection, Broockman explained. Yet “presidential candidates do not appear to receive any spillover benefits.”

In other words, Portman probably can’t help Trump in Ohio this November.

The question remains, however: Is the reverse still possible? Could Trump wind up hurting Portman and other senators like him? Or will voters in Ohio and elsewhere decide to split their votes between Clinton and down-ballot Republicans?

Given that Trump is on track to lose Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Illinois, Nevada, and Wisconsin — i.e., nearly every state with a tossup Senate contest — Republicans are praying for the latter. As Karen Tumulty and Mary Jordan recently reported in the Washington Post:

This sort of outreach, Tumulty and Jordan conclude, “may be key to the survival of some endangered Republicans and possibly to the GOP’s hopes of maintaining control of the Senate” — even though it’s “a clear acknowledgment of the fear that Republican nominee Donald Trump is pushing away some voters.”

Split-ticket voting is a lot more plausible than the reverse-coattail effect, if only because it has actually happened before. In fact, voters used to be pretty willing to bounce back and forth between the two parties as they worked their way down the ballot. In 1972, for instance, 44 percent of congressional districts voted for one party in the presidential race and another in their local House contest.

Thanks to polarization, this doesn’t tend to happen as much anymore; by 2012, the number of “split” congressional districts had declined to 6 percent.

But that doesn’t mean, at least in theory, that it couldn’t happen again — especially when the GOP’s presidential nominee has a historically high unfavorable rating and is barely even a Republican. As Toomey himself recently put it, “Pennsylvania voters are really quite sophisticated, and they know for sure that Donald Trump is in a category unto himself. So they will make their decision about the presidential race, and then they will make a completely separate decision about the person they want representing them in the United States Senate.”

To some degree, this may already be happening. Check out the RealClear Politics polling averages. In Pennsylvania, Trump is trailing Clinton by 7.3 percentage points; Toomey is trailing his Democratic opponent, Kate McGinty, by 1.2 points. In Florida, Trump is behind by 2.7; Rubio is ahead by 5.7. In Ohio, Trump is losing by 3.8; Portman is winning by 7.5. And the same is true in nearly every other tossup state.

Ultimately, however, the issue for Senate Republicans won’t be whether some voters split their tickets. It’ll be whether enough voters do. If Clinton wins, Democrats need a net gain of four seats to regain control of the Senate. According to RCP, the polls currently show them poised to pick up five (Indiana, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Illinois, Pennsylvania) and lose one (Nevada). Unless even more Clinton voters — in exactly the right places — decide to vote for down-ballot Republicans between now and November, the GOP won’t be able to save the Senate from Trump.

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How the establishment won Tuesday’s primaries

If you wanted to test the theory that 2016 is an anti-establishment, anti-status-quo kind of year — the year that brought you both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders — then it would have been difficult to design a better experiment than Tuesday’s primaries in Arizona and Florida.

The ballot was packed with exemplars of establishment politics. John McCain, the GOP’s 2008 presidential nominee. Marco Rubio, this year’s consensus choice for president among Beltway conservatives. And Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the former chair of the Democratic National Committee.

All three were facing insurgent challengers in the Trump-Sanders mold. For McCain, it was Kelli Ward, a 47-year-old doctor of osteopathic medicine who slammed the five-term senator as a pro-immigrant, pro-war Hillary Clinton clone, while openly speculating that he might die in office. For Rubio, it was Carlos Beruff, a rich, bombastic Manatee County developer who’d been nicknamed “the Cuban-American Donald Trump” by the Miami New Times. And for Wasserman Schultz, it was Tim Canova, a law professor who’d become a cause célèbre among Sanders supporters nationwide.

So what happened Tuesday? The insurgents lost — and the establishment won.

It wasn’t even close. Rubio defeated Beruff 72 percent to 18.5 percent. Wasserman Schultz defeated Canova 56.8 percent to 43.2 percent. And McCain defeated Ward 51.7 percent to 39.2 percent.

And Rubio, McCain and Wasserman Schultz weren’t alone. Only one incumbent lost in Tuesday’s primaries: Florida Rep. Corinne Brown. She was also the only incumbent currently under indictment in a federal corruption case.

How is this possible? How can voters gravitate toward Trump and Sanders, then reward their down-ballot establishment foes? Amy Walter, the national editor of the Cook Political Report, has a theory:

Walter goes on to note that while “many have pointed to the fact that just 32 percent of Americans think the country is headed in the ‘right direction’ as a sign of voter anger and interest in shaking up the system,” the truth is, “the right direction/wrong track number has been terrible for years.”

“This isn’t about Trump or even Obama,” she concludes.

Sounds about right to us. One thing we’d add: In July, only 11 percent of likely U.S. voters said Congress is doing a good or excellent job. But a majority (59 percent) added that either their local representative deserves to be reelected, or they’re not quite sure yet — versus 41 percent who said they’d rather kick the bum out. That’s the highest level of support for reelection in five years.

The establishment is bad — unless it’s your establishment. Then it’s tolerable.

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