Trump critics among the least popular senators in the country
The five least popular senators, according to a Morning Consult poll, have all clashed with President Trump.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., leads the list with a 30 percent approval rating while a staggering 56 percent disapprove. Frequent Trump foil Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., comes next at 30 percent approval and 51 percent disapproval. Perhaps more surprisingly, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., has a 42 percent approval rating while 46 percent of Arizonans disapprove of his job performance. The next two are incumbents Trump and the GOP are actively targeting for defeat in November. Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., stands at 40 percent approval and 44 percent disapproval. Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., is deadlocked at 44 percent apiece.
McConnell and Trump have largely patched things up after the two sparred over the the Senate’s failure to repeal Obamacare and the general slow pace of legislative change. Trump helped pull the plug on his former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon’s project of primarying McConnell-friendly senators. Nevertheless, McConnell’s status as a party establishment figure and top membership of leadership means his unpopularity plays into Trump’s populist, anti-establishment appeal. Trump won Kentucky with 62 percent of the vote in 2016, running ahead of Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky.
Flake has remained a regular Trump detractor within the Republican Party. He delivered an anti-Trump speech on the Senate floor, criticized him in a book and has often zinged him on Twitter. “[I]t is a testament to the condition of our democracy that our own president uses words infamously spoken by Josef Stalin to describe his enemies,” Flake said in his speech. “It bears noting that so fraught with malice was the phrase ‘enemy of the people,’ that even Nikita Khrushchev forbade its use, telling the Soviet Communist Party that the phrase had been introduced by Stalin for the purpose of ‘annihilating such individuals’ who disagreed with the supreme leader. Flake is retiring after the midterm elections, essentially driven from the Senate by Trump. His criticisms of the president tanked his numbers with Republicans without producing a corresponding bounce among Democrats and independents.
McCain has at times been even harsher. “Today’s press conference in Helsinki was one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory,” the longtime senator said after Trump’s joint press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin. “The damage inflicted by President Trump’s naiveté, egotism, false equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats is difficult to calculate. But it is clear that the summit in Helsinki was a tragic mistake.” For his part, Trump has engaged in highly personal criticism of McCain. During the campaign, he questioned the former POW’s status as a war hero, saying he preferred heroes who were not captured. Trump has continued to ding McCain, though usually not by name, for voting against an Obamacare repeal bill. A White House staffer made a disparaging remark about the senator’s health — McCain is suffering from a serious form of brain cancer and the staffer said he would probably be dead soon — without receiving a public rebuke.
Trump has campaigned against both McCaskill and Heitkamp in their home states. “We need Josh badly,” he said Tuesday of McCaskill’s likely Republican challenger, Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley. "Heidi will vote 'no' to any pick we make to the Supreme Court," Trump said of Heitkamp, though the Democrat did vote to confirm Justice Neil Gorsuch.
The Morning Consult poll isn’t all good news for Trump. Ten of 12 vulnerable senators outperform the president in net approval rating, according to the survey. The two most popular governors are Republicans who haven’t been supportive of Trump. Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker has a 69 percent job approval rating while only 17 percent disapprove, positioning himself to be the first GOP governor to win in the Bay State by a big margin since Bill Weld was reelected with 71 percent of the vote in 1994. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan is the next most popular, with a 68 percent approval rating and 17 percent disapproval.
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