Keller @ Large: Trump's Scattershot Message Ahead Of Midterm Elections
BOSTON (CBS) - "This will be the election of Kavanaugh," President Trump told crowds at his rallies over the weekend. "The caravan. Law and order. Tax cuts, and common sense."
It's a scattershot message these days from Mr. Trump, reflecting a political terrain that isn't quite what the GOP had planned on. Republicans had hoped the Kavanaugh saga would anger and motivate their base, and it has, but polls show the Democratic base is equally furious about the judge's confirmation despite sexual assault allegations.
"Democrats produce mobs, Republicans produce jobs," says the president, as he labors to turn the refugee caravan fleeing crime-ridden regions of South America into a Democratic plot to promote crime, a claim unsupported by evidence and unlikely to move undecided voters.
And in a races like the Florida governor's contest, in states won by candidate Trump two years ago, Democrats are making headway turning it into a referendum on the president.
"Donald Trump is weak, and he performs as all weak people do, they become bullies," said Florida Democratic nominee Andrew Gillum in his first debate with Congressman Ron DeSantis, the GOP nominee. "And Mr. DeSantis is his acolyte."
DeSantis in turn has tried to paint Gillum, the state's first African-American gubernatorial nominee, as indifferent to crime, and infuriated many voters early on in their race by warning that a vote for Gillum would "monkey up" the state's progress.
The latest poll has the Democrat up by double digits.
And in perhaps the most eyebrow-raising wrinkle of all, even the president is no longer touting last year's GOP tax cut, instead ad-libbing this curious claim: "We are looking at putting in a very major tax cut for middle-income people. And if we do that it will be sometime just prior, I would say, to November."
Good luck with that. Congress is out until after election day.