CLEVELAND (AP) – Refusing to give Republicans the benefit of the doubt, President Barack Obama is working to saddle GOP candidates across the country with the baggage of Donald Trump and his sexually aggressive comments about women.
Obama will rally for Democrat Hillary Clinton on Friday in Cleveland, Ohio, appearing in one of just a handful of toss-up states that could potentially swing to either Clinton or Trump on Election Day. Campaigning for Clinton has become Obama’s central focus for the month of October and constitutes his best chance to prevent his accomplishments of the last eight years from being reversed by a Republican successor.
Yet as polls suggest Trump’s chances of winning the White House declining, Democrats have increasingly shifted focus to trying to maximize their gains by winning as many congressional seats as possible – perhaps enough to retake control of the Senate and, in a long shot, even the House.
To that end, Obama on Thursday signaled the strategy his party intends to deploy: refusing to let Republican candidates off the hook for their controversial presidential nominee, even if they’ve disavowed him in the wake of a video that emerged late last week of Trump bragging about kissing women without their permission and groping them.
“You can’t wait until that finally happens and then say, ‘That’s too much, that’s enough,’ and then say somehow you are showing some type of leadership and deserve to be elected to the United States Senate,” Obama said at a dinner in Columbus for Ohio Democrats. “In fact, I’m more forgiving of the people who actually believe it than the people who know better and stood silently by, out of political expediency.”