Over the past week, POLITICO surveyed nearly 50 GOP candidates in competitive House, Senate and governor’s races on whether they’d be willing to campaign with the Republican nominee. Only a handful said yes — and the rest said no, refused to commit or didn’t respond at all.

It’s an unusual turn of events. Typically down-ballot candidates — eager to generate excitement and media attention for themselves, to turbocharge fundraising, and to increase their stature — spend the fall months proudly campaigning alongside their presidential nominee.

But in the year of Trump, appearing on the same stage as the party’s standard-bearer — whose negative ratings are higher than any other GOP nominee's in recent memory — is perilous for those running in hypercompetitive states and districts.

“I would recommend they have a perpetual scheduling conflict,” said Rob Jesmer, a former National Republican Senatorial Committee executive director who advises a number of the party’s most prominent lawmakers.

CNN's Nia-Malika Henderson noted that Trump is campaigning this week in Maine and New York, two states that traditionally go blue in presidential politics.
He'll also be in Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania. But it's the two states he'll be in Thursday that are raising eyebrows among Republicans.
Maine makes sense because it's a funky state that splits its electoral votes, though that's never happened. Trump has also said he wants to play aggressively in his native New York, where some Republicans on the ground think he may do well in rural areas upstate.
But other Republicans say it's not a good idea for him to spend any time at all in New York, which Hillary Clinton represented in the Senate for eight years.