Down Ticket #5: Have Republicans finally figured out how to save themselves from Hurricane Donald?

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Down Ticket has already written about the challenges facing Republican candidates this fall — and how GOP nominee Donald Trump is making their lives even more miserable.

We’ve noted that Republican senators trying to have it both ways on Trump are struggling as a result. We’ve explained why the GOP’s plan to cut Trump loose and focus on down-ballot races might not work as well as it did in 1996. We’ve examined how Trump is turning North Carolina blue faster than anyone expected. And we’ve even entertained the possibility that Trump could cost the GOP its biggest House majority since World War II.

But what about the other side of the story? Are there any bright spots for down-ticket Republicans in this, the Season of the Donald? Or is it all doom and gloom?

We’re glad you asked.

Just this week a few glimmers of hope have started to emerge for the Party of Lincoln. A leading super-PAC aligned with House Republicans has revealed that it will be spending a record amount in some of this year’s most competitive congressional districts. GOP strategists are actively preparing a “break glass in case of emergency” playbook for candidates eager to distance themselves from Trump. In states with key Senate races, more voters are registering as Republicans than Democrats. And several buoyant GOP Senate candidates are proving that it’s possible to convince swing-state voters to support a Republican over a Democrat — even when they don’t support Trump.

In short: As Trump continues to spin out of control, it seems as if the rest of the GOP is starting to strategize about how to survive Hurricane Donald.

Let’s take a closer look at the latest developments — and try to assess what impact, if any, they might have on the election as a whole.

First up: the money. For weeks now, House Speaker Paul Ryan has been making the case that if Hillary Clinton wins in November — an outcome that even he appears to consider increasingly likely — the GOP will need to preserve its House firewall as a final check on her liberal ambitions.

Now it’s clear that some big GOP donors agree. The Congressional Leadership Fund, a super-PAC with close ties to Ryan, announced Monday a new $10 million spending spree — including a $7.4 million ad campaign —meant to lift Republican House candidates to victory in some of November’s hardest-fought contests.

Donors know that “we have to protect the House and build the firewall,” CLF president Mike Shields told Politico. “And they have a tremendous amount of faith in the job that Speaker Ryan is doing and want to make sure he has the largest functional majority that he can have.”

Much of CLF’s spending is defensive, with more than half the $10 million reserved for Republican candidates locked in tossup battles for seats the GOP already controls: Rep. Carlos Curbelo (FL-26), former FBI agent Brian Fitzpatrick (PA-08), Rep. John Katko (NY-24), Rep. Will Hurd (TX-23), Republican foreign policy adviser Mike Gallagher (WI-08), Rep. David Young (IA-03), Rep. Lee Zeldin (NY-01), Rep. Steve Knight (CA-25) and lawyer John Faso (NY-19).

But not all of it. CFL is also channeling about $3.4 million to three Democrat-held districts in California, Florida and Nebraska and investing $1.5 million in broader turnout operations in New York and the Golden State. What’s more, the super-PAC is ramping up about three weeks earlier than it did in 2014 and signaling that additional waves of money are on the way — meaning that it’s likely to spend a lot more this year than ever before. This could be key: Money tends to make a bigger difference in House races — where advertising is cheaper and field operations are less sophisticated — than pretty much anywhere else.

Then there’s that “break glass in case of emergency” plan to consider. Until the past few days, the notion of down-ballot Republicans campaigning as checks on a Hillary Clinton presidency — and essentially conceding a Trump loss — was largely theoretical. But now the wheels appear to be in motion. As Politico reported Saturday, “nearly one dozen Republican operatives” — including Karl Rove and his influential group American Crossroads — have begun to poll-test this emergency message, and “it’s a question of not if but when” Rove begins airing ads in key Senate races.

Meanwhile, the National Republican Senatorial Committee has already released one such TV spot in Indiana, and the National Republican Congressional Committee has “requested that imperiled candidates begin polling to see how voters in their districts would respond.” Republicans say the strategy could go into full effect next month.

We’ve analyzed the downside of this approach. The last time it was attempted, with Bob Dole in 1996, so-called blank check ads didn’t appear until late October, at which point even Dole’s staunchest supporters had basically accepted that Bill Clinton was going to win. Try to dump Trump any sooner and you risk alienating base voters who still believe he has a shot.

But there’s an upside here as well. Early absentee voting is much more prevalent today than it was in 1996, so the old CW might be wrong: Sooner could be better. Also: The more poll-tested the message is — and the more time down-ballot candidates have to internalize it — the more skillfully they can thread the needle when they finally do decide to distance themselves from Trump.

Speaking of which, a handful of GOP senators are currently showing their fellow Republicans how that feat might be accomplished. In a new CBS Iowa poll, incumbent GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley leads Democratic challenger Patty Judge by 7 percentage points, which is at least 7 percentage points better than Trump is doing in the Hawkeye State. (Trump and Clinton are tied in CBS’ Iowa survey, and the Manhattan mogul trails by 1.5 points in RealClear Politics’ polling average.)

Another new CBS poll shows incumbent GOP Sen. Rob Portman routing former Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland in Ohio by the same margin, despite the fact that Clinton’s lead over Trump in the Buckeye State has grown from 4 points to 6 points since July.

At the same time, incumbent Sen. Marco Rubio is ahead of his likely Democratic challenger, Rep. Patrick Murphy, by an average of nearly 6 points in Florida, while Trump is currently losing to Clinton there by roughly the same amount.

How are Grassley, Portman and Rubio alike? They’ve all defined themselves in ways that keep them from being defined by Trump.

As FiveThirtyEight’s Harry Enten points out, Portman has been in Ohio politics for more than 20 years and has “an established brand in the Buckeye State” as “a quiet, Chamber of Commerce-type of Republican” — the opposite of Trump. Portman is also benefiting, Enten continues, from a $15 million advertising blitz designed to reinforce that brand — not to mention the fact that “Ohio’s Republican Party has distanced itself from Trump in a way that few other state parties have,” with Gov. John Kasich leading the charge.

According to a new Des Moines Register analysis, Grassley is a “juggernaut at winning over independent and Democratic voters”; he has attracted sizable support from non-Republicans in four of his last five Senate races and seems poised, as Quinnipiac University Poll assistant director Peter A. Brown puts it, “to avoid the kind of down-ballot bloodletting that may hurt some Republicans in other states who are not as well attuned to the views and values of their home base.”

And having already run against Trump for the GOP nomination, Rubio is one of the highest-profile Republicans in the country. He also happens to have made his anti-Trump views clearer than pretty much anyone else in the party — even if he now (technically, halfheartedly) supports the nominee.

Whether GOP candidates elsewhere can actually apply any of these lessons remains to be seen; establishing a brand strong enough to withstand Trump tends to take time. But the relative success of figures such as Grassley, Portman and Rubio suggests it probably couldn’t hurt to try.

And that’s especially true given the latest voter registration news:

In Pennsylvania, Democrats’ registration advantage has fallen by a fifth since the 2012 election, and more than 85,000 former Democrats have become Republicans this year — almost three times the number of voters who swung the other way. In North Carolina, Democrats’ registration advantage shrank by 44,000 between June 2015 and May 2016 — more than twice the rate of decline during the same period in 2012. In Florida, registered Democrats now outnumber registered Republicans by a mere 259,000 voters — down from more than half a million last presidential election cycle. And in Iowa, Democrats continue to see their position erode after losing their entire 100,000-active-voter edge between 2008 and 2012.

As it turns out, these states have something in common: They’re where many of 2016’s closest House, Senate and gubernatorial races will be fought.

All hope, in other words, is not lost; Hurricane Donald hasn’t blown away down-ballot Republicans yet. The question now is whether they can take advantage of these opportunities — and save themselves before he does.

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