Senate Republicans plotting how to take Trump out of the picture and run against Clinton

Mitch McConnell is very likely to lose the Senate majority this November. A map that was already favorable to Democrats has been made more so by Donald Trump securing the Republican nomination. So McConnell and team are calculating what to do with that and will likely end up running against Hillary Clinton, conceding that she will win the general election.

Recent polling shows the presidential race tightening, but Republicans signaled Wednesday their intention to run aggressively against Hillary Clinton, tying their opponents to the former secretary of state and every scandal from her family’s 25 years in the national spotlight.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee unveiled an ad campaign showing the images of several Democrats and labeled Clinton the “living embodiment of everything people hate about politics,” warning that she is Democratic Senate candidates’ “burden to bear.”

It’s almost certainly just an opening volley in a long campaign to take on Clinton and, to some degree, separate these Republican candidates from the presidential contest altogether.

“If I were running in 2016, I would be running as a check on the president, certainly on a President Clinton but I think even President Trump,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), the No. 2 GOP leader, said in an interview this week. “Obviously he’s not what I’d call a traditional Republican.”

It's an extension of the tack they already trying to take—ignoring that he exists at the top of their ticket. That's going to be awfully challenging, since, well, how do you ignore something like Donald Trump? And how is Trump going to react to that? Is he just going to play along when other Republicans act as though his loss is a given? Not likely.