John Thune's balancing act: Inside his push to save the GOP majority

Senate Majority Leader John Thune has tried to balance passing the president’s agenda and preserving the independence of the Senate. The midterms are his biggest test yet.

Sioux City, Iowa — Less than 24 hours after President Trump held a raucous rally inside an airplane hangar in this western Iowa town, Senate Majority Leader John Thune stood alongside Rep. Ashley Hinson in a strip-mall bar and grill a few miles away.Looking out over a giant water tank that punctuated the flat plains stretching out to the horizon, Thune and Hinson were hosting a roundtable with six local business owners last Friday, a decidedly less boisterous crowd than the one that had greeted the president. The event last Friday was part of Thune's final campaign sprint before the midterms, one of several stops he's made to support his GOP candidates for Senate.Hinson fielded a reporter's question that has trailed Republican candidates all fall: How is she threading the needle between the president's demands for loyalty and his increasingly unpopular policies?

She offered a version of what has become her standard answer: that she would back the president when she agreed with him, and be a "thorn in his side" when she did not.Thune barely flinched. The exchange was representative of the balancing act he is all too familiar with — a line he's been walking for nearly two years. The South Dakota Republican has led his colleagues through unforgiving terrain, trying to do two things at once: advance