Posted on 12/07/2022 2:00:56 PM PST by thegagline
Herschel Walker’s 100,000-vote loss in Georgia puts the exclamation point on the “Donald Trump is electoral poison” narrative. If the former president had deliberately attempted to sabotage the Republicans' chances ever since November 2020, he could not have been more destructive than he actually was.
In the Senate, the Trump effect meant Republicans lost chances at a whopping 10 seats (one of them two times!) they either should have won or in which they might have been competitive. In the House, Trump’s harm was more diffused, but almost equally baleful.
On Jan. 5, 2021, Republicans lost two Senate seats in Georgia they almost assuredly would have won if Trump had not depressed Republican turnout by waging verbal war on Georgia’s Republican governor and secretary of state. Then, in the 2022 cycle, Trump’s direct endorsements or his attacks or threatened attacks on otherwise winnable candidates doomed Republicans in nine states (and almost doomed them in otherwise Republican Ohio).
Arizona should have been a relatively easy GOP win. Gov. Doug Ducey is popular, but Trump’s baseless attacks helped keep him from the race. Superb, conservative Attorney General Mark Brnovich did try for the Senate nomination and would probably have won the general election, but Trump absolutely trashed him while endorsing Blake Masters — an oddball with an arguably antisemitic past who twice in the past 18 months actually praised the manifesto of the Unabomber.
In Pennsylvania, against a radical, stroke-addled, failed Democratic former mayor of a tiny town, Trump ignored solid businessman Dave McCormick in favor of Mehmet Oz, a quack-ish TV doctor who lived in New Jersey and carried political water for Turkish Islamist strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In New Hampshire, both the extremely popular governor, Chris Sununu, and the admired former senator, Kelly Ayotte (the latter of whom lost by only 1,017 votes in 2016 while running better than Trump did), declined to run, it seems, because they didn’t want to deal with Trump’s abuse. Instead, the nominee was election denier Don Bolduc, who repeatedly insisted his state’s public schools were making young children use kitty litter instead of commodes.
In Georgia again, Trump cleared the field of potentially strong primary opponents for Walker — on the surface a potentially strong candidate, but one whose increasingly manifest flaws could have been vetted in a more competitive primary that Trump’s interference effectively negated. Almost any decent Republican nominee would have defeated Democrat Raphael Warnock, if only the Republican didn’t admit to living in Texas and to having played Russian roulette, all while telling multiple lies and probably having paid for two abortions.
In Nevada, otherwise excellent candidate Adam Laxalt made the mistake of embracing Trump’s election denialism and lost an excruciatingly close contest. In Maryland, supremely popular Republican Gov. Larry Hogan declined to run, as did popular three-term Gov. Phil Scott in Vermont, both probably dissuaded by the Trump factor. Neither is a conservative stalwart, but both would have been far better than the leftist Democrats who won. While both would have had a tough time winning Senate races in such “blue” states, both surely at least would have been competitive.
In Colorado and Washington state, there is no way to test the hypothetical that impressive, non-Trumpy candidates Joe O’Dea and Tiffany Smiley, respectively, would have run close races if the whole GOP brand weren’t poisoned by Trump, but at least some of the evidence indicates as much. It certainly didn’t help that even in the general election, Trump openly campaigned for O’Dea’s defeat.
Republicans lost every one of those states.
Then there are the House races, where Republicans did, just barely, resecure the majority Trump lost for them in 2018. But by all common expectations, they severely underperformed. The perceived Trumpiness of the whole party certainly hurt the cause, especially since two-thirds of incumbent Republicans voted to challenge the election results. Most pundits ignored the key poll findings all year that a solid majority of independent voters were less likely to vote for any candidate who said the 2020 election results were illegitimate. Combine that with the way Trump motivated liberals to vote: Surveys showed they otherwise were discouraged by President Joe Biden’s performance, but it seems their antipathy toward (or fear of) Trump drove them to turn out against Republicans anyway, rather than staying home.
Meanwhile, Trump-aligned Republican candidates lost eminently winnable gubernatorial races in Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania and an arguably competitive contest in Illinois, while incumbent GOP juggernaut Gov. Charlie Baker declined to run for a third term in Massachusetts when Trump supported a primary opponent.
Rarely in modern political history has a major party suffered from as many legitimate, missed opportunities as the Republicans did in 2022. The common denominator in most of them was Trump. For their own political good, Republicans should treat him as anathema.
The SCOTUS decision on abortion was the problem.
The RNC spent $364,163,818
Here’s what they spent it on, https://www.opensecrets.org/parties/expend.php?cycle=2022&cmte=RNC
The dominate MAGA wing needs to make their case, office by office. Simply pushing aside others results in what happened. Walker was a terrible candidate. He was our Fetterman.
Hillyer is fanatical in his hatred of Trump. He is a gadfly.
He had a 83% success rate in the general - the highest ever. That was out of 254 races. Odd the media never covered most of them and focused on the losses. And the few winners they did cover, they made sure to emphasize that it was a lock anyway. There is a reason they did that.
Arguably the loss of one seat is due to voting corruption in AZ...well anywhere else demoncrats are involved too.
No, it was Graham’s proposed federal bill on abortion prior to the midterms. He stirred the pot intentionally to help the Dems.
A single statement: “Arizona should have been a relatively easy GOP win. Gov. Doug Ducey is popular...” shows how stupid Hillyer is. Ducey is despised by the Republican base for his feckless mealy-mouthed term in office, and for his lack of support for Republican candidates. Ducey’s career in Arizona is finished. As for Hillyer, he himself has been around politics for so long the stench of swamp envelops him.
Thank God it wasn’t all the turncoat RINO’s that actively undermined MAGA republican candidates
Exactly. McConnell is determined not to sit by and watch Donald Trump and the MAGA Deplorables ruin the RINOs and Democrats decades of selling out the citizens of the U.S.
McConnell was part of the selection of Hillary Clinton in 2016, working with Yeb Bush to take the dive. McConnell worked with the Democrats against Trump in 2020 and MAGA candidates in 2022.
Thank God! The eunuchs are finally back in charge!
So what if they endorsed Trump in 2020? The article is thoroughly one sided. Is Trump perfect? Far from it, but he’s not responsible for all the losses.
So better (moderate) candidates didn’t run because of the Trump effect? If true, that’s on them and reflects very poorly on their character, rather than Trump’s.
Blake Masters praised the Unabomber manifesto twice? Fake news!
Don Bolduc, an “election denier!” claimed public schools were forcing children to use kitty litter? Fake news!
That’s just a couple of the many deceptions in the article. You know what should be anathema? Any propaganda piece written by Quinn Hillyer at the Washington Examiner.
Wikipedia (for what it’s worth):
“Quin Hillyer
Born March 16, 1964 (age 58)
New Orleans, Louisiana
Occupation Journalist
Richard Quin Edmonson Hillyer (born March 16, 1964) is an American conservative newspaper columnist and writer.
“He unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination for the United States House of Representatives from Alabama’s 1st congressional district[1] in the 2013 special election in that district, finishing fourth in the Republican primary.”
Hillyer (now with National Review?) finished 4th in his own 2013 congressional run and he’s criticizing Trump for not getting Herschel Walker and others over the finish line?
The McConnell (RINO) faction that controls the contributions meant for all campaigns was/is at war with the Trump (MAGA) faction. Trump knows that just like 2016 he will not get funds from McConnell so he used his contribution money judiciously going to MAGA candidates only since he will need it in 2024. McConnell refused money to MAGA candidates. Anti MAGA people are pro swamp, pro corruption Internationalists. Does this include DeSantis? It remains to be seen. But he takes McConnell money and is being pushed by McConnell, Ryan (Fox), etc. Blaming Trump for Rona McDaniels failure to put boots on the ground to match Democratic activists vote harvesting they’ve been successfully doing since 2020 is ludicrous.
Yup, The Turdle should be held to account for not backing certain candidates, and for backing putrid RINOs.
Sober assessment.
I fear we have roughly 51% Dems and 40% GOP voters. Turnout, cheating, counting fraud are all factors.
But the indoctrinated young products of anti-American wokism, plus the gimmedat new arrivals, some from the past ten or more years of illegal immigration, plus the lifelong Democrats who learned decades ago from their mommies to always vote Dem in every election and the energized women who think murder by abortion is “a woman’s right to choose”———add up to the Dems winning many states in the next election. The media is all out to help the Dems and make stories of Biden and Hunter and AOC and other problems disappear.
Can we write off Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona now? All the nail-biting about “swing” states ended with Dem victories again.
The Presidential and midterm elections of the past years since 2016 were each “we can say goodbye to our American values and freedom if we don’t win” and ended in sorrow except for one small victory of the current US House election. Thanks be to God for that one.
Perhaps Republicans let Republicans lose to strike a blow to Trump. With Trump out of the picture in 2024, they can make sure they recoup their losses and gain even more power.
Exactly.
It’s amazing the number of “Never Trumpers” that have come out of the woodwork the past few weeks....
“GOP doesn’t know who its electorate is, and frankly hates what its electorate stands for and believes....”
This bears repeating-it is so obvious that I can’t believe any person who is a conservative hasn’t seen it in the last 2 years-if not, they are really ignorant or in total denial-the GOPe just wants you to send money to and vote for any vanilla RINO puppet they set up as their candidate-Romney-and Ryan- McCain-Jeb was supposed to be the next designated loser/puppet and they are still furious that he was rejected by those of us who aren’t RINO/Uniparty-so they kept money away from candidates conservatives wanted for congress...
All the RINO senators and reps who supposedly work for their voters just go to cocktail parties and kiss ‘rat ass every chance they get-they sell us out every day and need to go away...
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