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.
I would put the Senate losses, not on Trump, but on Judas Mc Connell.
Well, we need to step back, take off the blinders, and objectively find the facts.
Once we have the data and the facts they lead us to, we must do something about them.
There’s enough blame to go around. Trump and McConnell share a good part of it equally.
It’s time for Trump to enjoy his retirement…
McConnell ran interference with Trump’s endorsements. He even pulled PAC money from one and sent it to Murkowski.
The idea that the utter failure of the GOP in the mid terms is all because of Trump is nonsense.
GOP is utterly out of touch, ran terrible campaigns, didn’t press its advantage at all that I could see.
Believes that just running “I’m not the other guy” is going to get you wins... it DOESN’T... at least not in places that you actually have to compete in.
GOP doesn’t know who its electorate is, and frankly hates what its electorate stands for and believes....
So they are ignoring the obvious. The left GOP couldn’t win a primary, so they decided to not support the winner. However, if it were reversed they’d expect to be supported.
F*** them!
Considering how the RNC didn’t help Trump-endorsed candidates might be the real answer.
I would say the refusal of the Establishment Wing to peaceably make way for the dominant MAGA Wing with ground support and funding did not help things.
In some cases, there were GOP politicians telling people not to vote for GOP candidates(Georgia Lt. Gov.)Government..
In other cases, poor allocation of money and other resources.
RetiredTexasVet wrote: “I would put the Senate losses, not on Trump, but on Judas Mc Connell.”
McConnell wasn’t on the ballot. Trump’s handpicked candidates were.
BS.
McConnell spent $45 million on Walker in the general election and then another $14 million in the runoff.
How much did Trump spend?
At best, you would have to blame both.
He has served in senior roles for the Washington Times, the Mobile Register, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, and Gambit New Orleans Weekly and has been published in almost every major newspaper in the nation.
A New Orleans native and cum laude graduate of Georgetown University, he is the author of the Mad Jones trilogy of satirical novels. He lives in Mobile, Alabama.
I love President Trump. I voted for him twice. And I’ll vote for him again if given the chance.
But that does not make me blind to his flaws. In many ways he’s his own worst enemy.
L
Yes, because if not for Donald Trump, the Democrats would be perfectly fine with relinquishing their power and objectives in a fair and honest election.
We’ve all heard it, and we’ve all probably said it: We want politicians to stand on principle rather than follow the political winds they feel with their desperately outstretched fingers.Even more galling than the hatred RINOs like Hillyer have for conservatives and particularly for PDJT is that when they achieve their goal of blocking conservatives, they don't try to win, but instead bow down to their RAT betters as if to say, "We didn't want to you to lose and we made sure those evil conservatives couldn't hurt you."By those lights, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) should be an overwhelming favorite to win reelection to Congress from Wyoming rather than trailing badly in the final week of her Republican primary race. (The primary is on Aug. 16.) If she loses, it will be a black mark against Wyoming voters, against her Republican colleagues who raised money against her, and against the whole Trump-right media conglomerate that has mercilessly attacked her.
As a tenaciously resolute and effective conservative who is obviously acting on deeply held principle even against her own political best interests, Cheney merits admiration and support, not treatment as a pariah. Before addressing the elephant in the room (her entirely justified insistence that the 2021 Capitol incursion was a major and dangerous transgression and that President Donald Trump was to blame), consider her conservative bona fides.
Murkowski was the incumbent and incumbents are entitled to Senate Leadership Fund money.
You don't have to like it but it's one of the perks of being an incumbent.
Georgia has nearly 8 million registered voters in a state of about 10 million people.
Yeah, that makes sense....nothing to see there/s
” an oddball with an arguably antisemitic past who twice in the past 18 months actually praised the manifesto of the Unabomber”
What?!
No such crap came up about Masters. Made up BS.
This article was RINO BS probably written before the “election” so the Ruling Class could point fingers after the desired wipe out happened.
Would Ducey have won? Maybe. But Masters was outspent something like 8:1 and still only lost by a few. Had McConnell given him the $8M he was promised, it would have very possibly come out different. Kelly isn’t popular in Arizona, and his wife is meaningless. She wasn’t even well known before the Loughner shooting. The sympathy vote is all over.
But now Arizona has a two Rats as the Senators from that state which is majority Republican.
How’d that happen Mitch? How much more money did Murkowski need to fend off the perfectly acceptable Tshibaka?
Trump’s mistakes are trusting the RINO liars.
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