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.
McConnell ran the republican senate campaign finance part of the deal. Here in AZ we were absolutely bombed with "I was an astronaut you know" commercials and I cannot recall hearing more than one Blake Masters commercial. McConnell withdrew funding then put meager amounts back in late in the game when Masters was looking competitive.
IMO mitch would rather keep his position than have a majority in the senate where the new guys would have challenged him.
McConnell’s money wasn’t on the ballot either.
Suggest you put the blame where it lies.
Good point about McConnell’s support for Murkowski. In that particular race, Kelly Tshibaka would have undoubtedly won had Murkowski not been in the race. Meaning? The race was securely in Republican hands either way, so no money was needed to prop up Murkowski.
This anti-Trump crap is the same old tired story. We gotta run moderates, because those Trumpy conservatives just can’t win. The moderates always say the same thing. They were against Reagan, too.
You know? I always voted for and supported moderate Republicans when they won the primaries. When Trump came along, it became clear the moderates would never reciprocate.
Way too many moderate Republicans actually seem to take pleasure in our lost races. They expect us conservatives to be loyal but they have zero loyalty to us.
All these folks now saying told you so. Did they even vote? Did they back the party candidates?
Face it; Georgia and Pennsylvania both had awful candidates on the R side.
Say what you want about Pennsylvania corruption and Fetterwoman... Oz was a loss the second he was nominated.
However I offer no passes to anyone in Pennsylvania that looked at the brain addled candidate and thought he was a better choice. Truly you could run a child molester as a D and he or she would be stunning and brave for challenging what love is with Pennsylvania Democrats.
Well. They ain’t wrong.
Check
The Trump effect must be right because we know stupid don’t vote. /s
I voted for Trump twice. But must move on. He will not win again. The on the fence voters are tired of him. Let's forget all the excuses, valid or not for his lose and this this 2022 mess.
$150 billion to Zelensky sunk Republicans
I’m old school and wish others were the same. You fight these political battles in the primaries but then come together to support the candidate. Sadly, the moderates won’t reciprocate. Truth: Trump was undermined at every step by his own party! That’s why we lose races. Republicans can’t get their act together and cooperate to win races.
Good article. Thanks.
It’s not Trump’s fault they stole it.
Yeah, Walker was such a strong candidate that it was Trump who did him in. Good grief, it isn’t just in Dems and RINOs heads where Trump lives rent free.
You and yours can get this through your skull -- I am not every supporting a Republican again that supports amnesty, neocon foreign policy or any money laundering operations in foreign nations.
We can and should descend into communism and end with a civil war or state secession before that happens.
Trump was called Hitler x 5 years, they threw phony charges on him twice yet he got 74 million votes, 15% more than in 2016. So about your hot political take? It’s a loser.
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