The right-wing grassroots scored big in 2010. But 2022 was far different.
PHILADELPHIA — Doug Mastriano’s campaign for governor began with denunciations of “establishment Republicans,” a guest appearance by Michael Flynn and a blast from a shofar. It ended with discoball-style lights illuminating a fast-emptying hotel ballroom in Camp Hill, Pa., as the sound system played Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up.”
Mastriano’s defeat in Pennsylvania on Tuesday — as well as those of other prominent Republican candidates across the country who championed a similar blend of election denialism and far-right politics — suggested the limits of the grassroots movement that grew up on the right around Donald Trump’s presidency.
That loose coalition of right-wing grassroots groups and candidates resembled the Tea Party movement, which 12 years ago waged a similar campaign to purge the Republican Party of establishment elites whose ideological commitments were deemed insufficient to the cause.
But unlike the Tea Party — which went on to deliver Republicans’ sweeping victories in the House in the 2010 midterms, bring the Obama policy agenda to a nearhalt and give the party control of state legislatures that it has largely held since — the post-trump grassroots proved to be mostly a liability for the GOP in the party’s crucial 2022 midterms test.
Results are still forthcoming in Arizona and Nevada, where some of the highest-profile election deniers are seeking office. But the GOP wins fell well short of the party’s gains in the 2010 midterms, as well as the Democrats’ gains in 2018, and voters delivered unexpectedly strong rebukes to the candidates and the state parties that had most aggressively embraced Trump’s legacy of election lies and scorched-earth politics.
In the races that have been decided so far, only 14 of the 94 election deniers running this year for statewide offices with oversight of elections — nine of them incumbents — have won, according to States United Action, a nonpartisan watchdog group.
Mastriano, one of the Republican Party’s most vocal election deniers, fell 13 points short of Josh Shapiro, the Democratic attorney general, in the race for governor. In Pennsylvania, the governor appoints the state’s top election official.
In Michigan, outspoken election deniers endorsed by Trump lost their races for governor, attorney general and secretary of state, the office that in Michigan and 39 other states oversees elections.
In Wisconsin, Tim Michels, the Republican candidate who during his campaign had declined to rule out overturning the 2020 election results, lost his race for governor — a defeat that also effectively blocked Republican state legislators’ efforts to remove oversight of elections from a bipartisan commission.
In the 2010 midterms, “most of those House Republicans were pretty disciplined in their messages,” said Brendan Steinhauser, a Republican strategist who worked at the time at Freedomworks, an outside group closely aligned with the Tea Party. “This was totally different. You had candidates leading with the 2020 election denial stuff. And Trump was a big factor in that.”
The Tea Party, like the post-trump right-wing grassroots, often embraced conspiracy theories and exuded suspicion toward party politics even as it made its home within the GOP, reserving much of its rage for those its activists deemed to be “Republicans in name only.” And the extremism of its candidates in several key Senate races was blamed for Republicans’ failure to take the upper chamber in 2010, even as they swept contests for other offices.
But from early in its evolution, the Tea Party was also shaped by organizations like Freedomworks and Americans for Prosperity. Those well-funded and more conventionally conservative and libertarian groups bridged the gap between the Tea Party and the mainstream GOP. They used their resources and influence to emphasize the fiscal priorities that were more palatable to both the Republican establishment and independent voters.
The new grassroots have shown little inclination to sublimate their most conspiracy-theory-focused views, and many of the movement’s most visible financiers and promoters have actively pushed it in that direction.
“There were those kinds of people” in the Tea Party, Steinhauser said, referring to the elements of the movement driven by Islamophobia and conspiracy theories about Barack Obama’s birth certificate. “But they weren’t as prominent, and we very strategically kept them off the stage.”
Eric Wilson, a Republican digital strategist, noted that Trump had made the consolidation of Republican support in the general election more difficult by encouraging candidates to compete for his favor by demonstrating maximum allegiance at each other’s expense.
“If you have to spend your general election campaign getting your own party on board,” Wilson said, “that’s time and resources that you’re not spending getting independents.”
In particular, Trump and his supporters’ decision to treat denying the outcome of the 2020 election as a loyalty test left lasting rifts within the party.
Some influential figures among the grassroots on the right, including Steve Bannon, a former Trump adviser, spent the final weeks of the election urging Trump supporters to rally around even Republican candidates they considered suspect. “Don’t make perfect the enemy of the good enough for now — and it’s good enough for now,” he told listeners on his “War Room” podcast in late October.
But figures like Trump and My Pillow’s Mike Lindell continued to rail against Republicans who had stood by the outcome of the 2020 election. And in states where those Republicans defeated election deniers in the primaries, local activists often remained openly ambivalent about them into the general election.
Another key difference between the Tea Party and the Trump grassroots was the rise of social media, which was only a fledgling force in politics during the Tea Party’s ascent.
On the right, Facebook had been a powerful tool for organizing protests against COVID-19 lockdowns and Stop the Steal rallies following Trump’s election loss, which also made it an effective platform for organizing insurgent campaigns in the Republican primaries. But Wilson, the digital strategist, said those advantages did not necessarily translate into the general election environment.
“It works in contests where you have to get just the plurality,” he said, noting that Mastriano and other candidates who came up short Tuesday had won crowded primaries with the support of fewer than half of the party’s voters. “The question is whether that style and approach works for more people.”