Trump turns out to be biggest loser in midterm election
It wasn’t the red wave that many Republicans promised it would be. If not for a certain former guy, it could have been.
All of the momentum was with Republicans. The party in charge is usually punished in the midterms. President Joe Biden’s approval was at 39% as of Monday. And a majority of voters cited the flagging economy as their top priority. TRhis should have delivered a tsunami of Republican victories. But it didn’t. Democrats did far better than many expected in Tuesday’s election.
So what went wrong? It’s what’s been going wrong for Republicans since 2018: former President Donald Trump.
In the four years he was president, he managed to lose the House, Senate and White House to Democrats. He also got himself impeached twice and might very well go to jail if charged with any number of crimes now under investigation. That lesson should have turned off anyone who can do basic math. In the all-important game of political math, Trump is a divider, not a multiplier, and he is quite literally a loser. Yet Republican leadership in many cases — and plenty of Republican voters in the primaries — hitched their wagons to Trump-endorsed candidates rather than more moderate Republicans who had better chances of winning.
There was Doug Mastriano, the election-denying Trump acolyte who lost his bid for governor in Pennsylvania. And Democrat John Fetterman won his Senate race, beating out Dr. Mehmet Oz, a reality TV personality who Trump, unsurprisingly but ill-advisedly, endorsed.
In New Hampshire, Trump’s pick Don Bolduc lost to Democrat Maggie Hassan in that state’s Senate race. Trump then dinged Bolduc for eventually backtracking on the big lie.
In Georgia, Brian Kemp won his race for governor, despite Trump having endorsed his primary opponent and attacking Kemp. Incidentally, Brad Raffensperger won his reelection for secretary of state, despite defying Trump in 2020.
Also in Georgia, that Senate race is headed to a run-off, with neither the Trump-endorsed Herschel Walker nor the Democrat Raphael Warnock getting more than 50% of the vote. Imagine if Republicans had backed a candidate who didn’t have all of Walker’s obvious deficiencies and scandals.
In blue states like Massachusetts and Maryland, Republicans had a clear blueprint to win state houses there. Instead, they deemed those popular twoterm Republican governors, Charlie Baker and Larry Hogan, insufficiently Trumpy and nominated far-right candidates who didn’t stand a chance. Both states are now run by Democrats.
The Trumpster fire had even those on the right seeing red over the losses. Rick Santorum blamed Trump for losses while on Newsmax: “I’m looking at the rest of the team — and you know who the leader of the rest of the team is — and the rest of the team didn’t do well tonight.” Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro called Trump “a major drag on Republicans, from his picks to his antics.”
Georgia Lt. Gov. Jeff Duncan said, “This is a time that Donald Trump is no doubt in the rearview mirror, and it’s time to move on with the party, it’s time to move on with candidate quality.”
It’s been time for quite a while now, but maybe these losses will finally shake loose Trump’s chokehold on Republican Party leadership and voters — if they care about winning, that is.
Despite Trump’s promises that America would get sick of all the “winning” under his reign, it didn’t seem like winning was a top priority to Republicans. Instead, stoking the culture wars and owning the libs were.
If they want to win again, the midterm message is clear: Republicans need to dump Trump.
Despite Trump’s promises that America would get sick of all the “winning” under his reign, it didn’t seem like winning was a top priority to Republicans. Instead, stoking the culture wars and owning the libs were.