Races show limits to Trump’s power
Ex-president’s hold over GOP voters tested this season
NEW YORK — The tumultuous start to the Republican primary season, including a down-to-the-wire Senate race that divided conservatives in Pennsylvania, has shown how thoroughly former President Donald Trump has remade his party in his image — and the limits of his control over his creation.
In each of the most contentious primary races this month — including two closely watched contests next week in Alabama and Georgia — nearly every candidate has run a campaign modeled on the former president’s. Their websites and advertisements are filled with his images. They promote his policies, and many repeat his false claims about election fraud in 2020.
But Trump’s power over GOP voters is has proved to be less commanding.
Candidates endorsed by Trump lost governor’s races in Idaho and Nebraska and a House race in North Carolina. In Senate contests in Ohio (where his pick won this month) and Pennsylvania (which remained too close to call Wednesday), roughly 70% of Republicans voted against his endorsement. In contests next week, his chosen candidates for Georgia governor and Alabama senator trail.
Trump increasingly appears to be chasing his supporters as much as marshaling them. Republican voters’ distrust of authority and appetite for hard-line politics — traits Trump once capitalized on — have worked against him. Some have come to see the president they elected to lead an insurgency as an establishment figure inside his own movement.
Trumpism is ascendant in the Republican Party, with or without Trump, said Ken Spain, a Republican strategist and former National Republican Congressional Committee official.
“The so-called MAGA movement is a bottom-up movement,” Spain said, “not ... from the top down.”
The primaries are not the first time that conservative voters in Trump’s red-capped constituency have demonstrated their independence from the patriarch of the Make America Great Again movement.
In August, at one of Trump’s largest post-presidential campaign rallies, the crowd booed after he urged them to get vaccinated against COVID-19. In January, some of the most influential voices in Trump’s orbit openly criticized his pick for a House seat in Tennessee, Morgan Ortagus — who had served in the Trump administration for two years as State Department spokesperson but was deemedinsufficientlyMAGA.
These mini-rebellions have tended to flare up whenever Trump’s supporters view his directives or endorsements as not Trumpy enough.
“There’s no obvious heir apparent when it comes to America First; it’s still him,” said Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s White House counselor. “But people feel they can love him and intend to follow him into another presidential run — and not agree with all of his choices this year.”
Still, Republican candidates remain desperate to win Trump’s endorsement.
In Georgia’s Senate race,
Trump’s support for Herschel Walker kept serious rivals away. In some contested races, his endorsement has proved to be hugely influential, as it was in North Carolina’s Senate primary Tuesday, where Rep. Ted Budd cruised to victory against a former governor and a former congressman.
But the emergence of an autonomous wing of the MAGA movement — one more uncompromising than Trump — has allowed candidates without Trump’s endorsement to claim the mantle.
“MAGA does not belong to President Trump,” Kathy Barnette said during a Pennsylvania Senate primary debate in April.
The late surge from Barnette, who portrayed herself as a higher-octane version of Trump, eroded support for Dr. Mehmet Oz, the longtime TV personality whom Trump endorsed, from conservatives who questioned his political credentials. As a result, Oz was running neck-and-neck with David McCormick, the hedge fund executive who had withstood criticism from Trump. Still, Oz held about one-third of the vote.
Barnette’s rise stunned Trump, who never considered endorsing her candidacy, advisers said.
Advisers have urged Trump to make up with former primary rivals. But the former president has not called Jim Pillen, the Republican nominee for governor in Nebraska who beat Trump’s preferred candidate, Charles Herbster. In Ohio, about 718,000 Republicans voted for someone other than the Trump-endorsed victor, J.D. Vance.
In the Pennsylvania governor’s race, Trump backed Doug Mastriano last week over Lou Barletta, a former congressman and early supporter of Trump’s 2016 campaign.
“Where ... is the loyalty?” former Rep. Tom Marino, another early Trump 2016 supporter, said last week.
“Loyalty to what?” Trump said Monday.
He criticized Barletta for losing a 2018 Senate bid and not fighting harder to back Trump’s bogus claims that Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election.
“My loyalty is to a guy that was in there fighting,” Trump said. “And Mastriano was the guy that was fighting.”
Mastriano won Tuesday.