With the midterm elections officially over, Republicans are pointing fingers over their disastrous performance — and the divisive role of former President Donald Trump.
Herschel Walker’s loss in the closely watched Georgia Senate run off capped a campaign in which the GOP dramatically failed to engineer a sweeping red wave rebuke of President Joe Biden and the Democrats.
Republicans across the political spectrum from MAGA loyalists to “Never Trump” conservatives agree that they flopped.
But the party is bitterly divided about who should take the blame for the losses and even more deeply split on what to do about Trump’s vast influence going forward.
The stakes couldn’t be higher. The former president has already launched his 2024 comeback presidential run, and Democrats are determined to win four more years in the White House.
“There are Republicans looking ahead to a post-Trump Republican Party, but it’s still not clear what the divorce looks like,” said Nathan Gonzales, editor of Inside Elections.
Here’s how four distinct groups of Republicans are framing the midterms and what they hope to do about the biggest elephant in the GOP room.
True believers: Unite behind Trump
Trump’s loyal base of supporters say there is a very simple explanation for the Republican defeats: lack of unity.
The MAGA stalwarts say pro-Trump Republicans mostly ran strong campaigns by mobilizing the party’s right wing base behind issues like securing the southern border, intense dislike of Biden and their belief that the 202 election was tainted by Democratic fraud.
They claim Walker and others fell just short of winning mostly because Republicans in Name Only, or RINO’s, stabbed Trump’s favored candidates in the back.
The theory leads to only one good strategy for 2024: Clear the field for Trump and demonize any Republican who dares to challenge him.
Dump Trump or keep on losing
For the party’s Never Trump wing, the message of the midterms is equally simple: Republicans must dump Trump once and for all.
Led by Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., the GOP rebels see the midterms as a clear repudiation of Trump’s lawlessness and especially his failed effort to stay in power after losing the 2020 election.
Walker’s loss to Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., was typical of a string of 2022 defeats in eminently winnable swing states races, they say.
The former football star, who was hand-picked by Trump despite obvious shortcomings, narrowly lost in the same state where more moderate Republicans like Gov. Brian Kemp romped to victory. It was the same story in other battleground states like Pennsylvania, Arizona and Nevada.
Cheney and other rebels say the party needs to win back the nation’s trust by forcefully denouncing Trump and openly declaring him as unfit to serve.
But the real question is how much influence any of the Never Trumpers hold among Republican voters. Ten Republican House members, including Cheney, voted to impeach Trump. Only two won reelection.
Knives out, but how sharp?
The establishment wing of the Republican Party agree with the Never Trump rebels but they have far too much more to lose by openly breaking from Trump.
Embodied by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the aging leaders say the midterms would have worked out fine if the party had stuck with plain vanilla Republicans who ran on time-tested GOP messages of lower taxes and sniping about Biden’s supposed mishandling of the economy and rising crime.
Look at New York State, they say, where generic GOP candidates flipped five Democratic seats.
McConnell and his risk-averse allies are starting to whisper openly what they only said off the record before: that the party cannot win without sidelining Trump.
Skeptics counter that GOP moderates have long known how dangerous Trump was, both to the country and their party. But they lack the political courage to do anything meaningful about it, even after the shocking Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Even now, McConnell refuses to rule out voting for Trump. Ditto former Vice President Mike Pence, even after Trump cheered on the mob that bayed for his blood on Jan. 6.
Keep the MAGA, lose Trump
The one unqualified success for Republicans in the midterms was Florida.
Gov. Ron DeSantis swept to reelection by a 20% landslide and almost singlehandedly delivered the House of Representatives to the GOP with an audacious gerrymander.
DeSantis’s crushing win came on the back of his no-apologies embrace of MAGA-style politics including boasting about his COVID-skeptic policies and culture war offensives like the so-called Don’t Say Gay law that prohibits teaching anything related to gender identity or sexual orientation to younger schoolchildren.
Things weren’t too much different in Texas where Republican Gov. Greg Abbott easily swatted away a challenge from onetime Democratic rising star Beto O’Rourke despite presiding over the botched response to the Uvalde school massacre.
The midterm victories in the biggest red state of ‘em all offers some hope that the right Republican candidate might be able to elbow Trump aside without alienating his base of supporters.
For now, DeSantis and other ambitious right-wing Republicans could choose to ignore Trump and hope he loses his mojo with their shared MAGA base.
The real test will come when Trump starts naming names and fighting back.
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