Washington Republicans are in turmoil hours before Donald Trump is expected to launch a new presidential campaign, exacerbated by the party’s prolonged wait for a House majority to use to try to unseat President Joe Biden.
Trump apparently plans to open the 2024 election cycle at his Mar-a-Lago resort Tuesday night, despite the failure of his midterm election denial colleagues and unusual ambivalence among GOP lawmakers about his prospects.
His failed attempt to use the congressional elections to demonstrate his own power has sparked a chaos of infighting and recriminations over the GOP’s failure to generate a red wave to claim large majorities in Congress. It also raised questions about Trump’s own viability for the general election in 2024. The result is that the GOP in Washington is further weakened and Trump is under some of the most intense pressure he has faced during a tumultuous political career. – even if there is no sign yet that his enduring power base among the party’s adoring base has eroded.
The former president was clearly hoping to take credit for a Republican midterm performance to supercharge his bid to win back the presidency, but the party failed to retake the Senate — and a full week from Election Day, it’s still waiting for the his control of the House for confirmation. The GOP added several seats overnight and is now three seats short of the 218 it needs. But his final margin will be much smaller than he had hoped, meaning the majority will be volatile and difficult to manage.
But while that could cause general chaos in Washington, it could give pro-Trump factions in the party an opportunity to maximize their leverage over potential House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who faces a tougher-than-expected race to reduce the votes it would need. to take over the top job in January. On Monday night, GOP Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona confirmed he would challenge McCarthy in an effort to show he still lacked sufficient support for the speaker.
But the California Republican and current minority leader received applause after calling on his caucus to show unity on Monday ahead of Tuesday’s leadership election.
Backbiting has also erupted in the Senate GOP, with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz criticizing veteran Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, while Florida Sen. Rick Scott is mulling a challenge despite the GOP campaign committee’s mismanagement of the effort. to win the Senate. A race is also looming for control of the Republican National Committee.
Ted Cruz says he’s “pissed off” and blames Mitch McConnell
The finger-pointing is emerging for a disappointing performance for Republicans. Trump-style extremism was rejected at the ballot box in a vote that should have been a referendum on an unpopular incumbent in a tough economy — instead of a predecessor who left the White House but won’t.
There is every logical reason for Republicans to move on from Trump. One lesson from last week’s election is that voters didn’t reject Republicans on their own. Real conservatives who distanced themselves from the former president, such as Govs. Brian Kemp of Georgia, Mike DeWine of Ohio, Ron DeSantis of Florida and Chris Sununu of New Hampshire cruised to re-election.
But many Trump-backed nominees for governor, secretary of state, and Senate and House seats have come under fire. One of the election’s most high-profile naysayers, Arizona Republican Kari Lake, will lose to Democrat Katie Hobbs, CNN reported Monday night. Democrats in Michigan, meanwhile, won control of the state legislature, which had spent the past two years on election-denying distractions. Pledging allegiance to Trump and his election fraud has proven to be a disastrous campaign strategy for many candidates.
Lake’s projected loss in the Arizona governor’s race on Monday completes a near-total destruction of the 2020 election naysayers in swing states that Trump pushed into the midterms.
His determination to run again is already drawing widespread opposition among many Republicans on Capitol Hill, who are upset by his failure to mount a red wave to capture the Senate, which Democrats hold, and the House, which remains unclaimed.
A new Trump campaign would pose a test between growing skepticism about his ambitions in the upper echelons of his party and the adoration millions of grassroots voters still feel for the twice-impeached former president.
Despite once telling supporters he’d do so much winning they’d be bored, Trump’s record on Election Day is pretty thin — except for the transformative shock of his 2016 victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton.
The GOP losses under his watch — when they lost the House in 2018 and the Senate two years later — are prompting a debate about his political viability in the long-dominant party. His support of low-quality, fringe, election-denying GOP candidates in this year’s midterms doesn’t just detract from his likely starting party. The former president is accused of sabotaging his own team.
But true to form, Trump has shown little sign of self-doubt. Instead, he is attacking those Republicans who have proven they can build majorities more recently than he has — including DeSantis, his biggest potential threat in a presidential primary, and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who campaigned for GOP candidates across the country this year after last year flipping a state that Biden had won by 10 points.
But while Trump’s brand has been tarnished and there are fresh doubts about whether a new campaign based on his obsessive claims of voter fraud will make it to a general election, his past record of resilience suggests he should not be dismissed.
The 45th president has fallen and been damaged in the past — after releasing the Access Hollywood tape in his first campaign when Republicans lost the House in 2018 and then after his own general election loss in 2020. He won the historic shame of a second impeachment after inciting a riot at the US Capitol in 2021.
But he always bounces back, leveraging an almost mythic bond with the Republican base to tear down party rivals. Trump’s power has always been rooted in the perception that potential Republican foes cannot afford to attack him, as they would alienate his supporters and destroy their own political careers. One motivation behind an early White House announcement may be to prove that’s still the case, as candidates like DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence and other presidential stalwarts assess his strength as they consider their own aspirations.
Pence, for example — who will appear in a CNN town hall Wednesday afternoon — told ABC News in an interview that aired Monday that the American people “will have better choices in the future.”
A 2024 presidential race — with several strong potential GOP alternatives poised in the wings — will test whether Trump’s magnetism with primary voters will overcome growing fatigue over his incessant lies about 2020 election fraud. And it would put voters of the GOP primary one question: Is their loyalty to the former president more important than concerns about his ability to actually win the White House, despite mounting evidence to the contrary?
So unless he changes his stance, Trump — who still rages about the last presidential election at every campaign rally — will have to prove that his false claims of a stolen election in 2020 are a winning message in 2024.
The evidence shows that while these lies may still be hot currency in the GOP base, they are a failure in a broader national electorate.
“You know, if you lose over and over again to a team that’s not that great, you have to reevaluate, is it time to rebuild?” Maryland Republican Gov. Larry Hogan said on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday. “Trump cost us the last three elections. And I don’t want to see it happen a fourth time.”
GOP governor: ‘Trump cost us the race’
Outgoing Pennsylvania GOP Sen. Pat Toomey essentially blamed the former president for losing his seat. The Democratic race for Senate control ran through Pennsylvania, where Democrat John Fetterman defeated Republican Mehmet Oz. Backed by Trump, Oz narrowly edged out businessman David McCormick, a potentially stronger general election candidate, in the primary.
“Across the country, there’s a very high correlation between MAGA candidates and big losses, or at least dramatically underperforming,” Toomey told CNN’s Erin Burnett last week.
On Monday, Idaho GOP Rep. Mike Simpson told CNN that while he embraced Trumpism, he was tired of Trump and didn’t think he was good for the party. “I think his policies were good. I just don’t need all the drama with it,” he told CNN’s Alex Rogers.
And one of the incoming Republican House members, Mike Lawler, who took a Democratic seat in New York, said it’s time for someone else. “I would like to see the party move forward,” he told CNN’s “This Morning” last week.
And in an exclusive interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Monday, outgoing Republican Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker said the world is tired of the radicalism represented by former…
