2020 Is Over

F or media obsessives, the big questions in the 2022 Republican primaries are all about Donald Trump, his claims that the 2020 election was stolen, and the January 6 riot. If you look at the results, however, it turns out that Republican voters have a lot else on their minds, and aren’t particularly stuck in 2020.

At first glance, it would seem difficult to tease out a trend. If you want to make the case that this is still Donald Trump’s party, marching to the beat of Trump’s endorsements, and full of Stop the Steal obsessives and a menagerie of rough-edged candidates, you’ll have plenty of evidence to point to. In Ohio, Trump-backed J. D. Vance won a five-way race for the party’s Senate nomination over four other candidates, three of whom had vied for the MAGA label. In North Carolina, Trump-backed Ted Budd beat former governor Pat McCrory. In Georgia, Trump-backed Herschel Walker stampeded his primary opponents like they were so many broken tackles. Dr. Oz is still clinging to a tenuous lead in Pennsylvania in a race where an even-more-MAGA (but not Trump-endorsed) candidate finished third. Formerly Trump-endorsed Mo Brooks made the runoff in Alabama. In Arkansas, John Boozman, with Trump’s backing, fended off a primary challenge from the right.

Former Trump press secretary (and daughter of the state’s former governor) Sarah Huckabee Sanders won the party’s gubernatorial nomination in Arkansas, while Stop the Steal rallygoer Doug Mastriano won handily against divided opposition in Pennsylvania’s gubernatorial primary. In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott beat back challenges from the right with Trump’s endorsement, while Trump-backed Ken Paxton and Dawn Buckingham won the GOP nominations for attorney general and public-land commissioner in their respective runoffs. In Georgia, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene easily survived a primary challenge. Nationwide, Trump-approved candidates have won at least five out of the six open-seat House races in which he endorsed. (Vernon Jones finished second in Georgia’s tenth district, but is headed to a runoff.) In other statewide races, Tim Griffin won an open race for Arkansas attorney general, and Burt Jones, running for an open seat as lieutenant governor of Georgia, outdistanced his top opponent by 20 points and seems at this writing as if he might avoid a runoff.

If you want to make the case that Trump fever is broken, there is also plenty to work with. In Georgia, Trump invested heavily in defeating Governor Brian Kemp, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Attorney General Chris Carr, and Insurance Commissioner John King. Yet despite recruiting heavyweight challengers to Kemp (former senator David Perdue) and Raffensperger (Representative Jody Hice), Trump failed to unseat any of the four incumbents, who all trounced the field en route to victory. In North Carolina, Madison Cawthorn was defeated. In Pennsylvania, Oz may yet lose. In Alabama, incumbent governor Kay Ivey beat back primary challenges encouraged by Trump, although he did not formally endorse a candidate, and Brooks was left for dead until Trump publicly un-endorsed him, after which he surged again in the polls to ultimately finish in second, 15 points behind Katie Britt, whom he’ll face in a runoff. A Trump-backed primary challenge to Idaho governor Brad Little failed, as did Trump’s candidate (Charles Herbster) in the open race for Nebraska governor. Trump stayed out of Dan Crenshaw’s House primary in Texas, which Crenshaw won easily.

What does it all mean? The most obvious conclusion to draw is that Republican primary voters are no longer so caught up in the Trump Show that other factors don’t matter in competitive races. Incumbency still matters: aside from the inept and self-sabotaging Cawthorn, every major race with an incumbent was won by the incumbent regardless of what Trump did. Money matters: Greene had a huge financial edge over her challenger, while Cawthorn did not. Divided fields matter: In Pennsylvania, David McCormick had less competition in his “lane” than Oz did, and Mastriano benefitted from a split in the “normal”-lane vote between Lou Barletta and Bill McSwain. Candidate quality matters: Ohio voters settled on Vance only after finding the rest of the choices wanting, Brooks revived as Mike Durant collapsed in the same way that Mike Gibbons did in Ohio, George P. Bush’s effort to unseat Paxton was hurt by his last name, and McCrory had baggage from his prior tenure as governor, while Kemp and Abbott had particularly strong records to run on. Campaigns matter: Chuck Edwards and his allies battered Cawthorn, and Brooks got a wake-up call from Trump’s abandonment that prompted him to run a big ad blitz down the stretch, while Perdue all but disappeared from the campaign trail near the end.

Republican voters, by and large, liked Donald Trump’s policy agenda, which outside of a harder line on immigration was more an evolution of than a revolutionary break in practice from the platforms and agendas of Mitt Romney, John McCain, and George W. Bush. They also liked Trump’s combative attitude, and associated him with a willingness to fight for the policies they wanted in a way that “establishment” Republicans often failed to do. All of these attitudes are still out there, and they go a ways toward explaining why Trump’s endorsements are still influential in close races and those with big, wide-open fields of candidates. The idea that association with Trump or “Stop the Steal” or even January 6 would, overnight, become radioactive has not panned out.

But at the same time, Republican primary votes are no longer something Trump can just conjure up by pressing the Diet Coke button on his desk, if they ever were. Georgia voters followed Trump’s lead in open-seat races, but they could see that the policy agenda they associated with Trump would be best served by reelecting Kemp, and that Trump was wallowing in the past by trying to tear down Kemp and other incumbents. Voters in Idaho and Alabama liked their governors, too, and didn’t much care that Trump felt otherwise. Even in the Raffensperger–Hice race, waged almost entirely over election-integrity issues, Raffensperger was able to convince voters that he could be trusted to stand up to Stacey Abrams, and that this mattered more than charges that he’d stood up to Trump when he shouldn’t have.

What does this tell us moving forward? Donald Trump isn’t going away, and Republican candidates will — and as a matter of practical politics, should — still seek his endorsement, as they would that of any other former president still popular within his own party. But they need not cringe in terror at offending him, as if he wields a magical hold over voters unable to think for themselves.

For Trump personally, however, the warning lights are flashing. A year and a half after he left office, he remains obsessed with the past, unable to move on from 2020, while voters clearly have more pressing concerns. If Trump runs for president in 2024 and faces an opponent who runs the Kemp playbook — standing up fearlessly to his attacks and keeping the focus on each candidate’s record and stances on the current issues of the day, rather than relitigating 2020 — he may find that his grip on the party’s voters isn’t nearly as strong as he thought it was.