How Not to Stop Trump

T he conventional wisdom about the November 8 midterm elections is still taking shape. In conservative circles, the discourse about the “red ripple” has largely consisted of finger-pointing, inside-the-trenches sniping, and dueling allegations of incompetence and malice — a bitter downturn from the GOP’s optimistic expectations on the eve of voting. In some ways, the returns raised more questions than answers. In one big way, however, the message of Election Night was unambiguous: It was a Republican failure.

As is so often the case with election postmortems, the various explanations for the GOP’s underwhelming showing have tended to fit conveniently with the pre-existing political commitments of whoever happens to be doing the explaining. (As my friend Chris Johnson quipped on Twitter the morning after Election Night: “Happy ‘we would have done better if we had embraced the ideological/policy positioning I was already advocating for’ day to all who celebrate.”) With some notable exceptions, very few in any of the GOP’s, and the conservative movement’s, dueling tribes have been willing to implicate their own tribe’s shortcomings in the red wave that wasn’t. The MAGA wing of the party points to some combination of Mitch McConnell, allocation of campaign funds, and ballot harvesting. Libertarians blame national conservatives. National conservatives blame libertarians. At the Federalist, Victoria Marshall suggests that the GOP’s intraparty strife is due to nebulous “powerful special interests” that “are working overtime to pit DeSantis and Trump supporters against each other, divide the party, and take back control from the anti-establishment wing,” completing an impressive series of mental gymnastics to arrive at the conclusion that the fault lies with “some conservative media outlets” for noticing that Trump attacked DeSantis, rather than with Trump for leveling the attack in the first place.

Trump’s singular presence, as always, features heavily in these debates. Among many Republican and conservative elites, the former president has emerged as one of the central culprits for the GOP’s lackluster midterms performance. As I noted in a recent column for Unherd, on the heels of the election, blame was cast on Trump by former House speaker Paul Ryan, prominent right-wing media outlets like Fox News and the New York Post, and GOP billionaire mega-donors who once backed him.

Others have cast not-so-subtle aspersions while avoiding any explicit mention of Trump’s name: Mike Pence, for example, told Fox News that Republicans who “focused on the future” and on “the issues the American people were focused on . . . fared very well, where by contrast, candidates that were focused on the past, on re-litigating the last election, did not fare as well” — “a real affirmation,” he argued, “that the Republican Party going forward needs to be focused on the future.” Mike Pompeo tweeted: “We were told we’d get tired of winning. But I’m tired of losing. And so are most Republicans.” Later, he added: “We also need to talk about some hard truths about the conservative movement, our party, and our country…Personality and celebrity didn’t get it done because they are not as powerful as character, competence, and commitment.”

Aside from debates about Trump’s influence in general, there are legitimate reasons to view his interventions in this election cycle as a net negative for the party. While it’s true that the vast majority of the 187 Trump-backed congressional candidates (25 for the Senate, 162 for the House) on the November 8 ballot prevailed, Trump’s endorsements in competitive races — the contests that were pivotal to determining the balance of power in the federal government — fared considerably worse. None of the four Trump endorsements in the Senate races rated as “Toss-Ups” by the Cook Political Report — having prevailed in contested primaries at least in part owing to his support — won outright: Blake Masters lost to incumbent Mark Kelly in Arizona, Mehmet Oz ceded an open — but previously Republican — seat to John Fetterman in Pennsylvania, Adam Laxalt fell short by razor-thin margins in Nevada, and Herschel Walker’s bid to unseat Democrat Raphael Warnock in Georgia is headed for a runoff, with Walker no longer sharing the ballot with a popular governor. Of the six Trump-backed Republicans running in “Toss-Up” House races, five lost; the sixth, running in Arizona’s first congressional district, eked out a narrow 3,000-vote win. Democrats flipped districts in Michigan and Washington where Trump-endorsed primary challengers had bested incumbents. In competitive gubernatorial races, Trump endorsements failed to unseat Democratic incumbents in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Kansas; in Arizona, where popular Republican governor Doug Ducey was term-limited, the Trump-backed Kari Lake lost by a narrow margin to a lackluster Democrat.

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To be sure, other factors were at play, to varying degrees: strong Democratic challengers, the overturn of Roe, incumbency advantage, and Democratic campaign funding advantages. (Conservative failures also occurred in places where Trump can’t be blamed, such as the six-point loss of Montana’s ballot referendum that would have mandated life-saving care for children born alive after attempted abortions.)

But if they do want the party to move on from Trump, the Republican establishment will have to take care: Trump’s populist appeal and the fierce loyalty he enjoys from a segment of the Republican base are predicated on his being the anti-establishment heavyweight. His critics may contend, with good reason, that a former president and de facto party leader is hardly “anti-establishment.” But ultimately, it will be the perception among rank-and-file Republican voters that counts.

The current closing of ranks against Trump conjures memories of 2016, when Republican elites threw everything but the kitchen sink at him in an attempt to stymie his path to the nomination, only to make him more sympathetic to Republican voters who had spent years resenting their party’s leadership class. (A July 2015 Pew poll, conducted as Trump was surging in the GOP primary, found that Republican voters’ view of their party had declined 18 points since January.) The party now risks reminding otherwise-persuadable Republican voters why they loved him in the first place.

So what can Republicans who want to move on from Trump do? As Peter Spiliakos noted in an insightful piece on NRO today, one option is to turn to the conservative voices that Republican voters actually trust:

Talk radio is, potentially, one of the most powerful forces in the nominating contest. It is more trusted among Republican-leaning voters than the mainstream media. Collectively, it even has wider reach than Rupert Murdoch’s empire of conservative news outlets (the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal, and Fox News). . . . Talk radio’s audience is scattered between both syndicated shows and local programs — but if a clear consensus 2024 candidate emerged among conservative talk-radio hosts, it could make a vast difference to their millions of listeners.

As Spiliakos observes, “Trump himself has greater reach and credibility with Republican voters than the Murdoch empire (as he proved in both 2016 and 2020),” but right-wing talk radio played a king-making role in the 2016 primaries. If someone like DeSantis were to capture that media ecosystem’s imagination, it could handicap Trump’s chances.

For that to happen, DeSantis — and as it stands right now, the Florida governor does look like the most viable alternative — needs to capture the Republican electorate’s imagination. He’s done an impressive job of that thus far, but it remains to be seen how he fares when up against Trump himself. DeSantis is doing extremely well in early Republican primary polls because he has positioned himself as a successor to Trump rather than a rebuke of him. That’s his best shot at the GOP nomination. But if Republican leaders make the foolhardy decision to run the 2016 strategy again, making the 2024 primary a referendum on Trump’s unfitness for office rather than presenting DeSantis as a positive alternative, it will play right into the former president’s hands.