When you look at the big Senate races, it is clear that Donald Trump blew his party’s chances at claiming the majority.
When you look at the big Senate races, it is clear that Donald Trump blew his party’s chances at claiming the majority.
Author’s note: This is the first in a series of articles looking at Donald Trump’s impact on the Republican candidates chosen to run in the 2022 midterms.
A major reason why many Republicans and conservatives have increasingly soured on Donald Trump following the underwhelming 2022 election cycle is that Trump played a crucial, often decisive role in picking so many of the bad candidates who lost winnable races. What follows is an examination of exactly how badly Trump harmed Republicans, beginning in this first installment with the big three Senate races in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona. All three were eminently winnable with good candidates, and any two would have given the party control of the Senate.
Trump and his defenders argue that he endorsed more than 200 candidates who won, and that this outweighs his losing endorsements. Clearly, as unpopular as Trump is, being endorsed by Trump was not a kiss of death all by itself. Nor did voters reject candidates merely for what the GOP’s more florid critics call “complicity.” In Florida, Marco Rubio won by 16 points running with Trump’s general-election endorsement, double his 2016 margin. In Utah, Trump endorsed the reelection of Mike Lee. Evan McMullin built his whole Senate campaign around Lee’s post-election text messages with Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows. Lee faced a surprisingly competitive race — he got the lowest vote share of any Utah Republican for the Senate since 1974 — but he won by double digits anyway.
But Mike Lee and Marco Rubio were not chosen or recruited by Donald Trump. And therein lies the difference.
In examining how Republicans ended up with so many losing candidates in winnable races, tallying endorsements is the wrong question. Trump padded his list by backing a ton of safe House incumbents with no real primary challengers. The more important question in assessing whether Trump should continue in a leadership role in the party is what role he played in the party’s selection of candidates in 2022.
That role goes beyond simply a numerical scoreboard of endorsements. Trump deterred some potential candidates, even incumbents, from running. He endorsed unsuccessful primary challengers to candidates who won in November. He helped some candidates win their primaries with decisively timed interventions. He endorsed others only when they had locked up their nominations, or only in the general election. Once the campaigns began, some Trump-endorsed candidates ran standard Republican campaigns; others, even those not formally endorsed by Trump, went all-in on 2020 stolen-election theories. The latter fared much worse.
A separate question, not examined here, is the impact of Trump, Stop the Steal, January 6, and the poor candidates recruited or endorsed by Trump on the huge spending advantages enjoyed by Democrats in many key races.
Turnout and Persuasion
Candidate selection is, of course, not the only way in which Trump negatively affected the midterms. As I have detailed from exit poll data, Trump was massively unpopular with the people who voted in the midterms. The people who said that they were casting a vote to oppose Trump greatly outnumbered those who said that they came out to support Trump. Indeed, the margin between the anti-Trump and pro-Trump voters was, by itself, enough to play a decisive difference in nearly every Republican defeat for which we have exit polls.
Whatever issues Republicans had with turning out their voters early or by mail-in balloting, the electorate wasn’t the main problem. According to the exit polls, the national electorate was R+3 — in other words, three points more Republican than Democrat, 36 percent to 33 percent. If you’re familiar with party identification in polls, R+3 is extraordinary red-wave turnout. The national electorate was D+7 in 2008, D+4 in 2016 and 2018, and D+1 in 2020. It was evenly divided in 2004 and 2010, the former for George W. Bush’s national popular majority, the latter for a 63-seat red wave in the House. It was R+1 in 2014, when Republicans gained nine Senate seats.
On a state-by-state level, exit polls show an electorate that was astoundingly Republican: R+14 in Florida, R+11 in Ohio and Texas, R+6 in Georgia and Arizona, R+5 in North Carolina, R+3 in Pennsylvania, R+2 in Nevada and Wisconsin, and R+1 in New Hampshire. I have expressed some skepticism about whether those polls classified too many Democrat-leaning voters as independents, but the data we have are hard to square with the theory that Republicans lost mainly due to failure to use mail-in balloting and early voting to turn out their voters.
The Key Senate Races
One must look race-by-race to see the true scale of Trump’s impact on Republican fortunes in 2022. It was not all negative in every case — but on balance, it was so overwhelmingly negative that only a determined effort at denial can avoid acknowledging the damage done. I will award a letter grade to each race to summarize Trump’s impact.
The most important elections of 2022 were the contests for the Senate. The Senate controls the courts. Each election yields a six-year term, so the consequences of this cycle would be felt until the end of the next presidential term. It entered this cycle divided 50/50. Senate races are traditionally highly correlated with presidential approval, so Joe Biden’s low standing offered a lot of Republican opportunities, but big-money statewide races can buck trends due to individual candidates.
Democrats had only one retirement, that of an elderly incumbent in deep-blue Vermont, but they had short-tenured incumbents in vulnerable seats in Georgia and Arizona, and there were other potential Republican pickups, such as Nevada and New Hampshire. Meanwhile, Republicans had to defend seats they won in good GOP years in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Ohio.
Pennsylvania: By any standard, the Pennsylvania Senate race was the year’s most important election. It turned out to be the only Senate seat to change parties, in a state that Trump carried by 0.7 points in 2016 and that Biden won by 1.2 points in 2020. It began 2022 with one senator from each party, a Democratic governor, and a Republican state legislature.
The top Republican priority should have been persuading incumbent Pat Toomey to run again. Every single Senate incumbent ended up getting reelected in 2022, as well as all but one incumbent governor (a Democrat). In retrospect, Toomey would almost certainly have been reelected in this environment. Trump, whose relations with Toomey were always frosty, did nothing to help persuade Toomey to stay on, and much to drive him away.
Toomey publicly announced his retirement a few weeks before the 2020 election, before he voted to impeach Trump over January 6 (after voting against the first impeachment). He offered principled reasons to not stay too long in public office. Like other Republicans who passed on winnable races, Toomey won’t exactly say that he retired rather than continue dealing with Trump and his influence on the party. So, it is possible that Toomey would have retired anyway. But given his small-government Tea Party principles and how obviously uncomfortable Toomey was with having Trump as the party leader, it seems clear that Trump’s continuing influence contributed to Toomey deciding to pack it in rather than fight for his seat.
Trump wasn’t worried: He had his man, Sean Parnell. Trump’s first endorsement to replace Toomey, in September 2021, was a failed 2020 congressional candidate who had never won an election, and whom Trump touted as “a great candidate, who got robbed in his congressional run in the Crime of the Century — the 2020 Presidential Election Scam.” Whatever might be said for Parnell’s political talents, he withdrew from the race after an ugly divorce in which his wife accused him of domestic abuse. Lest we pass too quickly over this disastrous judgment by Trump, imagine the national narrative if the domestic violence charges against Parnell had come out after he won the nomination, and while Herschel Walker was already dealing with similar baggage.
Enter Dr. Mehmet Oz, who won Trump’s endorsement on April 9, 2022, a little over five weeks before the May 17 primary. Despite nearly universal name recognition, Oz was then at 16.3 percent in the RealClearPolitics poll average, six points behind front-runner David McCormick in what was effectively a five-candidate field, none of whom had ever won elected office. Trump’s intervention was likely the decisive factor: Oz pulled ahead in the polls ten days later and never trailed. But he was hardly an overwhelming choice of the primary electorate, beating McCormick by 950 votes out of 1.35 million cast and capturing 31.2 percent of the vote. The other 68.8 percent of Republican primary voters were stuck with him.
Oz was a strange choice. He was not the natural MAGA candidate in the race: Kathy Barnette ran a much more populist campaign, embraced the Stop the Steal movement identified with so many other controversial Trump candidates who rejected the 2020 election outcome, and basically ran as a ticket with Trump-endorsed gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano. Barnette inspired some real populist energy in the western half of Pennsylvania, but she also had her own severe flaws. Trump seems to have warmed to Oz mainly because he was a celebrity and because he gave Trump a flattering bill of health when they met in 2016. He had previously served under Trump on the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition, although being a former Trump official is often a path to becoming one of Trump’s enemies.
Oz was not without his strengths. In addition to being massively famous and a smoothly experienced television performer, he is highly intelligent and intensely hard-working. He campaigned tirelessly, and by all accounts took seriously the role of a future Senator. He was, nonetheless, a poor candidate for reasons that were obvious from the outset. He lacked warmth — no bedside manner for the TV doc — and his lack of a prior record of political engagement made him seem a rich dilettante. His long residence in New Jersey allowed John Fetterman’s campaign to paint the Muslim with Turkish citizenship as “not a real Pennsylvanian.” Despite his distinguished medical record, he also carried an odor of quackery from some of the things he’d promoted during his TV career.
With 46.3 percent of the vote — two and a half points behind Trump’s own 2020 showing — Oz ended up running just under four points ahead of Mastriano, whose campaign was an even bigger fiasco also traceable to Trump’s malign influence. Mastriano and Oz took the Republican majority in the state house down with them. But at the congressional level, Republican House candidates won 52.5 percent of the vote statewide, and Republicans held their majority in the state senate, in which they also won a majority of the votes cast statewide. Even if you exclude the two House districts in which Republicans ran unopposed, Oz ran five to six points behind the party’s House candidates.
Looking geographically, Pennsylvania is traditionally divided in a way that compels both parties to make choices about the coalitions they pursue. The eastern part of the state is more upscale and educated and prefers socially moderate, fiscally conservative Republicans; the western part is more white working class and populist. The east is Arlen Specter country; the west is Rick Santorum country. Toomey, despite coming to office via successive primary challenges to Specter, was always more an eastern Pennsylvania guy. Even in 2016, Trump ran far ahead of Toomey in Western Pennsylvania, and Toomey ran even farther ahead of Trump in Eastern Pennsylvania.
Compared with those two paths to victory, Oz was the worst of both worlds. He ran ahead of Trump’s 2016 coalition in only one county, Philadelphia itself. He lost two counties Trump won: Northampton on the New Jersey border, and Erie in far northwestern Pennsylvania. Oz ran stronger than Toomey in a bunch of the thinly populated western counties, reflecting the reddening of those counties as well as Oz’s association with the Trump brand. But he did so at the cost of losing seven counties carried by Toomey, some of them among the state’s most populous: not just Erie and Northampton, but two heavily populated upscale suburban Philadelphia counties (Bucks and Chester), Dauphin, Centre (home of Penn State), and Allegheny (Fetterman’s home county, which contains Pittsburgh).
Oz ran ahead of the party’s 2022 House candidates only in three counties. All three were in counties he lost in the easternmost parts of the state: Philadelphia, Chester, and heavily Democratic Lackawanna. But his failure to keep the pace cost him even in the east and center of the state: Bucks and Centre, which Oz lost, were won by House Republicans.
A stronger candidate should have been able to do more against Fetterman, who had a debilitating stroke in May and was visibly impaired throughout the campaign, especially when the two candidates debated on October 25. Republicans would likely have been wiser to pick McCormick, who worked for the Commerce and Treasury departments during the George W. Bush administration. Also a novice candidate, and perhaps vulnerable to some similar populist attacks for being the CEO of a Connecticut-based hedge fund, McCormick looked more like a Toomey-style candidate retrofitted with some harder edges for the Trump era. At least one early poll had McCormick three points ahead of Fetterman in the spring at a time when Oz trailed him by nine.
Given the absence of any Republican alternative besides Toomey who had ever won an election, I will be charitable and give Trump a D, but the sheer number of ways in which he drove the final outcome argues against any better grade.
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Georgia: The single biggest target among Democrat incumbents in the Senate was Raphael Warnock. Georgia still has strong Republican roots (until 2020, no Republican had lost a statewide race in Georgia in 20 years), and Warnock was seen by many Republicans as essentially an accidental senator elected in the midst of Trump’s post-2020 tantrum. After all, the Republican candidates got more votes than the Democratic candidates in Warnock’s race on Election Day in 2020, just as David Perdue got more votes on Election Day, 2020 than did Jon Ossoff — until the runoff was blighted by Trump’s sore-loser campaign.
Even more so than in Pennsylvania, the recruiting of a challenger to Warnock cannot be separated from either the endgame of the 2020 election or from the 2022 election for governor. Because Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger stood in Trump’s way in the 2020 election controversy, Trump publicly swore revenge and set about recruiting his own slate of candidates for nearly every major office in Georgia.
Two of those recruits — former senator David Perdue, running against Kemp, and Congressman Jody Hice, running against Raffensperger — might have been formidable challengers to Warnock, had they kept their distance from Trump’s stolen-election obsessions. So might any number of experienced political figures in Georgia. Instead, Trump talked Herschel Walker into running. Arguably the greatest living Georgia sports legend, Walker played for Trump’s New Jersey Generals in the mid 1980s; he was thus a friend of Trump long before either man got into politics. Few Georgia Republicans wanted to go head-to-head with Walker in a primary. For a variety of reasons, not least of which was the need to pick their battles with Trump in the Georgia primaries, most leading Republicans in Georgia and nationally took a pass on opposing Walker, who faced only poorly funded opponents. Thus, while there is blame to go around among national and statewide Republicans in declining to present a serious alternative to Walker, Trump was pivotal to getting him into the race and deterring opposition.
The strategy of picking their battles with Trump worked for the rest of the ticket: Aside from the lieutenant governor’s race, all of Trump’s other endorsees lost in the primary, several of them (including Perdue) by substantial margins. All of those Republicans went on to win on Election Day by five or more points. Up and down the ticket, even in federal races for the House, Republicans had a good election in Georgia — except for Walker. An analysis by Nate Cohn of the New York Times emphasized that there was plenty of Republican voter turnout in Georgia, and that Republicans were likelier to turn out than Democrats — a pattern we have seen across a number of states. Even Walker supporters in polls were likelier to turn out than Warnock supporters. The New York Times/Siena poll found that Georgia voters wanted Republicans to control the Senate; they just didn’t vote that way, because they didn’t like the candidate.
A full catalogue of Walker’s well-known failures as a candidate is unnecessary here. His weakness as a public speaker, his documented mental-health issues, and his moral failures were all either apparent or easily discovered at the time Trump persuaded him to run for the Senate.
As in Pennsylvania, it is not entirely clear who would have run and beaten Warnock without Trump’s meddling, but the strength of the Georgia Republicans and the catastrophic recruiting of Walker justifies giving Trump an F.
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Arizona: In Arizona, there was a mounting fissure in the state Republican Party going into 2022, which Trump has done everything in his power to exacerbate. The old party establishment, an uneasy alliance of moderates with Reagan/Goldwater libertarian-leaning conservatives, was arguably more successful before Trump than the Georgia Republicans:
Arizona remains a red state in every meaningful sense. Republicans have controlled both houses of the state legislature for two decades, and appear to have retained control this year. Before 2022, Democrats hadn’t elected a state attorney general since 2006 or a state treasurer since the 1960s; the state treasurer’s race this year was a Republican blowout, the attorney general’s race still too close to call, but likely a very narrow Democratic pickup. Before 2018, Democrats hadn’t won a Senate race in the state since 1988. Before 2020, Bob Dole in 1996 was the only Republican to lose Arizona at the presidential level since 1948 — and 1948 was also the last time a Democrat won a majority of the popular presidential vote there. From 1968 through 1992, Democratic presidential candidates never cracked 40 percent in Arizona; from 2000 through 2016, they never cracked 45 percent. In the House, Republicans have held onto six of the state’s nine seats, winning the popular vote across those House races by a margin of 56.9 percent to 43.1 percent. Two Republican incumbents ran unopposed, but even if you arbitrarily assume that Democrats would have taken a third of the vote in each of those deep-red districts, Republicans would still have won the statewide vote for the House by 51.3 percent to 48.7 percent. Exit polls showed an electorate that was 33 percent Republican, 27 percent Democrat, 36 percent self-identified conservatives, and 22 percent self-identified liberals.
Some cracks were showing by the Trump era. Jeff Flake won his Senate seat with just 49.2 percent of the vote in 2012, but that was a year when Republicans won only two of the 13 Senate races decided by less than 15 points (Dean Heller in Nevada was the other). John McCain won a career-low 53.7 percent of the vote in 2016 after fending off a populist primary challenge from Kelli Ward, whom he defeated by twelve points. Both McCain and Flake drifted left in office and fell out with Trump. In 2018, a Democratic wave year but one more congenial to Republican Senate candidates, conventional Republican Martha McSally won the nomination with 55 percent of the vote when Ward and Sheriff Joe Arpaio divided the populist wing, but McSally went on to lose to Kyrsten Sinema by a little over two points.
In the round of musical chairs that followed McCain’s death in 2018, Governor Doug Ducey first picked former senator Jon Kyl as a placeholder, then — in a rare misstep by Ducey — chose McSally to hold and try to defend the seat in 2020. Ward became the state-party chair. McSally ran a lackluster campaign and lost to Mark Kelly in 2020. She ran two points behind Trump, who lost Arizona by a hair. Trump, backed enthusiastically by Ward, charged pervasive fraud in the 2020 election, and demanded an expensive audit of Maricopa County, which concluded that Trump lost the county by slightly more than the official count.
Trump declared war on Ducey, for certifying the 2020 election, and on state attorney general Mark Brnovich, for concluding that Joe Biden did not steal Arizona. Ward led the state party in censuring Ducey, Flake, and McCain’s widow, stopping short only from censuring McCain himself posthumously. She may as well have censured Arizona’s Republican voters.
The bland Kelly was in some ways a fatter target than Warnock in 2022, tying himself closely to Biden and his agenda (both of which are unpopular in Arizona) while Sinema acted as one of the few effective checks on Biden’s money-printing machine. The top recruit sought by Mitch McConnell and other Republicans was Ducey, who was term-limited from seeking a third term as governor. Arguably the most effective enactor of conservative policy in the country, Ducey was elected state treasurer with 52 percent of the vote in 2010, won the governorship with 53 percent in 2014 (after winning a six-way primary by 15 points), crushed a primary challenge in 2018 by 40 points and went on to be reelected with 56 percent of the vote.
Like Toomey, Ducey won’t say he passed on a Senate bid because of Trump, and as a career executive in business and politics, he likely had little enthusiasm for moving to Washington to become one of 100. Still, without Trump’s enmity, Ducey could likely have sailed to the nomination and would probably have beaten Kelly. It is hard not to conclude that Ducey’s falling-out with Trump, which was caused entirely by Trump’s rage over the 2020 election, contributed mightily to Ducey passing on the race.
Arizona could still have run a proven conservative, because Brnovich was not similarly deterred. Brnovich toppled a Republican incumbent in the 2014 primary, won 53 percent of the vote to become state attorney general that fall, and won 52 percent in his reelection in 2018, running four points behind Ducey but four points ahead of McSally. He is best known nationally for a successful 2021 Supreme Court defense of Arizona’s election laws against all the usual Democratic charges of racism, voter suppression, Jim Crow, and the rest. But defending actual election integrity put him, too, at odds with Trump. In December 2021, Kari Lake (running for governor of Arizona) “headlined a rally outside Brnovich’s office in December and used her time at the microphone to demand Brnovich file charges and make arrests.” In April 2022, Trump issued a statement claiming that Brnovich had disregarded “massive information on the fraud” and “crime committed” in the 2020 election that was “compelling, irrefutable, and determinative.” Trump promised an endorsement of one of his opponents:
NEW!
President Donald J. Trump:
“Attorney General Brnovich of Arizona was given massive information on the fraud and so-called ‘irregularities’ that took place in the 2020 Presidential Election…rather than go after the people that committed these election crimes, it looks… pic.twitter.com/a5T2OOqk0F
— Liz Harrington (@realLizUSA) April 18, 2022
Brnovich offered the reliability that characterized winning Republican candidates in 2022, but the attacks from Trump and Lake took their toll. Brnovich led by double digits in some early polls. If the modest public polling in the race can be trusted, he was still at or near the front of the pack until June 2, when Trump endorsed Blake Masters. Trump wasn’t shy about why: “Blake knows that the ‘Crime of the Century’ took place, he will expose it and also, never let it happen again,” he declared. Masters responded that “President Trump is a great man and a visionary.” Alayna Treene of Axios reported that “one key factor was Masters’ attendance at a screening of the 2020 election conspiracy documentary, “2,000 Mules,” at Mar-a-Lago last month — a move Trump thought gave him an edge over the other candidates, according to two sources.”
Masters — in single digits until late April — leaped ahead and ended up winning the primary with 40.1 percent of the vote. Brnovich, the two-time winner of statewide popular majorities, got 17.8 percent.
This turned out to be a disastrously bad endorsement. Masters, who unlike Ducey or Brnovich had never run for office or won an election before, was a strange, creepy guy with no personal charisma. Assessments of how he went over with the public found “some of the worst focus-group results of any Republican candidate ever, according to the head of a Mitch McConnell–aligned super PAC; lower favorability ratings than Roy Moore, according to an internal poll of the Arizona Senate race.”
Masters took fire for being too Trumpy, and also for some amateur efforts to have it both ways. After he scrubbed from his website his primary-season claims about the 2020 election and said in a debate that Biden was the “legitimate president,” he got a call from Trump, who demanded that he not “go soft” and follow Lake’s model: “Look at Kari. Kari’s winning with very little money. And if they say, ‘How is your family?’ she says the election was rigged and stolen. You’ll lose if you go soft. You’re going to lose that base.” (Lake lost). Masters promised Trump, “I’m not going soft.” Tucker Carlson, for some reason, thought Masters’s sycophantic responses to Trump were helpful to him, and played the call on national TV. Masters kicked up a similar storm when he seemed to back away from pro-life commitments made during the primary.
He also brought a lot of strange baggage of his own. He touted the Unabomber when asked in a debate to name a thinker people should know more about. His past included all sorts of weird paleolibertarian stuff like this:
In a 2006 post on the libertarian site LewRockwell.com, he rehashed an elaborate conspiracy theory about the United States’ entry into World War I, implying a connection between the banking “Houses of Morgan and Rothschild” and the failure to alert American steamship passengers to German threats that preceded the sinking of the Lusitania. His main source was C. Edward Griffin, an ardent libertarian who once said that “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” — a notorious antisemitic forgery — “accurately describe much of what is happening in our world today.”
He was pulverized by Democrats for touting entitlement reform and saying, in a debate, “Maybe we should privatize Social Security.” Naturally, Kelly misrepresented this as a plot to defund the system, but it allowed Masters to be saddled with all of the baggage of the Romney–Ryan era Republican Party in addition to all the baggage of Trump and a trove of stuff that sounded like it came from a Ron Paul newsletter. Meanwhile, there ended up being a festival of finger-pointing between Masters, tech magnate Peter Thiel, McConnell, and Trump over whose responsibility it was to adequately fund the general election campaign. Masters, who relied heavily upon the patronage of Thiel in the primary, enjoyed no such financial edge against Kelly, who outspent him significantly.
The results weren’t pretty. Compare Masters’s showing with that of the top-of-the-ticket Republican candidates for president, senator, or governor since 2016, along with the midterm statewide votes for Republican House candidates in 2018 and 2022. Masters was the weakest of the bunch, losing by nearly five points, more than two points worse than either of McSally’s campaigns:
As in Pennsylvania, Republicans ran up the score in the popular vote for the House because Paul Gosar and Debbie Lesko both ran unopposed, but the House GOP slate still drew 81,000 more votes than Masters. Masters ran nearly ten points behind Ducey in 2018, in a much more favorable environment for Republicans. This was a fiasco.
Per the exit polls, the 36-year-old Masters lost voters in their 30s by 21 points, and voters in their forties by eleven. He lost white voters (by one point), which no Republican can survive in any jurisdiction in America, on account of losing white women by ten and white college graduates by 18. He lost independents by 16 and moderates by 30. He won 89 percent of Republicans, while Kelly was winning 97 percent of Democrats and six percent of 2020 Trump voters. He lost suburbanites, who make up 48 percent of the Arizona electorate, by one. He ran up only a twelve-point margin among white voters without college degrees. Kelly rolled up a 59-point margin among the 63 percent of the electorate who thought Biden won the 2020 election. Fifty-seven percent of Arizona voters had an unfavorable view of Trump, and Masters lost them by 72 points; 57 percent disapproved of Biden, but Masters had a less commanding 66 point margin among them. Kelly won 28 percent of voters who listed inflation as their top issue.
The 800-pound gorilla of Arizona elections is Maricopa County, which houses both Phoenix and Mesa and accounts for about 60 percent of the state’s voters. The other big county is Pima, which includes Tuscon and the southern border. Traditionally, Maricopa leans modestly Republican, while Pima is heavily Democrat, and the rest of the state is deep red. Arizona’s blue shift in recent years has not, unlike in some states, been driven by a disproportionate population shift towards the big, urban-centered counties. It has been largely the result of demographic and political change within Maricopa.
Maricopa’s share of the state electorate peaked in the 2020 presidential and Senate races, but not by a large amount. In 2022, Maricopa turnout was down significantly in the House races, due in part to a chunk of the county being included in Lesko’s and Gosar’s districts. Overall, the rest of the state outside of Maricopa and Pima was a larger share of the electorate in 2022 across the board than in any recent election. Arizona Republicans didn’t lose in 2022 because the red hinterlands got swamped by the big cities; quite the opposite happened:
Masters was a terrible candidate for Maricopa. He lost the county by six points just four years after Ducey carried it by nearly 14, and while the county was swinging from 50-48 percent Democrat to 57-40 percent Republican in House races. He did worse there than Trump, Lake, or McSally:
Kelly, meanwhile, ran up bigger margins against Masters in Pima than any Democrat had done in recent years, even Katie Hobbs in her campaign against Lake:
What about heavily rural red Arizona? Here, at last, Masters wasn’t the very worst, compared with McSally’s 2018 campaign, but his 12.4 point margin of victory in the rest of the state pales in comparison with Ducey, McCain, or Lake — three very different candidates:
Maybe Arizona Republicans would not have recruited Ducey for the Senate without Trump, and maybe Brnovich would have lost to Jim Lamon in the primary. But clearly, Trump’s intervention had a disfiguring impact on this election from start to finish, leading to the worst statewide defeat for Arizona Republicans since at least the 2006 race for governor, accomplished by a candidate who excited nobody and turned off every category of persuadable voter. F.
* * *
If Donald Trump had simply disappeared after losing the 2020 election, it is highly likely that Republicans would have won at least two of these three races, and probably all three. They would today control the Senate. In the next installment, I will follow how much further his leadership damaged the party in 2022.