Politics is all about matching the man to the moment. Trump’s moment was six years ago.
Donald Trump announced his 2024 presidential campaign Tuesday night, heavy with the odor of a man fighting the last war. But politics is all about matching the man to the moment. Trump’s moment was six years ago. The nation’s voters have moved on, and if early signs are any indication, Republican primary voters are ready to consider doing so as well.
The 2022 midterms were about as decisive a failure for Trump as it was possible for them to be. Consider, as one item of evidence, the exit polls. Exit polls are not perfect; even though they should have the advantage over other polls of polling only people who actually voted, they still have their known biases and shortcomings. Still, they are the only evidence we get of who voted for whom and why at the time of the actual election, and when they deliver messages in bold, screaming letters, we should listen.
The 2022 exit polls examined the national House electorate and 19 Senate and/or governors races across eleven states — Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin. Two of the clearest findings across all of these races are that (1) Donald Trump is profoundly unpopular with the people who voted in 2022 and (2) Trump was a fatal drag on many Republican candidates.
On the first point, look at Trump’s favorability ratings. He is viewed unfavorably by a solid majority of the midterm voters nationally (by a 19-point margin of 58 percent to 39 percent), and in every state polled, even places such as Texas (52 percent disapproval to 45 percent approval), Ohio (53 percent to 44 percent), and North Carolina (53 percent to 43 percent) that he won two years ago. In Florida and New Hampshire, the polls asked a different question — whether voters wanted Trump to run again — and the results were, if anything, more lopsided. (Granted, in Florida, some Ron DeSantis voters may like Trump but want the man of the hour to run in his place). And across the board, the voters who viewed Trump unfavorably voted in vast margins for the Democratic candidates. Outside of Florida and New Hampshire, Mike DeWine in Ohio was the only one of these candidates to get more than 20 percent of the vote from people with an unfavorable view of Trump (DeWine still lost those voters 69 percent to 31 percent).
For a Trump presidential campaign, these are terrible numbers. Trump’s hope is that winning the nomination would force lots of people to a choice between him and Joe Biden. But Republican primary voters don’t need to pick a candidate who is already disliked by a majority of the voters in Texas and Ohio and nearly 20 points underwater in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Arizona.
How much of a drag was Trump’s unpopularity on Republican midterm candidates? The natural dynamic of midterms — the reason why we so often see them benefit the party out of power — is that the elections are about the president, who is frequently unpopular at that juncture (as is true of Joe Biden). Yet, the exit polls asked whether voters were voting to support or oppose Trump — and close to half said that they were. Republicans got massacred with those voters, denying them what might otherwise have been a historic landslide. In the generic House vote, for example, Joe Biden was quite unpopular (56 percent disapproval to 41 percent approval), although not quite as unpopular as Trump. At first glance, it might seem that Biden was the bigger problem. Democrats got just 14 percent of the voters who disapproved of Biden, while Republicans got 20 percent of the voters who disapproved of Trump. Among voters who disapproved of both men, Republicans won 57 percent to 40 percent. But normally, a midterm wouldn’t involve a competing unpopular figure from the other party.
A key question: Twenty-eight percent of voters said they were casting their ballots to oppose Trump, while only 16 percent said they were casting votes to support Trump. Thus, the anti-Trump voters outnumbered the pro-Trump voters by 75 percent. If you run the numbers, Democrats won 59.3 percent of the combined vote of the two groups. If both groups had stayed home, by contrast, the remaining 58 percent of voters who said that Trump was not a factor in their vote broke 58 percent to 40 percent for Republicans — a whopping 18-point win that would have satisfied even the wildest fantasies of the Big Red Tsunami.
The same story appears in race after race. In 16 of the 19 races polled, voters who cast their ballots without reference to Trump made up a majority, between 51 and 56 percent of the vote. In the other three (the North Carolina Senate race and the two Arizona races), they were just under half. In 18 out of 19 races, those voters supported the Republican candidate, frequently by wide margins. Among voters who didn’t cast a ballot with Trump in mind, Kari Lake won by 36 points, Blake Masters by 28, Adam Laxalt by 22, Don Bolduc by 19, Tim Michels by 17, Tudor Dixon and Dr. Oz by seven apiece, and Herschel Walker by six. Only Doug Mastriano was a bad enough candidate to lose on his own merits. But in each of those races, the anti-Trump voters swamped the pro-Trump voters by a wide enough margin to cancel that out.
Does Donald Trump add votes to the Republican Party? Sure. But he subtracts more than he adds. Without him, 2022 would have been much more about Joe Biden, and things would have gone very differently. 2024 doesn’t have to be that way.