J.D. Vance’s come-from-behind victory in the Ohio Republican primary was the first test of Donald Trump’s influence in 2022 election cycle as well as the future of the Republican Party. Spoiler alert: He’s influential.
Mr. Vance was endorsed by Mr. Trump, who has also thrown his considerable influence behind candidates for office all the way from U.S. Senate seats down to state-level insurance and safety-fire commissioner.
Mr. Vance’s win will likely come as a disappointment to some Republicans who have been quietly hoping that Mr. Trump’s grip on the party is slipping. They see the midterms as an existential moment for the party. They are acutely aware that if the candidates he endorsed do well, the feeling of inevitability that he will be the party’s nominee in 2024 increases, annihilating any hope of reconstituting a political coalition around anything other than fealty to Mr. Trump.
And some Republicans have also worried that some of the outlandish candidates endorsed by Mr. Trump could lose winnable races.
Yet conservatives must be honest. At this time, there is no moving past Mr. Trump. He has remade the Republican Party in his image, and many Republican voters now crave his particular brand of combative politics.
In races across the country, Republicans who have won Mr. Trump’s endorsement mention it constantly. Even those who didn’t win his endorsement still mention him constantly. Mr. Trump might not have endorsed them, but they all endorse him.
In his endorsements, Mr. Trump appears to be hedging against any narrative failures by placing his chips all over the table. So far, in 2022, he has endorsed over 150 candidates.
Generally speaking, Mr. Trump has made two kinds of endorsements. Standard incumbent endorsements are the first. What is new this cycle is Mr. Trump’s endorsements of so many federal, gubernatorial, state executive and state legislative candidates. Many of these candidates agree with his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. It’s not unreasonable to assume he’s endorsing these local candidates to lay the groundwork to run in 2024. Who better to help shape the outcome of the next election than Republicans who believe the last election was stolen?
On the national level, some of Mr. Trump’s marquee endorsements seem risky. Dr. Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania was best-known as the former star of “The Dr. Oz Show” and is vulnerable to charges of carpetbagging. The biggest primary endorsement flop is likely to come in Georgia, where Mr. Trump is hoping to unseat Brian Kemp, a popular incumbent governor, with former Senator David Perdue, whose distinction in the race seems to consist mostly of repeating Mr. Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen.
There’s one candidate quality Mr. Trump can’t resist: celebrity. In endorsing Dr. Oz, Mr. Trump said, “When you’re on television for 18 years, that’s like a poll, that means people like you.” Celebrity also brings with it an edge when it comes to public performance. As Axios reported, Mr. Trump “puts a ton of stock in debates” and was “impressed” with Mr. Vance’s debate performances. In one debate, he thought “all the G.O.P. hopefuls were terrible except Vance. Trump says Vance ‘has the look.’”
Republicans discount Mr. Trump’s instincts at their peril. I’ll admit to scoffing at his eager endorsement of the former football star Herschel Walker for Senate in Georgia, and Republicans like Mitch McConnell were reportedly skeptical of the candidate, concerned about parts of his personal history. Mr. Walker has admitted, for example, to playing Russian roulette several times and to being “accountable” for what his ex-wife has called abusive behavior. (He said that he has struggled with mental illness in the past and wrote about it in his book, “Breaking Free: My Life With Dissociative Identity Disorder.”)
But when I conducted focus groups in Georgia, I immediately realized that Mr. Trump understood something I didn’t: Many people in Georgia love Mr. Walker without reservation and will forgive him any indiscretion. When I raised the issue of Russian roulette, a Georgia man responded, “He keeps winning.” And indeed, Mr. Walker is going to win the Republican Senate primary easily.
In Ohio, before Mr. Trump endorsed Mr. Vance in April, Mr. Vance was in third place, polling at about 10 percent, behind Josh Mandel and Mike Gibbons, each at about 21 percent. Without the Trump endorsement, Mr. Vance almost certainly languishes at around 10 percent and finishes fourth.
The other characteristic of many of those Mr. Trump has endorsed is their unreserved embrace of “Stop the Steal.” It’s apparent why: When you listen to Trump voters — as I’ve discovered conducting regular focus groups with them — their beliefs are crystal clear. A majority believe the 2020 election was stolen and would like to see Mr. Trump run again in 2024, and even those who don’t want him to run still want him to play a big role in the G.O.P.
Inevitably, many of Mr. Trump’s chosen will wind up in office. And whenever one of the candidates loses, there will be a horde of Republican political operatives ready to tell reporters — on deep background, of course — how this or that defeat signals that the Republican Party is finally ready to move beyond Mr. Trump.
The problem is that I see absolutely no evidence of this being true. We can tally Mr. Trump’s endorsement wins and losses, but we cannot fail to grasp a key point: Mr. Trump has already won.
Whether Mr. Trump’s handpicked candidates win or not, the Republican field that will emerge from these primary battles will be overwhelmingly Trumpy. If Brian Kemp and a handful of the elected officials who voted to impeach Mr. Trump survive their primaries, it will be good for democracy. But it will not be sufficient to blunt Mr. Trump’s wholesale takeover of the party.
For that to happen, scores of candidates endorsed by Mr. Trump who win their primaries will need to lose in the general election. Only sustained defeat delivered by high Democratic turnout and right-leaning, college-educated suburban voters refusing to support these Trumpy candidates will change the current trajectory of the Republican Party.
Unfortunately, for reasons historical (the party in power almost always loses seats in a midterm) and practical (inflation, violent crime and more), it’s shaping up to be a difficult election cycle for Democrats. Still, some key opportunities exist for Democrats, especially in swing-state gubernatorial and secretary of state races.
Ultimately, Mr. Trump’s win-loss record is likely to be mixed. And that won’t be enough to pull the Republican Party from his grip, not in this cycle. On the existential question, Mr. Trump has already won — for now.
Sarah Longwell (@SarahLongwell25) is a founder of Defending Democracy Together, executive director of the Republican Accountability Project, the publisher of The Bulwark and the host of “The Focus Group,” a podcast.
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Source: Elections - nytimes.com
