In Arizona, Republicans endorsed by Donald Trump lost the races for governor and senator. But Trump didn’t make any endorsement in one statewide race — the race for state treasurer. The result? That Republican candidate won in a landslide. Kimberly Yee got 55.7% of the vote. As a reporter for the Arizona Republic notes, “If Arizona Republicans want to know where their party went wrong just look at state Treasurer Kimberly Yee. She’s the Republican who won — the one who wasn’t endorsed by Donald Trump.”
Meanwhile, Trump-backed Blake Masters lost his bid to unseat U.S. Senator Mark Kelly (D), by a 5% margin. And Trump-backed Kari Lake lost the governor’s race to Democrat Katie Hobbs, even though Hobbs was a weak and inept candidate who was afraid even to debate Lake. Lake managed to lose even though Arizona has had a Republican governor for the last 14 years. Both Masters and Lake antagonized some Arizona voters by claiming that Trump won the 2020 election, in which Biden managed to carry Arizona by a narrow margin. Voters also rejected the GOP Secretary of State candidate who denied Biden won Arizona. He lost by a 5% margin, as Arizona voters chose to elect a staunch leftist instead, to oversee the state’s elections.
One Trump-backed candidate may eke out a narrow victory in Arizona’s statewide elections: Tom Horne, the GOP candidate for Superintendent of Public Instruction. He is currently leading by a minuscule 0.2% of the vote with some votes yet to be counted. Tom Horne did not deny that Biden won the 2020 election, in his race against Democrat Kathy Hoffman. Rather than relitigating the 2020 election, Horne focused on criticizing his progressive opponent for supporting Critical Race Theory and neglecting the teaching of basic skills.
In Arizona’s elections for the U.S. House of Representatives, in which Trump took little interest, Republicans won six of the nine seats. Democrat Kirsten Engel was ousted by Republican Juan Ciscomani, who did not claim to voters that Trump won the 2020 election. Ciscomani is a staunch conservative who promised to battle the “radical left,” secure the border, protect the Second Amendment, vote against federal spending increases, oppose Critical Race Theory, and support free speech on college campuses.
In Georgia, a “right-wing Republican,” Governor Brian Kemp, was easily reelected despite signing into law an unpopular ban on abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, and other laws backed by right-wingers that made it harder for him to get reelected. Kemp has publicly acknowledged that Donald Trump failed to carry the state of Georgia in the 2020 election. Trump has never forgiven Kemp for saying that Trump lost Georgia, although it happens to be true. Trump opposed Kemp in the 2022 Republican Primary for governor, which Kemp won handily.
The conservative National Review says that “Trump is a loser. He squeaked past the most unpopular woman in America in 2016, he presided over a blue wave in 2018, he lost to a barely breathing Joe Biden in 2020, and he hand-picked a bevy of losing Republican nominees in 2022.”
In Pennsylvania, Trump-endorsed Mehmet Oz lost the Senate election to left-wing Democrat John Fetterman, who was seriously impaired by a stroke. Trump endorsed Oz in the Republican primary, even though Oz was very unpopular and trailed Fetterman in the polls, unlike David McCormick, Oz’s competitor in the Republican primary, who led Fetterman in the polls. Trump’s endorsement of Oz was decisive in the primary, but harmful to him in the general election. Oz had been trailing McCormick in the Republican primary race before Trump’s endorsement, but Oz won the primary by a minuscule 0.1% of the vote after Trump endorsed him.
The conservative New York Post, which endorsed Trump in the 2016 and 2020 general elections, says that “What Tuesday night’s midterm election results suggest is that former President Donald Trump is perhaps the most profound vote repellant in modern American history.”
The liberal New York Times notes that “in 36 House races that the Cook Political Report rated as tossups, Mr. Trump endorsed just five Republicans. Each one lost on Tuesday.”
Trump somehow managed to lose the 2020 election to the senile Joe Biden. Over 60 court rulings rejected various challenges to the presidential election results. That includes over a dozen rulings by judges appointed by Donald Trump himself. Most of the election results were not suspicious, but totally predictable based on public opinion polls. For example, those polls showed Biden leading Trump by 1.1% in Georgia in November 2020, right before the election. And Trump in fact lost in Georgia.
Trump raised $250 million from donors by making vote fraud claims that his own aides told him were mostly false. He raised that money to supposedly bring lawsuits challenging the election outcome. But instead, he directed virtually all of the money to an unrelated political action committee — rather than using it to challenge the election.
The lawyers that Trump used to challenge the election outcome were so incompetent, that they committed legal malpractice over and over again — especially attorney Sidney Powell. Her briefs were terrible. As Politico notes, in “a filing in federal district court signed by Powell misspelled ‘district’ twice in the first few lines.” As the Tribune notes, “the word district in the court name was misspelled twice on the first page of the document. First there was an extra c for ‘DISTRICCT’ and then, a few words later, ‘DISTRCOICT.’” Powell also misspelled the word “declaration” as “decleration,” cited fraud in non-existent places, and filed appeals in the wrong courts. Powell confused Michigan with Minnesota in court filings, citing election results from a bunch of Minnesota municipalities in her Michigan lawsuit.
Attorney Lin Wood, a Trump ally who pushed his vote fraud claims in court, was just as bad. Wood paid little attention to actual problems, such as evidence of partisan poll-workers in liberal counties, and a few instances of double-voting by mostly Democratic voters. Instead, Wood spewed easily-debunked conspiracy theories. Wood is such a crackpot that he later said the earth is flat!
Powell and Wood filed legal briefs filled with mistakes, typos, sentence fragments, and frivolous claims. Their legal briefs were so badly written that they made Trump look like a fool, and damaged his reputation and future electability.
