Privately, progressive reporters in Washington, DC and New York City say at cocktail parties that they hope Trump wins the Republican nomination, so that the Republicans will lose the general election in 2024. If he wins the Republican nomination, they will likely do what they did in 2016 — release dirt they have kept private during the Republican primary, to try to make him lose the general election, and take other Republican candidates down with him (most voters these days vote a straight ticket, so if they vote Democrat for President, they will usually vote for the Democrat in House and Senate races, too). The media attacks Trump a lot, but very little compared to how much it will attack him once Republicans nominate him again. Trump’s popularity will also likely decline after he is nominated, because he is likely to be convicted in some court before the 2024 general election, and swing voters who say in polls that they support Trump now also say they won’t support him if he is convicted of anything.
In 2016, the press kept the the “Access Hollywood” video — in which Trumped talked about grabbing women “by the pussy” — a secret, until after Trump got nominated. Then, the press released the humiliating video right before the election, hoping to tank Trump’s campaign and make down-ballot Republican candidates lose. It waited until the moment when releasing the video would do the maximum damage to Trump’s campaign. They will do the same sort of thing again in 2024.
In 2016, voters in swing states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were so tired of 8 years of progressively more left-leaning Obama policies that they held their nose and voted for Trump, making him president (although Trump got fewer votes than Republican candidates running in the same states, like Senator Ron Johnson, who won in Wisconsin by more than Trump did, and Senator Pat Toomey, who won in Pennsylvania by more than Trump did). Some of these same swing voters quickly tired of Trump and voted for Joe Biden in 2020. Republicans need to nominate someone else to win those voters back.
The candidate the left-wing media hates most is Ron DeSantis, because he is a winner in general elections, and actually implements conservative policies, and manages to win elections even when they attack him non-stop. Trump lost reelection in 2020. Desantis won reelection in Florida — which was a swing state in 2008 through 2020 — in a landslide in 2022, in an election where Republicans elsewhere actually lost ground in the U.S. Senate. DeSantis got Florida’s legislature to pass conservative legislation, and fixed liberal activist appellate courts in the state judiciary by appointing conservative judges to those appeals courts.
By contrast, Trump failed to repeal Obamacare, which he said he would so. And Trump left most of Obama’s bad regulations intact, and his attempt to rescind Obama’s job-killing regulations were so inept that 93% of those attempted changes failed, a high failure rate due more to inept Trump appointees failing to comply with basic procedural requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act than to Obama-appointed judges blocking the changes on the merits (although both were factors). Business was at least happy that Trump, unlike Democrat presidents, wasn’t imposing a flood of new regulations and red tape — giving businesses the ability to get up to speed on their legal obligations. So Trump was better than Obama or Hillary Clinton would have been. But, still, Trump was underwhelming. Other Republican presidents have successfully rescinded many of their Democratic predecessors’ regulations, unlike Trump.
DeSantis actually gets things done. As a bestselling conservative author notes, “DeSantis is not only running on 70-30 popular issues, but he’s following through by actually enacting those policies — on everything from immigration to crime, to trans-mania, to anti-white racism. Most spectacularly, he made utter fools of the entire liberal brain trust over COVID.” This is why the media constantly attacks him and tries to distort his record.
DeSantis is a more effective party leader than Trump, helping elect Republicans all across Florida. Trump has never been effective in electing candidates he endorsed. In 114 competitive House races in 2022, Trump-endorsed Republican candidates underperformed by 5 percentage points while those who weren’t Trump-endorsed overperformed by 2.2 points, calculated Phillip Wallach of the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Trump-endorsed candidates tend to lose in the general election if they run in Congressional districts that have similar numbers of Democrats and Republicans. That’s partly because independents tend to dislike the sort of Republicans Trump prefers. Some independents also hold against a candidate the fact that he was endorsed by Trump. This is a problem for the GOP, because most Americans are either independents or Democrats, not Republicans who love Trump. Wallach says Trump weighed down Republican candidates, allowing the Democrats to win key races for seats in Congress.
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. That was the one race where the 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, and a Republican won the governor’s race handily in 2018, even though Democrats came out to vote in droves, because independents preferred Republican Governor Doug Ducey. 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.
In Arizona’s elections for the U.S. House of Representatives, in which Trump took little interest, Republicans won six of the nine seats, unseating two Democratic incumbents. 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. 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, even though Fetterman was seriously impaired by a stroke. Trump endorsed Oz in the Republican primary, which was a strange choice because Oz was very unpopular and trailed Fetterman in the polls, unlike David McCormick, Oz’s more conservative 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, said in 2022 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 noted that “in 36 House races that the Cook Political Report rated as tossups, Mr. Trump endorsed just five Republicans. Each one lost” in 2022.
