State Republican Parties in Arizona and Michigan are close to broke, even though they had hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash a few years ago. Why? Partly because they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars bringing futile challenges to the 2020 election results. And even more, because big Republican donors stopped giving to them. Why? The big donors — including many who gave generously to Donald Trump’s 2016 and 2020 election campaigns — think it is obvious that Trump lost the 2020 election, and view those state Republican parties as being out of touch with reality for not accepting the reality of Trump’s loss. Big Republican donors closely watched the challenges brought by the Trump campaign and its allies to the election results, read the dismally-bad briefs filed in support of those challenges, and concluded that Trump in fact lost the election (as most conservative analysts also concluded).
Many big Republican donors won’t give to state Republican Parties that denied the outcome of the election, because those donors think they are out of touch with reality, and won’t competently fight the Democrats as a result. The big donors are annoyed that Trump hasn’t moved on, and is still denying that he lost the election (a denial that annoys independent voters who might otherwise vote Republican), rather than highlighting all the harmful things that Joe Biden is doing.
As a conservative notes on Twitter, “The AZ GOP is almost bankrupt and about to lose their status as biggest party in the state to registered independents all because they wasted all of their money & time pursuing Trump’s bogus 2020 election fraud claims.” Moreover, “They turned a solid red state almost blue and it wasn’t because Dems ran great candidate or campaigns, but because they didn’t want to accept Trump lost in 2020. Every candidate who ran on election denial in a competitive race ended up losing.” By contrast, staunchly conservative candidates who did not deny Trump lost the election won in the 2022 House elections. Meanwhile, Kari Lake, who denied that Trump lost, lost the governor’s race to an extreme, not-very-articulate, politically clumsy leftist, Katie Hobbs.
The one Republican candidate to win a statewide Arizona race in 2022 — the state treasurer’s race — was the one statewide GOP candidate that Trump failed to endorse. In Arizona’s 2022 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.
The Arizona Republic reports that “Four years” ago, the Arizona Republican Party “had close to $770,000…The party blew $300,000 on ‘legal consulting,’ much of which focused on overturning Trump’s 2020 defeat. All they have to show for it are a Democratic governor and U.S. Senate delegation.” That happened in one of America’s more conservative states, in a state that Democratic presidential candidates had carried only once between 1952 and 2016.
Michigan’s state Republican Party is suffering the same fate. Reuters reports:
Real estate mogul Ron Weiser has been one of the biggest donors to the Michigan Republican Party, giving $4.5 million in the recent midterm election cycle. But no more. Weiser, former chair of the party, has halted his funding, citing concerns about the organization’s stewardship. He says he doesn’t agree with Republicans who promote falsehoods about election results and insists it’s “ludicrous” to claim Donald Trump, who lost Michigan by 154,000 votes in 2020, carried the state. “I question whether the state party has the necessary expertise to spend the money well,” he said.
The withdrawal of bankrollers like Weiser reflects the high price Republicans in the battleground states of Michigan and Arizona are paying for their full-throated support of former President Trump and his unsubstantiated claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
The two parties have hemorrhaged money in recent years, undermining Republican efforts to win back the ultra-competitive states that could determine who wins the White House and control of the U.S. Congress in next November’s elections, according to a Reuters review of financial filings, plus interviews with six major donors and three election campaign experts….The Michigan party’s federal account had about $116,000 on March 31, a drop from nearly $867,000 two years ago.
Due to COVID and his unpopularity with the independent voters who are the kingmakers in American elections, Trump managed to lose the 2020 election to the senile, left-wing Joe Biden. Over 60 court rulings rejected various challenges to the 2020 presidential election results. That includes over a dozen rulings by judges appointed by Donald Trump himself. Most of the election results Trump called suspicious 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.
Big GOP donors wish that Trump had not lost the 2020 election, But they mostly believe he did lose the 2020 election — because they follow elections closely, are politically savvy, and know what happened: Trump did in fact lose the election.
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.
Despite his well-intentioned efforts, President Trump largely failed to reverse Obama’s bad policies. He tried to reverse most of Obama’s regulatory policies, but failed in most cases, due to not understanding the nuts-and-bolts of government, such as the need to comply with the procedural requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act before revoking a prior administration’s policies. You can’t drain the swamp if you don’t learn how the swamp works.
Voting to make Trump the Republican nominee in 2024 would make it easier for Biden to win reelection and continue fundamentally transforming American society in a harmful, leftward direction. Independent voters often vote against candidates who deny that Trump lost the 2020 election, which is one reason left-wing Democrats won the 2021 Georgia Senate special election. Independent voters said they were voting for Democrats Warnock and Ossoff, despite disagreeing with some of their left-wing positions, because their Republican opponents denied Trump lost the election, which struck those voters as delusional. Trump continues to antagonize those independent voters by denying that he lost the 2020 election. By contrast, the very conservative, pro-gun, anti-abortion governor of Georgia won reelection in 2022, after rebuffing Trump’s claims that he won the election. In 114 races, candidates Trump endorsed did worse than candidates Trump did not endorse.
Trump may be unable to undo many of Biden’s harmful policies if he is elected again, because he never understand government enough to undo most of the left-wing policies left behind by Obama. Trump’s useful deregulatory reforms in 2017-19 were mostly overturned by the courts — 93% of them, in whole or in part. Many of the Trump losses were due to ineptness by Trump appointees in drafting the Trump changes, such as procedural mistakes and sloppiness. Some of the losses were due to left-wing activist judges.
Trump talked about “draining the swamp,” but most of the time, he didn’t really know how. You can’t drain the swamp without the help of someone who knows the swamp well (like knowing administrative law and procedure). Trump never got that expertise. He didn’t hire most of the right people. If you want to fix bad government rules and red tape, you have to hire experts, know what you are doing, and be patient until you get it right.
Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) would have been much better at draining the swamp. Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) would have been better still. These highly-intelligent men understand the law and administrative procedure and how to run a bureaucracy. Trump didn’t. He paid little attention to the rules and processes of governing.
An administration can’t just suddenly change most regulations, even if they are bad. It usually has to go through the procedures mandated by the Administrative Procedure Act, such as “notice and comment,” before pulling even a bad regulation. These procedures are detailed and time-consuming, but if they are ignored, someone can sue the government to overturn its regulatory changes, as often happened during the Trump administration.
Due to its lack of understanding of administrative law, the Trump administration failed to rescind most of the burdensome rules and regulations imposed during the Obama administration, which imposed a flood of rules and regulations on American business and our educational sector, harming economic growth and driving up costs to consumers and students.
The Trump administration repealed many of the bad rules, but often in procedurally improper or sloppy ways that led to judges blocking the rules changes and reinstating the bad rules.
