Before the votes are even fully counted in the 2022 midterm elections, Republicans are starting to face a decision: do they stick with Donald J. Trump into 2024 or leave him behind?
For seven years, in office and out, before and after his supporters overran the Capitol, Trump has exerted a gravitational pull on the party’s base, and through it, the country’s politics, no matter how hard lawmakers, strategists, officials and even his own vice president tried to escape his orbit.
Now, after a string of midterm losses by candidates Trump supported, there are signs of another Republican effort to inch the party away from the former president ahead of his expected announcement on Tuesday (Wednesday NZT) of another run for the White House — even as his allies on Capitol Hill demand new acts of fealty to him.
It has not escaped Republicans that this past week represented the third consecutive political cycle in which Democrats ran with considerable success against the polarising former president. While they rarely spoke his name, Trump formed the background music to their attacks asserting that the Republican Party had grown too extreme.
He was featured in their fundraising solicitations and made cameos in their television ads. The party even meddled in Republican primaries to help Trump-aligned candidates Democratic leaders thought would be easier to beat. Democrats won each of those races.
The tactics helped Democrats cast the election not as a referendum on the current, unpopular president, President Joe Biden, but on an even more unpopular ex-president and his allies. It is a strategy they will try again next month in Georgia, where Senator Raphael Warnock faces a runoff contest against Herschel Walker, a Republican plucked from pro-football retirement by Trump. Already, some are looking beyond that race, dreaming of a 2024 contest that could feature, once again, Trump at the top of the ticket.
“As an American, the idea of another Trump campaign and all of his lies and divisiveness and his efforts to undermine American democracy is an absolute horror show,” said Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. “On the other hand, [I’ve] got to say that as a politician who wants to see that no Republican is elected to the White House in 2024, from that perspective, his candidacy is probably a good thing.”
But if Trump remains a major motivator for Democrats, Republicans are starting to have to take sides, with his allies in Congress pressuring other Republicans to endorse his 2024 candidacy and a loyal band of senators looking for ways to undercut Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the party’s leader in that chamber and the object of Trump’s scorn.
The divisions were certain to consume the House as well, as Representative Kevin McCarthy of California is trying to rally support behind his bid to be speaker of the House. Jason Miller, a strategist assisting Trump with his campaign announcement, warned Friday, speaking on Steve Bannon’s internet radio show, that McCarthy “must be much more declarative that he supports President Trump” in 2024.
Some Republicans speaking out now have previously enabled Trump and his policies, either through public support or silence. While they long privately claimed to disdain Trump’s politics, they were fearful of crossing the party’s base.
Now, the party is reaping political consequences. Trump-backed candidates lost key Senate races in Pennsylvania and Arizona, as well as several House races from Alaska to North Carolina. On Saturday, Democrats clinched control of the Senate with a hard-fought reelection victory for Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada. In the House, despite predictions of a Republican wave, neither party had secured a majority.
Since Tuesday’s election, The Wall Street Journal editorial page and The New York Post — owned by conservative media baron Rupert Murdoch — called for Trump to be tossed aside. Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears of Virginia and Robin Vos, the powerful Assembly speaker in Wisconsin — both major Trump allies during and after his presidency — said Trump shouldn’t be the party’s presidential nominee in 2024.
The National Review summed up the message of the midterms as, “Republicans: Trump is your problem. Wake up.”
Republican moderates used the moment to bemoan the party’s plunge into conspiracy theories and divisive issues that light up the right-wing media. Senator Mitt Romney of Utah called for a return to classic fiscal conservatism. Governor Chris Sununu of New Hampshire said during a SiriusXM Radio interview on Friday that Trump risked “mucking up” the party’s chances of winning in Georgia.
And Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, who spoke at a Trump rally in Sioux City days before the election, said on Twitter that it was time to move on from Trump’s pet issue. “Quit talking abt 2020,” he wrote.
Even on the Republican National Committee, the 168-member body that has been among Trump’s most immovable defenders, cracks are beginning to show — over not just messaging, but the messenger.
“We can’t just jump and run and, you know, rah-rah Trump and jump over the cliff,” said Kyshia Brassington, an RNC member from North Carolina, who joined the committee two years ago as the party remade itself in Trump’s image. “I think that we need to look at every one of the viable candidates who can run and win for 2024.”
Andy Reilly, an RNC member from Pennsylvania who served as a delegate for Trump at the last two presidential nominating conventions, said the former president’s intervention in races in Pennsylvania — endorsing Dr Mehmet Oz for Senate and Doug Mastriano for governor, who both lost — had cost the party the elections.
“He is an impediment at this point,” Reilly said.
The party has been here before — repeatedly. Since 2015, there have been plenty of moments when Republicans tried — and failed — to put some distance between themselves and Trump.
First there was Trump’s proposed Muslim ban, then the attacks on a federal judge’s Mexican ancestry, the Access Hollywood revelations late in the 2016 campaign, his public declaration that he trusted Vladimir Putin more than he did American intelligence agencies. More recently, Trump has waged a two-year misinformation campaign, claiming his 2020 defeat was “rigged”. His supporters stormed the US Capitol in a violent attempt to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power. He now faces investigations into efforts to overturn the election results in Georgia, into his company’s finances and into his handling of classified documents.
Throughout it all, Republican officials and major conservative media figures have issued denunciations and other carefully worded complaints, but most have stopped short of actively working against him.
Trump’s plans to run for president, which he is expected to announce on Tuesday, could force the issue in ways not seen since Trump’s first campaign, as party leaders are asked to declare their allegiances to Trump or other potential rivals.
“We need DeSantis,” Representative Peter Meijer of Michigan said of Governor Ron DeSantis, who won reelection in Florida by 19 percentage points and has quickly emerged as a favourite in a still-theoretical Republican presidential primary. “That should be lit up in neon and projected onto the side of the RNC.”
Meijer, who lost his primary race to a Trump-backed challenger after voting to impeach Trump, hardly represents party leadership, which has largely stayed silent or pledged support. John Gibbs, the Republican who ousted Meijer, lost the general election to a Democrat.
Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the third-ranking House Republican, endorsed Trump for president on Friday.
“President Trump has always put America First, and I look forward to supporting him so we can save America,” Stefanik said on Twitter.
Other lawmakers rushed to show support, attempting to again tap the well of grievance against the party establishment that has fueled his political career. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia said this past week, in an interview on Bannon’s show, that Trump had been “politically persecuted worse than any human being in our country’s history”.
Two years after he left office, Trump remains underwater in polling, with more voters saying they disapprove of him than approve.
But Americans’ opinions on Trump are not black and white. In a recent New York Times/Siena College poll, 30 per cent of voters consistently held views that could be considered pro-Trump, such as planning to support him if he runs in 2024 and saying that his actions after the 2020 election were justified.
Another 39 per cent of voters consistently held a series of views that could be described as anti-Trump. And nearly 30 per cent appeared to hold seemingly conflicting views about him and his actions — either by expressing a mix of sentiments or by declining to respond to one of the questions.
There has been no sign yet that Trump, who spent the days after Tuesday’s election posting on his social media site and issuing statements about his stature in the party, has lost his grip on Republican primary voters — a necessary element in any effort to depose him as the party’s leader.
Democrats say that’s good news — at least in the short term.
Discussions over Trump’s role in the Georgia runoff on December 6 are underway, as state and national Republicans try to find the best way to energise their base behind Walker without turning off crucial swing voters in the Atlanta suburbs.
Adrianne Shropshire, who runs BlackPAC, an African American political organising group, said that risk was real.
“Voters in Georgia rejected Trump in 2021,” Shropshire said. “His presence now only reminds them of why.”
Democratic strategists and leaders are looking well beyond December and can’t hide their giddiness at the prospect of another election with Trump at the centre.
“It’s very good for Democrats,” said former governor Terry McAuliffe of Virginia, who spent the final weeks of his losing campaign for governor in 2021 trying to tie his opponent to Trump.
McAuliffe quickly added, “I think it’s horrible for the country — the divisiveness.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Lisa Lerer and Reid J. Epstein
©2022 THE NEW YORK TIMES