Republicans are blaming Trump after the GOP’s midterm ‘red wave’ failed to materialize
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Republican analysts and commentators blamed Donald Trump for the party’s disappointing performance in the midterm elections when hopes for sweeping victories fell short.
The former president had endorsed hundreds of candidates in the midterm elections as he sought to cement his control over the party. But as of early Wednesday many were performing poorly.
The most prominent setback came in Pennsylvania, where Mehmet Oz, the Trump-endorsed Senate candidate, was defeated by Democrat John Fetterman, damaging Republican prospects of taking control of the upper chamber.
In a CNN interview, former Trump aide Alyssa Farah Griffin blamed the failures on the poor quality of the candidates Trump championed.
“Are they going to continue to nominate poor-quality candidates to appease Donald Trump?” she said of Republicans.
“If you want the Republican Party to thrive, we’ve got to just finally speak out and say, ‘This man is a loser, he lost 2020, he’s losing a seat that is winnable this time,” she continued.
Scott Jennings, a conservative analyst who has been an advisor to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, said the results showed that Trump’s hopes of winning back the presidency were a non-starter.
“How could you look at these results tonight and conclude Trump has any chance of winning a national election in 2024?” he said.
Caleb Hull, a pro-Trump communications strategist, said that it was time for the GOP to move on from Trump.
“I LOVED Trump and campaigned for him in 2016 but the guy has lost his mind and attached (sic) everyone in our party far too much to be a serious face going forward. The COVID-19 briefings did him in and now he’s sealed it. Time to move on,” he tweeted.
Liam Donovan, a former aide to the National Republican Senatorial Committee, also laid the blame at the feet of the former president.
“If this proves to be another Senate flop in a year that was otherwise favorable to Republicans — even if not a wave — it will again be a function of the candidates they put up, which was unmistakably shaped and steered by Donald Trump,” he told The New York Times.
Trump has endorsed hundreds of loyalist candidates who have embraced his lies that the 2020 election was stolen. Many of them have checkered pasts and have pushed fringe conspiracy theories.
Oz had attracted criticism with a series of gaffes on the campaign trail and even recorded a campaign video from his New Jersey mansion while seeking to assure voters of his ties to Pennsylvania.
In Pennsylvania, Trump’s defeated candidate for the gubernatorial race, Doug Mastriano, had associated himself with the QAnon conspiracy theory movement and attended a rally before the January 6 Capitol riot. Trump-endorsed Georgia senate candidate Herschel Walker’s campaign was rocked by revelations he’d paid for a woman to have an abortion while calling for the procedure to be banned on the campaign trail. That race is in the balance and may result in a run-off vote.
Trump had hoped to use the successes of his candidates in the midterms to launch his own campaign to return to office in 2024, but much of the praise from senior Republicans Tuesday went to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, whose sweeping reelection victory was one of the few bright spots on an otherwise disappointing evening for the GOP Tuesday. He is considered Trump’s leading rival for the 2024 GOP nomination, and Trump had attacked him in interviews on the eve of the midterms.
“All the chatter on my conservative and GOP channels is rage at Trump like I’ve never seen,” Michael Brendan Dougherty, a Senior Writer at National Review, wrote on Twitter. “‘The one guy he attacked before Election Day was DeSantis — the clear winner, meanwhile, all his guys are sh***ing the bed.'”