Donald Trump’s Losing Touch

One of the only positive aspects of Donald Trump’s stranglehold on the Republican Party is that he’s terrible at picking candidates in winnable races. Remember Herschel Walker and Kelly Loeffler in Georgia? How about Doug Mastriano and Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania? The road to Democrats having kept the Senate thus far is lined with Trump’s bungled attempts to play kingmaker.

It’s not only the Senate, though. Of the 36 House races in 2022 that the Cook Political Report deemed most competitive, Trump endorsed candidates in five contests—all of which they lost. Trump’s winning percentage overall in 2022 was quite high, but “the vast majority of those endorsements were of incumbents and heavy favorites to win,” according to The New York Times. Sure, Trump can successfully back a MAGA candidate in a deep red congressional district, but Trumpism has proven poisonous to swing voters.

The good news about Trump is that he never learns from his mistakes when it comes to endorsements. In North Carolina, Trump has more recently gotten behind Mark Robinson, a gubernatorial candidate with a history of antisemitic, Islamophobic, and homophobic comments. The Times called him a “flamethrower,” but he sounds like a bigot. According to the paper, Robinson “condemned “transgenderism” and “homosexuality” as “filth.” Not to mention, as my colleague Bess Levin wrote, “Robinson is a conspiracy theorist to boot, saying, among other things, that he ‘wouldn’t be surprised’ if 9/11 turned out to be an inside job or if the 1969 moon landing had been faked; that he’s ‘SERIOUSLY skeptical’ JFK was assassinated; and that Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg was a paid actor.” Oh, and let’s not forget that Robinson would like to “go back to the America where women couldn’t vote,” which is hardly a way to galvanize women voters in 2024.

Over in Ohio, there’s former Trump critic turned supporter Bernie Moreno, whom the former president helped boost to win the Republican nomination. Ohio is an increasingly red state, and we’ve seen a Trump critic turned loyalist win there before. But Moreno is seen as the weaker general election candidate to face off against Senator Sherrod Brown, with Mike DeWine, Ohio’s Republican governor, and other state party leaders having backed Matt Dolan. Moreno, whose experience is in owning car dealerships rather than politics, hasn’t faced the scrutiny of running in a high-profile Senate race. Shortly before he won the primary, the AP noted noted that “Moreno—who has shifted from a public supporter of LGBTQ rights to a hardline opponent—is confronting questions about the existence of a 2008 profile seeking ‘Men for 1-on-1 sex’ on a casual sexual encounters website called Adult Friend Finder.” Moreno denied creating the account, and a former intern later said he created the posting as a prank.

Meanwhile in Montana, where Republicans are trying to knock out Democratic senator Jon Tester, there’s part-time Senate candidate and full-time CEO of a publicly traded aerospace company Tim Sheehy. Sheehy, a self-styled rancher who similarly lacks any political experience, wants to get rid of the Department of Homeland Security—that is, the department that deals with the border, which Republicans (pretend to) care a lot about. He’d also like to “return health care to pure privatization,” and has absurdly blamed high hospital bills on a “subsidy system that’s got perverse incentives.” As for taxes, Sheehy doesn’t seem too big a fan, having reportedly skipped out on state livestock taxes of his own. And to top things off, the Senate hopeful proudly presents as a self-made multimillionaire—but like you know who, received large investments from both his father and brother. (As a nepo baby myself, I should clarify that it’s not that he’s gotten help; it’s that he’s lied about getting it.)

Donald Trump and Kari Lake during a campaign rally in 2022.

Mario Tama/Getty Images.

Some Trump-backed candidates, like Kari Lake, recognize there may be political wisdom in tempering themselves. The failed gubernatorial turned Senate candidate, who said she had driven “a stake through the heart of the McCain machine,” is apparently trying to be more electable this time around, saying she is not “divisive.” Even the Times seems to have bought into this narrative: “[She] has reached out to her critics,” the paper recently wrote. “She has sought to appeal to the Republican establishment in ways that Mr. Trump has not, framing his Make America Great Again movement as a natural evolution of Reaganism, which attracted legions of voters to the party more than 40 years ago.” But when you get down to brass tacks, there is little evidence of any significant rebrand: Lake continues to post lies about the 2020 election, talk nonsense about the border, and engage in plain old racism. As one GOP strategist told NBC, Lake’s “instincts seem to be to quadruple down on ultra MAGA and all that entails.”

One of the interesting trends I’ve noticed this year is that a lot of these Trumpy candidates are wealthy carpetbaggers parachuting back into states they have only a tangential relationship with. Consider Wisconsin Senate candidate Eric Hovde, who endorsed Trump but hasn’t been endorsed by Trump…yet. Hovde appears to live in California, he owns a nearly $7 million house in Laguna Beach and a family banking business in California, and he was rightfully trolled by the cast of The Real Housewives of Orange County. (Hovde told the Wisconsin Journal Sentinel that “his home is Wisconsin.”) There’s also Dave McCormick, who has been running to represent Pennsylvania in the Senate since 2022, when he lost his primary to Dr. Oz. According to the AP, McCormick lives in Westport, Connecticut, but flies his private jet down to Pennsylvania seemingly every chance he gets. He has a dynasty trust. His wife, Dina Powell McCormick, worked in the Trump administration and is currently on the board of oil giant and serial polluter ExxonMobil. (There’s also Trump-backed former representative Mike Rogers, who for all intents and purposes lives in Cape Coral, Florida—in a house five times the price of the Detroit home he bought just last year!)

To be fair, running wealthy candidates has been a game that both sides have played for a long time. But the fact that these MAGA hopefuls can self-fund or turn to deep-pocketed friends is absolutely crucial for the GOP this time around, seeing as Trump has already spent $100 million on legal fees and continues to use the party’s coffer as his personal piggy bank.

However, as we saw in 2022, money doesn’t necessarily mean political mastery. Candidates like Kari Lake and Tim Sheehy are largely undisciplined, while Dave McCormick and Eric Hovde don’t even appear to live full-time in the states they hope to represent. Taken together, it seems as though Trump might yet again hurt his party down ballot as well as up. We continue to be lucky that Trumpism doesn’t scale.

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