Voters Tell Trump-Endorsed Candidates - “You’re Fired”

Is former president Donald Trump the biggest loser in the 2022 midterm elections?  

The fallout is clear: President Joe Biden and the Democrats did better in these midterms than almost any sitting president’s party over the past century. Midterms are traditionally the time when voters’ dissatisfaction with the party in power results in notable gains for the opposing party. Remember President Barack Obama’s “shellacking” in 2010? More recently, Trump himself was handed significant losses among Republicans in the House of Representatives in 2018.  

But in 2022, driven in no small measure by young voters concerned about abortion rights and the survival of our democracy, the Democrats far outperformed most pundits’ assessments of their chances, and they made history.  

According to CNN, voters “punished” the Republican candidates who offered extremist agendas on reproductive rights, and those who hitched their wagons to election denial and to Trump’s imploding star.  

Across the nation, most of the Trump-backed, extremist Republican candidates lost their elections. In swing states whose electoral votes will be crucial in the presidential election of 2024—Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Minnesota—every single election denier lost statewide races for governor and secretary of state. This fact emerges as especially important in light of our country’s ongoing struggle to remain a democracy.  

The right-wing extremist candidates in these contests built their brands spouting nonsense and dangerous conspiracy theories that called the integrity of thoroughly vetted voting systems into question when results did not go their way. (Oddly enough, when the vote did go their way, they raised no concerns.) This is a page ripped directly out of Trump’s playbook, and we have yet to see how this will go over nationwide when he runs again for president in 2024.  

A Democratic Senate, a sharply divided House 

The United States Senate is now firmly in the hands of the Democrats. The House of Representatives is expected to remain bitterly divided and relatively ineffective under its razor-thin new Republican majority. As of the end of November, with two House races still too close to call, the Republicans had gained only eight seats, bringing them to a total of 220. The magic number for control of the House being 218, this gives them the potential to make plenty of mischief in terms of blocking constructive legislation and calling time-wasting hearings, but they can’t afford to peel off any of their members during a floor vote.  

“Enough is enough” 

Leading up to Election Day on November 8, Trump’s call to his base to deal a “humiliating rebuke” to the Democrats seems to have bounced back to stick to him.  

Even longtime Trump loyalists in elected office and among the chattering classes have either openly blamed him for the losses, or have stayed silent. Right after the election, some were already commenting that the Republican Party needs to bind up its wounds and move on to other presidential candidates for 2024.  

Governor Ron DeSantis remains the leading choice among this group. In effect, he brings the same type of repressive policies and “culture war” politics to the mix, but with more intelligence, self-control, and strategy than Trump seems to be capable of. DeSantis, while similarly building his brand around belligerence, has an understanding of how to move the levers of politics and government that could roll back even more rights of Americans over the longer term.  

According to Winsome Earle-Sears, current lieutenant governor of Virginia and a formerly loyal supporter of the 45th President, midterm voters told Trump through their actions that “enough is enough.” They want, she said, “a different leader.” Earle-Sears, the first Black woman elected to statewide office in Virginia, went on to say that she can no longer back Trump, and that a genuine leader understands when it’s time to “step off the stage.” 

The second-ranking Republican in the U.S. Senate, John Thune of South Dakota, weighed in by saying he hopes his party will work to develop new, younger political talent. No party, he went on, can sustain itself if it’s based on “one person’s personality.”  

And Pat Toomey, the retiring Republican senator from Pennsylvania whose seat was just won by Democrat John Fetterman, blamed Trump’s insistence on promoting unqualified candidates for his party’s losses in the state.  

“Florida man makes announcement” 

Perhaps the unkindest cut of all for Trump post-midterm appeared in the New York Post. The famously conservative, Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid reported on Trump’s announcement of his candidacy for the president in 2024 with the brutal headline: “Florida Man Makes Announcement.” The below-the-fold banner then simply directed readers to page 26 for the story.  

As the Post put it, this “Florida retiree” and “avid golfer” made the announcement with almost a full two years to go before the election. The paper seemed to relish its in-print roasting of Trump, going on to list his accomplishments as building “gold-plated lobbies” and “firing people” who appeared on his reality TV show. It wasn’t until the last line of the piece that the editors noted that Trump was also the 45th president.  

And now that it has come out that, in late November, Trump dined with racist and anti-Semitic celebrities, his market value could fall even lower.  

But if there’s one thing we as a country have learned about Trump, it’s not to count him out just yet—no matter how many scandals he generates, or how poorly his extremist candidates do at the polls. It’ll be smarter to stay prepared for anything.