This is one of those things you have to open with a qualifier: I am going to support, advocate for, and vote for whoever the Republican nominee ends up being. That being said, it might be time for some people to reconsider whom they support for that position. I don’t say this from a point of malice, but ever since former President Donald Trump declared we’d be sick of all the winning we’d be doing with him, we’ve pretty much done nothing but lose. I’m not convinced that’s a coincidence.
There comes a point at which correlation becomes causation, where coincidence can no longer be blamed. Since 2017, Republicans have lost races, a lot of races, they should have won, and many handily.
Much of this can be traced back to bad candidates, people simply not ready for prime time. But how did those candidates get the nominations if they weren’t very good? Donald Trump.
I’m not going to go through a hundred House races of candidates who said nice things about the former president and ended up getting his endorsement, everyone knows they exist. But there are 2 pretty basic examples in the Senate – well, not actually in the Senate now – who won their nominations for the simple reason that Trump pushed them over the finish line in the primary: Dr. Oz and Herschel Walker.
Neither of those candidates actually lived in the states they were running in, but they got Trump’s support over candidates who did, candidates who might’ve won winnable races without the “carpetbagger” label attached to them. But Oz was a celebrity, and celebrity is the flame to Trump’s moth. Same with Walker, who, aside from countless problematic events in his personal life, couldn’t articulate a basic agenda or justification for his candidacy.
They were awful. Yet, like every other Trump-endorsed candidate, they were dragged across the finish line of the primary and largely abandoned for the general election. Yes, Trump did a rally in each state, but Trump’s rallies are never about anyone other than himself. They’re funny, they’re entertaining, and they’re profoundly unhelpful to anyone else.
Other candidates at a Trump rally get shout-outs, occasionally, and that’s about it. A couple of lines about how good they are or how they like Trump, and then it’s back to complaining about whatever is bothering Donald that day. Worst of all for the candidates, it’s straight up preaching to the choir. If you don’t have the voters at a Trump rally already, it’s over. But there aren’t enough of them to win a general election. To do that requires work and retail politics – going out and meeting people where they live, shaking hands and actually campaigning with someone. Trump does none of that.
People in Trump world will tell you he has a very high level of “success” in endorsing candidates. What they won’t tell you is about 90-95 elections are foregone conclusions, with the incumbent winning easily. Candidates, incumbents who didn’t seek Trump’s endorsement got it anyway and went on to win with 70 percent of the vote. Predicting the Sun will rise in the east does not make you a psychic when it happens.
In the races that matter, the ones that could flip seats or control, and where Trump picked the candidate, his record is abysmal. Hate me all you want for saying it, dislike of reality doesn’t make it any less real.
Republicans need to find a way to win again independent of Trump. More than that, they need to find a way to win in spite of him.
His legal issues, as bogus as most of them seem, aren’t going away. His inability to talk about anything else, or his unwillingness to run a campaign talking about issues from anything less than a 30,000 foot concept “it’ll be great” kind of way isn’t about to change.
Democrats are not going to stop making everything about Trump any sooner than he will because it serves both their purposes – it reminds their voters of who they hate most and reminds Trump of who loves most.
Republicans have to find a way to talk about issues in a way that connects with voters through all this noise. Trust me when I say I have little faith in their ability to do this. Dogs are better at teaching calculus than Republicans are at the basics of making the case for the cause of life and liberty. They’re terrible at it.
From the party perspective, candidates are just going to have to go it mostly alone. The national GOP is run by people Donald Trump picked, and their record is about as abysmal as his. No one is fighting the cases now to have voting laws illegally changed by courts and governors tossed out to comply with the Constitutional dictate that those changes emanate from state legislatures. If you spent the last 3 years whining about a “stolen election,” who do you blame for nothing having been done to un-rig it?
If things don’t change soon – either Trump becomes a serious candidate making the case for himself to people who are, at a minimum, skeptical of him, or the GOP nominates someone else – there is little reason to be hopeful about 2024. Yes, Joe Biden is wildly unpopular, but so is Donald Trump. Polls are irrelevant, as we’ve seen in every election since 2016, except the ones at which people vote. At those polls, Donald Trump and the Republicans he’s picked have a horrible record.
I was, and remain, eternally grateful for Trump’s defeating of Hillary Clinton. It truly spared us an earlier disaster. But what has happened since matters too. We were promised we’d get sick of all the winning, and I truly am. Unfortunately, the winning I’m sick of is by Democrats.
Derek Hunter is the host of a free daily podcast (subscribe!) and author of the book, Outrage, INC., which exposes how liberals use fear and hatred to manipulate the masses, and host of the weekly “Week in F*cking Review” podcast where the news is spoken about the way it deserves to be. Follow him on Twitter at @DerekAHunter.