We now know House Speaker Kevin McCarthy's (R-CA) plans for making a primary endorsement in the 2024 Republican presidential campaign. On Friday, POLITICO reported that he has declined to endorse former and potentially future President Donald Trump. As the report frames it, McCarthy is "fulfilling an important mission: sparing the House GOP a civil war over 2024."
Not all House members are staying neutral, though. Some have endorsed Trump, while others are throwing their support behind Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is currently in a distant second behind the frontrunner.
McCarthy isn't alone in not making an endorsement, as the report notes that House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) and Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN) "have also stopped short of endorsing Trump this time around."
The report focuses on concerns from some members that Trump being the nominee could lead to Republicans to not only lose the White House but their narrow majority in the House as well. As POLITICO notes:
While scores of McCarthy’s members have already backed Trump, plenty of other Republicans are steering clear of the polarizing former president in the GOP primary. That camp includes virtually every swing-seat lawmaker, many of whom fear that embracing Trump could spell their electoral doom next fall — as well as allies of Trump’s rivals, from Ron DeSantis to Doug Burgum.
So as much as McCarthy might risk alienating Trump by staying on the sidelines, the California Republican also provides the most political cover he can to his vulnerable members. The pressure on the speaker to choose sides will only grow throughout the summer, though, as Trump locks down support across the House GOP and questions intensify about why McCarthy isn’t fully embracing the man who helped deliver him the speakership.
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Many have expressed concern about Trump being on the ballot, given his record of loss in 2020 and failed endorsements in 2022.
Last November's midterm election results turned out to be more disappointing for the Republican Party than predicted. The red wave never materialized, and Democrats performed better than expected. In analyzing the results, Guy, in December of last year, after Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) was reelected, cited The New York Times in highlighting a "penalty" of sorts.
"Untested, 'high-negatives,' MAGA-aligned candidates -- many of whom Democrats actively boosted in GOP primaries, hoping to run against them and beat them in the general, with near-universal success where attempted -- significantly under-performed. 'MAGA' nominees, compared to more 'traditional' Republicans, were slapped by a five-percentage-point penalty, on average, by voters," Guy wrote.
In January, in response to Trump blaming midterm losses on the pro-life movement, Guy offered that Trump "knows that the 2022 midterm outcomes could be a political problem for him."
Then there's DeSantis, who looks to be the contender closest to Trump. As he launched his presidential campaign on Twitter on May 24, DeSantis mentioned in part that, "We must end the culture of losing that has infected the Republican Party in recent years."
He's continued to hammer that message, as he did during last month's Road to Majority conference. "We cannot continue with the culture of losing where we lose winnable races," he similarly said. "We have 49 Republican senators right now. We should have 55 Republican senators, and we would have been able to stop a lot of Biden's nonsense."
Then again, Trump not only won the presidency in 2016 against Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, but Republicans controlled both the House and Senate. He's certainly beaten the odds before.
With or without McCarthy's endorsement, Trump is leading the pack of candidates. RealClearPolitics (RCP) currently has him up with a spread of +32.1, as he enjoys 53 percent support in the presidential primary. The RCP average also shows Trump with a lead of +0.6 against President Joe Biden.
At the end of the day, what's crucial is that the party come together to support the eventual Republican nominee, keep control of the House, and gain back the Senate. The latter looks especially hopeful, given the map, as Democrats are looking to defend several vulnerable seats. Reporting from The Hill earlier on Friday notes that Democrats are hopeful about taking back the House but not so much about keeping the Senate.
Rep. Dan Meuser (R-PA), who endorsed Trump, is quoted in the POLITICO piece summing up McCarthy's message to his fellow House Republicans on the matter, "'Hey, you're with DeSantis right now. That's OK. We get that. You're with Mike Pence, Tim Scott. But in the end, we've got to come together with who's going to be our winning candidate.'"
The idea of avoiding "a civil war" and concerns about "disunity" don't merely apply to the 2024 elections but to McCarthy's time as speaker as well. It's worth noting that Trump endorsed McCarthy for speaker, though it took 15 rounds for him to secure enough votes in the early morning hours of January 7.
As the report mentions:
Several Republican lawmakers said that a McCarthy endorsement this early could exact a political toll on House Republicans by sparking disunity and infighting across different GOP factions — divisions that could seep into the rest of their agenda.
“There’s not a person who is more black and white, who is more hot and cold, who is more politically divisive than Trump,” said one centrist Republican who represents a district that President Joe Biden carried in 2020. “So, while McCarthy spent six months keeping us all together, it’s like the worst thing that you can do is take a stance for or against Trump.”
That’s not always an easy needle for McCarthy to thread. The speaker backtracked last week after questioning whether Trump was the strongest candidate for the party to run in 2024, telling conservative Breitbart News that the former president “is stronger today than he was in 2016.”
A spokesperson for McCarthy’s political arm responded to a request for comment for this story with the same statement printed in Breitbart, blaming the media for “attempting to drive a wedge between President Trump and House Republicans as our committees are holding Biden’s DOJ accountable for their two-tiered levels of Justice.”
"McCarthy" has been trending on Twitter, with many expressing their outrage at his decision not to endorse Trump, though others share the sentiment from the article that it would be the wise thing to do.
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