Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections. This year's elections have turned out badly for the GOP.
Republicans are feeling spooked by recent special elections losses and underperformances in party strongholds, as the White House ramps up President Trump’s presence on the campaign trail ahead of next year’s midterm elections.Andrew Egger at The Bulwark:
On Tuesday, Democrats flipped Miami’s mayoral office for the first time in nearly 30 years and won a conservative-leaning state House district in Georgia that Trump carried by 12 points last year.
Those victories came after Republicans gave up ground to Democrats in a special election for Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District last week and lost by wide margins in Virginia and New Jersey’s gubernatorial races last month.
Republicans note that while the off-year gubernatorial losses were not necessarily a surprise, upsets in GOP strongholds such as Miami and the Georgia state House district have them on edge.
“Republicans losing in Republican areas? That’s a different story. I think that’s got people freaking out,” one former Trump White House staffer said
“It’s not a secret. There’s no sugarcoating it. It’s a pending, looming disaster heading our way.”
“We are facing almost certain defeat.”
“The chances are Republicans will go down and will go down hard.”
“You hit the nail on the head. This is an absolute disaster. No matter what party is in power, they usually get crushed in the midterms.”
These pessimistic assessments of Republicans’ chances in next year’s midterms are the sort of thing you’d expect to hear from disgruntled GOP operatives outside the MAGA camp. This week, however, they’ve been coming from someone way crazier: Joe Gruters, the Trump-diehard chair of the Republican National Committee, who has been barnstorming conservative radio this week.1
Gruters isn’t throwing Trump under the bus. Quite the opposite: As Democrats overperform in special election after special election and Republican confidence in the midterms craters, he’s trying to set expectations low—way low. After all, he says, the guys in power nearly always lose the midterms. And as once-unimaginable cracks have begun spiderwebbing across the MAGA coalition, he’s making a specific case to his party: “The only person that could bring the nose up and help us win is the president of the United States, Donald J. Trump.”
Still, it’s remarkably abnormal to see the chair of the institutional Republican party—the head of the party’s campaign apparatus!—openly predict doom for his candidates. It risks further depressing GOP voters and encouraging lawmakers to retire early. And, beyond that, it’s far from clear that the Republicans who actually need to get elected next year share Gruters’s assessment of how to fix their electoral predicament.
This week, I spoke to a number of swing-state GOP operatives about Trump and the midterm environment. And they were pretty blunt. To them, the biggest reason Republicans seem bound for disaster isn’t historical midterm trends. It’s the world the president has built for them to run in—particularly when it comes to affordability. (To encourage them to speak openly, including in ways that contradict top-down GOP messaging, we agreed not to disclose their names.)
“His message sucks. It’s absolute trash. ‘Affordability is a Democrat hoax’??? Give me a break,” said one strategist, a veteran of presidential and congressional campaigns. “It’s the non-college-educated version of the Biden message, and we saw how well that worked. . . . Nobody believes the economy and particularly affordability is getting better.”
