It was quite head-spinning to see how instantly and gleefully many Republicans of the high forehead class leapt to blaming Donald Trump for the less-red-wavy-than-expected 2022 Midterms. And leapt from there to condemning his 2024 presidential run. But before lifting new champion Governor DeSantis to their shoulders, the Trump-trashers would do well to praise Caesar rather than burying him.
The Trump magic is clear in the Midterm numbers - 92% of Trump’s endorsees won their primaries, as did 86% of his general election picks. The nay-sayers claiming his 2020 coattails were toxic in 2022 - even though he had no coattails because he wasn’t on the ballot – are simply wrong. In total, Trump’s candidates won 224 of 241 primary races and 208 of 254 general-election ones, according to the Trump-hating Washington Post. People obviously like to vote for the candidates Trump likes. Rather than waning, his influence is on the rise. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/21/trump-republicans-elections/)
Also - if the usual suspects are using the 2022 election to condemn Trump’s 2024 presidential run, why shouldn’t they give him credit for winning back the House? And for the really big news that Republicans actually beat Dems in the popular vote by about 3.5 million ballots?
The Trump-floggers can’t have it both ways.
According to The Washington Times, Republicans’ 3.5 million (3%) Midterm popular vote win over the Democrats should have translated into a net gain of about 25 House seats, giving the GOP a firm 230 seat majority. What went wrong wasn’t a Trump hangover, but that Republicans won votes in districts which were already overwhelmingly Republican, instead of the races where those ballots were sorely needed to score seats. But we can still toss back some champagne because in 2022 citizens gave the Democrats about 10.3 million fewer votes than their 60.7 million votes in the 2018 Midterms which resulted in their 235-219 House majority now thankfully over.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/nov/24/gop-won-3-million-more-votes-this-year-but-not-whe/
More reasons to break out the bubbly: CNN exit polls show Republicans in 2022 greatly eroded and even erased much of Democrats gains among every ethnic group. More Americans are voting Republican. In 2018, Republicans and Democrats each won about half of the female vote but 2022 saw white women shifting to Republicans by 8 points. Republicans also improved among white men – 28% voted GOP in 2022, up from 21% in 2018. Democrat support slipped among black women from 85% for Democrats in 2018 to 78% in 2022, and also among black men from 76% in 2018 down to 65%. There’s the same GOP ascendant story among Latinos: Democrats lost 13 points among women (47% Dem in 2018, down to 33% in 2022.) And Latino men fled the Dems by a dramatic 21% - in 2018, 29% voted Democrat but in 2022 their Dem support dropped to only 8%.
https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2022/politics/exit-polls-2022-midterm-2018-shift/
If Trump was on the ballot in 2022 as his detractors insist, perhaps we should credit him and his upbeat America First message for Republicans’ impressive positive trend. And maybe we should blame Lindsey Graham, not Trump, for that pinkish wave. Senator Graham and his ill-timed and calamitous proposal for a federal ban on abortion helped fuel the Democrats’ abortion fear porn campaign that terrified women, especially single women, who Republicans disastrously lost by 37% this Midterm. The Democrats’ ads monopolized Tik Tok and Instagram, shrieking that Republicans would criminalize women seeking surgery for ectopic pregnancies and ultimately ban gay marriage and even birth control. And single women believed their lies.
Too many Americans didn’t understand what the Supreme Court’s Roe decision meant, which made them susceptible to the Democrat propaganda. And Republicans weren’t ready for the abortion onslaught since that wasn’t one of the top issues according to most pollsters. Instead, Republican messaging focused on high inflation, crime, education, and parents’ rights. Even when our candidates did talk abortion, the Democrats’ emotional “women’s rights” hysteria overwhelmed our common sense.
Here in Colorado, an elder Republican bull elephant who chaired the state party many, many years ago, has been eagerly stampeding to every Republican Women’s Luncheon, GOP Men’s Breakfast, and radio and television station, to pronounce Trump unelectable. Because of January 6 and the 2020 stolen election controversy. “All of that cast a pall on every Republican running… something was keeping them drugged down,” he claims in egregious grammatical and political error. Interestingly, this same person was a top advisor to my very favorite Senatorial candidate, who under his astute tutelage sadly didn’t even make the primary ballot. Political gurus of his stripe have a talent for dodging blame, not necessarily for winning.
He and his anti-Trump cronies are also wrong about the “election steal” being just a fringy conspiracy theory. Uh oh - those zany “Big Lie election deniers” are now quite mainstream, according to Rasmussen Reports. Their lead pollster recently revealed that the company found 59% of voters polled said cheating likely affected the outcome of the 2020 election.
“And that 59% is not new,” said Rasmussen’s Mark Mitchell. “We’ve tested that question six or seven times since 2020, and a strong majority of voters always thought cheating affected the outcome of the 2020 election, a strong majority of independents and even a good chunk of Democrats – 30 to 40%” People of all parties are even more alarmed about lapses in election integrity since the Midterms disaster in Arizona, their polling finds. Noted Mitchell, “65% of Democrats say it's likely botched issues affected the election for Republican candidates. Very clearly maybe hundreds of thousands of people were disenfranchised; that is breaking through the Democrat shell on this issue in a big way.”
Fully 71% of people polled, and even 69% of Democrats agree with Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake that Arizona voters “were denied their sacred right to vote.” Concluded Mitchell, “This is the biggest number I’ve ever seen for Democrats and a big step change in public opinion. The things we saw in 2020 didn’t necessarily get out there but it’s getting out there now, maybe because it’s so flagrant.”
So, what have we learned about how Trump’s invisible hand affected the 2022 Midterms that could foreshadow his success or failure in 2024? About 83% of his endorsed candidates scored victories in their general election races. Republicans won back the House with 3.5 million more votes than in 2018, while the Democrats lost 10.3 million of their 2018 vote total; nearly 17%. Republicans won, while Democrats lost, big chunks of every ethnic group – white, black, and Latino - putting us on a winning path for 2024. And Trump is joined by 59% of Americans who believe cheating affected the 2020 election. Now that the Arizona election hijinks that defeated Republican candidates has outraged large numbers of Democrats and Independents too, that 59% majority has expanded to 71%.
Want to hold Trump responsible for the 2022 election wins? Go right ahead.
Joy Overbeck is a Colorado-based journalist whose work has appeared in Townhall, American Thinker, The Federalist, The Washington Times, The Daily Caller, Complete Colorado, and other sites. Follow her on Facebook and on Twitter @joyoverbeck1.