Tired of Winning by Jonathan Karl

Author:Jonathan Karl [Karl, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2023-11-14T00:00:00+00:00

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For some Republicans, November 8, 2022, managed to do what January 6, 2021, did not: wake them up to the dangers of sticking with Trump, and give them the courage to speak out against him. “The voters have spoken and they have said that they want a different leader,” Virginia’s GOP lieutenant governor Winsome Earle-Sears, who in 2020 had served as cochair of a group called Black Americans to Re-Elect the President, told Neil Cavuto on Fox Business. “And a true leader understands when they have become a liability.”[8]

In January 2021, former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan had condemned Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election on moral and constitutional grounds, arguing it was “difficult to conceive of a more anti-democratic and anti-conservative act.” After the awful Republican performance in the 2022 midterms, Ryan appealed to his fellow Republicans’ instinct for political survival.

“With Trump, we lose,” he told me shortly after the midterms. “It’s just evidence. We lost the House in ’18. We lost the presidency in ’20. We lost the Senate in ’20. And now, in 2022, we should have—and could have—won the Senate. We didn’t. And we have a much lower majority in the House because of that Trump factor.”[9]

It took several days for all the votes to be tallied—particularly in Arizona, Nevada, and California—but Ryan was right: Republicans underperformed not only their own outsize expectations but also decades of historical midterm trends. Those seventy-four Democratic House seats they believed they had a chance to flip? They lost sixty-four of them. And in the Senate, the GOP needed to pick up only one Democratic seat to retake the majority and bring Biden’s agenda to a screeching halt. They lost every single one of them. In fact, Democrats increased their majority by winning retiring Republican Pat Toomey’s Senate seat in Pennsylvania.

“I think my party needs to face the fact that if fealty to Donald Trump is the primary criteria for selecting candidates, we’re probably not going to do really well,” Toomey told Erin Burnett on CNN November 10. “All over the country, there’s a very high correlation between MAGA candidates and big losses—or at least dramatically underperforming.”[10] Republicans being honest with themselves were immediately able to identify what went wrong.

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