After the bluff of the expected “red tide”, due to the color with which the Republican Party is assigned, Trump ran into the first limits. Tuesday’s disappointing results for the GOP raised questions about Trump’s appeal and the future of a party that fully supported him. In this way, Trump seems to have found a brake on his future plans, when the elections have also given a new impetus to his main rival within the party, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
Some allies are calling on Trump to delay his planned announcement for next week, saying the party’s focus should be on Georgia, where Trump-backed football great Herschel Walker’s effort to unseat Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock is headed. to a second round that could determine control of the Senate.
“I will advise you to hold off on him until after the Georgia runoff,” said former Trump adviser Jason Miller, who spent the night with the former president at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.
“Georgia should be the focus of every Republican in the country right now,” he said.
Trump tried to use the midterm elections as an opportunity to demonstrate his political influence after losing the White House in 2020. He endorsed more than 330 candidates in electoral contests, some inexperienced. He reveled in his major victories. But many of his positions, including echoing fraud in 2020 and his hardline views on abortion, were out of step with the political mainstream.
Although he scored some big victories on Tuesday, particularly in Ohio, where his election to the Senate, Hillbilly Elegy author JD Vance sailed to an easy victory after Trump’s endorsement catapulted him. In North Carolina, Rep. Ted Budd, one of Trump’s first picks, held a vacant Senate seat held by the GOP.
But Trump lost some bigger spots overnight, particularly in Pennsylvania, where Dr. Mehmet Oz, who narrowly won the Senate primary with Trump’s endorsement, lost to Democrat John Fetterman. Trump-backed candidates also lost gubernatorial races in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Maryland, and a Senate race in New Hampshire, though Trump seemed to celebrate the latter and criticized Republican Dan Bolduc for trying to moderate his positions by backing down. in his acceptance of the alleged electoral fraud invented by Trump in 2020.
The biggest Republican win of the night came in Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis won re-election, cementing his status as a national Republican rising star while contemplating his own potential 2024 run. Ex leader.
Trump’s setbacks
While Republicans still appear well-positioned to flip the House and ultimately could take the Senate as well, those who had believed that frustrations with record inflation, combined with President Joe Biden, would produce quick victories for the Republicans, they were wrong. The “red tide” was not.
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a longtime Trump friend and adviser turned critic who is considering his own run for president in 2024, said Republicans “have a fundamental choice to make.”
“We lost in the 18th. We lost in the 20th. We lost in the 21st in Georgia. And now, on the 22nd, we are going to lose net governorships, we are not going to get the number of seats in the House that we thought and it is possible that we will not win the Senate despite a president who has a 40% labor approval”, he affirmed. .
According to Christie, “there is only one person to blame for that and that is Donald Trump.”
Meanwhile, Trump publicly insisted that he was happy with the results.
“While in a way yesterday’s election was somewhat disappointing, from my personal point of view it was a great victory: 219 wins and 16 losses overall. Who has done better than that?” he wrote on his Truth Social network on Wednesday afternoon.
But Republican strategist David Urban, a former Trump adviser, said the Trump brand is hurt no matter what the former president says.
Some now worry that if Trump goes ahead with his planned announcement next week, it could pave the way for a repeat of the Republican defeats in Georgia in 2021.
Trump’s former press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, who now works for Fox News, advised on air that Trump should postpone announcing him until after the Georgia Senate runoff.
DeSantis, the future candidate
DeSantis emerged as the obvious winner of the night. In addition to his wide margin of victory, he won the Democratic stronghold of Miami-Dade, and he did so without Trump’s endorsement. (Although Trump told reporters that he had voted for the governor days after calling him “Ron DeSantis.”)
“DeSantis is coming out of the election with a lot of momentum,” said Republican strategist Alex Conant. “Trump has been weak for a long time, but it was not clear who the alternative was… For the first time, Trump really has a formidable rival within the party.”
Even some Democrats admitted DeSantis’ strength.
Miami-based Democratic strategist Jose Parra said Trump’s rival enters the 2024 conversation with “a lot of wind in his sails” after a stronger-than-expected performance across the state, especially in the Miami-Dade County, in South Florida.
Speaking at the White House on Wednesday, Biden said his “intent” is to run again. But pointing to the emerging competition between Trump and DeSantis, he said it would be “fun to see them square off.”
Trump futures
Trumpism as an expression of a right-wing “populism” is here to stay, although it was not expansive beyond its hard core. But this hard core of the extreme right is an intense political-social force, not an occasional phenomenon, arising from the deep political and social polarization that has been installed as a sign of the times, and that is expressed in a distorted way in the so-called “wars”. cultural”. Among Republican voters, a portion close to 70% considers that Trump was the winner of the 2020 presidential election, and therefore that the Biden administration is illegitimate. The most extreme sector of this electoral base was the one that starred in the attempted takeover of the Capitol on January 6, 2021 under the political leadership of the president himself, who was trying to prevent Congress from validating the electoral result.
DeSantis is something of a mild-mannered Trumpist. He won with a tough “law and order” speech. He promises to defeat the “woke”, that is, the “progresses”. He defines himself as “pro-life” but unlike other Republican states, Florida has not completely liquidated the right to abortion, but has limited it to 15 weeks. Several analysts highlight the high percentage of the Latino vote for DeSantis as a symptom. However, it does not seem at first a generalized phenomenon. In Florida, the most right-wing Latino electorate is largely concentrated, made up mainly of Cuban and Venezuelan exiles. Although it is a warning sign.
The result leaves DeSantis well placed as an alternative to Trump in the Republican presidential primary. This was received with some relief in the US imperialist establishment, which was already concerned about the possible return of Trump to the White House in 2024. Especially at a time when the White House, with its role in the war in Ukraine, had regained leadership over the European allies for its dispute with China.
(Taken from The Daily Left)