Their disappointing performance in this week’s midterm elections has landed the Republican Party in a big mess.
Rank-and-file lawmakers are publicly blaming their leadership for failing to deliver a “Red Wave.” The elite right-wing media has turned on former President Donald Trump. And Trump has been having a total meltdown.
Several Senate Republicans said Friday they should postpone an internal decision about who should lead the conference, a swipe at current Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
“First we need to make sure that those who want to lead us are genuinely committed to fighting for the priorities & values of the working Americans (of every background) who gave us big wins in states like Florida,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said on Twitter.
Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), chair of Senate Republicans’ campaign committee, had been poised to challenge McConnell until this week’s midterm flop, Politico reported Thursday.
On the House side, a faction of far-right lawmakers led by House Freedom Caucus chair Scott Perry (R-Pa.) is threatening to withhold support from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who also had hoped to become speaker in a Republican majority that has yet to materialize.
“As a leader in the party, you have a duty to provide a vision that informs voters of what you’re going to do if you win,” Perry told reporters Thursday. “I don’t think that vision was adequately provided by multiple folks on top of our party.”
Before the election, McCarthy and his leadership team pitched a “Commitment to America” that they said would cure inflation, make the country safe and empower parents still mad about pandemic school closures.
McConnell, for his part, was asked by reporters in January what Republicans would do if they grabbed the Senate from Democrats. “I’ll let you know when we take it back,” he said.
With the worst inflation in decades, Republicans went into the election with a strong advantage among voters concerned about the economy, but that edge was overwhelmed by Democrats’ advantage on abortion.
Meanwhile, candidates backed by Trump — against the wishes of party leaders — floundered in several high-profile races, including Senate contests in Arizona, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania.
Trump-aligned Republicans say it wasn’t Trump’s fault they lost.
“The corporate media is working overtime to hide the Republican establishment’s failures in the 2022 midterm elections — perpetuating a myth that Donald J. Trump dragged his endorsed candidates down,” J.R. Majewski, a Trump-endorsed Republican who failed to unseat Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), whined in a Thursday blog post. “This is a complete lie, told in order to embolden GOP leaders in Washington D.C., and ignores the fact that in so many instances, this same ’McLeadership’ set MAGA candidates up for failure.”
Kaptur noted in an ad that Majewski was at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. It also turned out that Majewski exaggerated his college credentials and military service. But Majewski had made his lawn into a 19,000-square-foot Trump banner, so Trump endorsed Majewski. Majewski lost bad.
At the state level, Michigan Republicans blamed Trump’s support for culture-war candidates for the party’s stunning losses in races for the executive branch and legislature.
“In what many of them saw as sending a message to Donald Trump and his supporters,” the Michigan GOP’s chief of staff wrote in a post-election memo, “longtime donors to the Party remained on the sidelines despite constant warnings of the possibility of the outcome we saw come to fruition on Election Day: A statewide sweep and one-party Democratic rule in Lansing, something that has not been seen in nearly 40 years in Michigan.”
Prominent voices in the conservative media have also begun to suggest that Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who won a landslide reelection victory on Tuesday, would be a better GOP presidential nominee in 2024.
Trump is not taking it well.
“NewsCorp, which is Fox, the Wall Street Journal, and the no longer great New York Post (bring back Col!), is all in for Governor Ron DeSanctimonious,” the former president said in a statement essentially claiming that DeSantis owes his career to Trump.
In the statement, Trump also bizarrely claimed he used federal law enforcement to rig the governors’ race so DeSantis could win his first term in 2018.
“Ron was going down ten thousand votes a day, along with now-Senator Rick Scott, I sent in the FBI and the U.S. Attorneys, and the ballot theft immediately ended,” Trump said.
Amid all the recrimination, high-profile Republicans still have Trump’s back. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), the third-ranking House Republican, endorsed Trump for president on Friday even before he’s announced he’s running.
“President Trump is doing everything he can to help Republicans across this country and help Republicans win while he is being politically persecuted worse than any human being in our country’s history,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) said on a podcast Wednesday.
The moment of disarray will probably pass in the coming weeks.
It’s likely that Republicans will wind up with a majority of House seats, since they have leads in the races where votes are still being counted. And as of this week, the Republicans grousing about McConnell and McCarthy haven’t suggested any plausible alternatives.
McCarthy is operating as though his speakership is inevitable. On Thursday, he sent a letter to Capitol Hill police and facilities managers ordering them to draw up plans to fully reopen the building to tourists in January.
Drew Hammill, a spokesman for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), said in a statement that “the Minority Leader is still the Minority Leader — and he shouldn’t count his chickens before they hatch.”