Kari Lake Rally with Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon

for The Washington Post

Midterm runoff elections in Georgia

Midterm Coverage - Denver, CO

The Washington Post

Georgia runoff 2022 promo

Kevin McCarthy Midterm Election

Biden To Meet With Progressive And Moderate Lawmakers

For The Washington Post 

staff

Kari Lake Attends The Republican Party Election Night Event In Scottsdale, Arizona

Election 2022 Nevada

Election Page Share Image

Daily Coverage on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC

For The Washington Post

Election Workers Process Ballots At The Maricopa County Tabulation And Election Center In Phoenix

voter turnout promo

Rep. Abigail Spanberger Holds Her Election Night Watch Party In Virginia

Stringer

anti-vote-map-promo-8

Capitol Hill

MIDTERMS2022-MICHIGAN

Respond to prefers-color-scheme dark in app web views

Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

World Press Freedom Day, 2024

How Trump convinces Republicans to adopt extreme views

Campuses are grappling with the Gaza war. So are our columnists.

Chinese EVs are good for the world. Biden says they’re bad for America. 

Why the Solomon Islands election matters to China and the U.S.

Biden calls ally Japan ‘xenophobic’ like China, Russia, at campaign event

Cat climbed into Amazon return box, found alive 630 miles away

Brave Little Hunter is free: Baby orca escapes lagoon for open seas

I learned to heal my sadness by cradling dying chickens 

This masterpiece ‘Birth of Venus’ probably isn’t of Venus at all

The beginner’s illustrated guide to watching an F1 race

Wait, what is Stephen A. Smith talking about? Find out with our quiz.

The 6 best things to do with kids in the D.C. area this weekend 

The 33 best things to do in D.C. this weekend and next week

Trevor Williams’s escape act helps Nationals blank Rangers 

Miss Manners: Offering my bedroom to guests

Ask Amy: My wife’s sister confessed her feelings for me

Carolyn Hax: Will request for a postnup offend much younger wife?

NASA moon capsule suffered extensive damage during 2022 test flight

Russian state media ramping up English, Spanish presence on TikTok, study finds

Apple is behind in AI and killed its self-driving car project. What’s next?

Young Georgians want to be part of Europe. Their government is in the way.

On Press Freedom Day, little to celebrate for Hong Kong’s journalists

Taxes are inevitable. Paying to prepare them doesn’t have to be.

What’s the best bus to New York? We tested 5 for comfort and value.

You asked: Do I need a passport for my cruise?

Adaptive equipment is making national parks more inclusive

Stephen A. Smith would like even more of your attention

Local sports networks go dark mid-game amid dispute with Comcast 

That time football legend, rig-driving eligible bachelor Biden was arrested

Trump and allies say Biden pays rent for ‘illegals’ in Michigan. Not true.

Eighty percent of Ukraine-Israel bill will be spent in U.S. or by U.S. military

Trump hush money trial live updates: Witness testimony to continue

See more coverage in your recommendations

Get the weekly Campaign Moment newsletter

Set alerts for major election developments

Election 2024

The Campaign Moment newsletter

Politics alerts

Phelan M. Ebenhack

Former president Donald Trump has made no secret in recent days that, even as Republicans were aiming for takeovers of both the House and Senate, he was utterly preoccupied with his own political fate.

While ostensibly campaigning for fellow Republicans, he has repeatedly prioritized <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/07/trump-spooks-republicans-with-talk-presidential-launch-eve-vote/" target=_blank>teasing his own potentially imminent presidential campaign</a> and sought to begin the intraparty maneuvering that comes with that — most notably by <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/09/desantis-trump-2024-presidential-election/" target=_blank>going after his erstwhile ally Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R)</a>.

He could scarcely have picked a worse time. Election Day 2022 is looking like a growing disaster for Trump. The question is whether anyone in the party summons the courage it has lacked to actually call that out and course-correct.

We’ll never know for sure — and the results are <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/interactive/2022/vote-count-2022-election/" target=_blank>still coming in</a> — but it’s quite possible that Trump cost the GOP the Senate majority, two elections in a row.

Live maps: Where midterm votes are still being counted

As in recent days, Trump was focused two years ago on himself during the runoffs in Georgia — specifically, with a far-flung attempt to overturn his election loss. While he perhaps views those baseless claims as legitimate, even Trump himself acknowledged last year that Georgia Republicans <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/10/20/trump-senate-loss/" target=_blank>didn’t want to vote because they didn’t trust the process</a>.

Today, consider his favored candidates, who had won primaries in each of the four key Senate toss-ups: At least three of the four carried notable image problems into the general election, in potentially decisive ways.

One of the them lost what had appeared to be a very winnable race Tuesday: Pennsylvania’s Mehmet Oz, who probably would have lost his narrow primary without Trump’s help. Now the GOP depends on both Blake Masters in Arizona and Herschel Walker in Georgia — both candidates who brought <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/25/gop-popularity-gap-analysis/" target=_blank>significant baggage</a>, in different ways.

Current data suggests Democrats are slight favorites in the outstanding races in Arizona and Nevada, where heavy mail voting leads to a slow count. Georgia, meanwhile, appears headed for another runoff, on Dec. 6, <a href="https://twitter.com/GabrielSterling/status/1590239693551325184" target=_blank>according to Gabriel Sterling</a> of the Georgia secretary of state’s office.

If Democrats can win both Arizona and Nevada, they wouldn’t even need Georgia for the majority. If they win one of them and Georgia goes to a runoff, the majority would come down to the prolonged and highly flawed candidacy of Walker, who has faced a series of ugly allegations about his family life even beyond the women who say the antiabortion hard-liner urged them to abort their pregnancies with him.

Tracking results where abortion access hangs in the balance

On top of these unpopular Senate candidates, other results Tuesday tell a similar tale. To wit:

Trump endorsed extreme Republican governor candidates Tudor Dixon in Michigan and Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania. Both helped cost the GOP winnable swing-state governorships, with Dixon trailing by eight points early Wednesday morning and Mastriano losing by double digits — both in states the GOP should rightly have been competing for in a midterm that almost <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/18/mcconnell-expectations-senate-midterms/?itid=lk_inline_manual_21" target=_blank>always favors the party that doesn’t hold the White House</a>. Republican Tim Michels also <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/election-results/2022/wisconsin/?itid=lk_inline_manual_21" target=_blank>lost in Wisconsin</a> by a wider-then-anticipated four points.

His primary-endorsed candidates also lost winnable races against Reps. Chris Pappas (D-N.H.) and Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), as well as a pretty pure swing district in North Carolina. Kaptur’s opponent, in particular, appeared to win Trump over thanks in large part to the mere gesture of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/05/04/majewski-ohio-kaptur/?itid=lk_inline_manual_22" target=_blank>painting a Trump banner on his lawn</a> for all to see.

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), Trump loyalist and GOP provocateur, found herself in perhaps <a href="https://www.cpr.org/2022/11/08/colorado-3rd-congressional-district-results-lauren-boebert-adam-frisch-2022-election/" target=_blank>the nation’s most surprisingly competitive race</a>. She trailed her Democratic opponent for much of the night despite coming from a district Trump won in 2020 by more than eight points that most race raters didn’t even bother to handicap. Few have embodied Trumpism like Boebert during her short tenure.

While Walker struggled in Georgia, two candidates Trump failed to defeat in primaries — Gov. Brian Kemp (R) and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) — won easily and racked up the biggest margins for statewide Republicans.

Similarly, DeSantis won a resounding victory in Florida in a way that will only further the belief <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/08/takeaways-midterms-election-2022/?itid=lk_inline_manual_25" target=_blank>that he’s a much more electable version of Trump</a>, without all the headaches.

GOP secretary of state candidates who were most aligned with Trump’s stolen-election claims underperformed the other statewide Republicans who ran on the same ballots <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/08/takeaways-midterms-election-2022/?itid=lk_inline_manual_26" target=_blank>in virtually every state</a>.

One key outstanding race on this front is Arizona governor. While many Republican candidates tempered their past stolen-election talk after winning primaries and some de-emphasized their support for Trump (for example, by disappearing mentions of him from their websites), GOP nominee Kari Lake featured both extensively in the closing days of the campaign. (She even allowed herself to be photographed <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/16/kari-lake-arizona-election-governor/" target=_blank>vacuuming a red carpet for Trump</a> ahead of his visit last month.) She is running ahead of Masters, but her race with Democrat Katie Hobbs appears closer than many expected.

Regardless of that outcome, Trump’s candidates in key races struggled, underperforming where they shouldn’t have. And the data we have on the election indicates independents split between the two parties — despite voting against the president’s party by double digits in each of the last four midterm elections.

Perhaps some of that was caused by the Supreme Court overturning <i>Roe v. Wade</i>. But midterms are usually a referendum on the president’s party — particularly when that party controls both chambers of Congress, as Democrats do. Trump allowed it to be about him and the flawed candidates he happened to like, regardless of their electoral prospects.

Republicans gave Trump a pass after the 2020 Georgia runoffs, seemingly in part because the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/january-6-capitol-riot/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Jan. 6</a>, 2021, attack on the Capitol by his supporters (which transpired the next day) so abruptly shifted the focus and because they decided the impeachment process that followed demanded a united front. And they no doubt <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/03/08/sen-lindsey-graham-describes-gop-hostage-trump/" target=_blank>fear what Trump could do to the party</a> if it turns on him, which will temper any true reckoning with what Trump has wrought in the 2022 election.

Tracking which 2020 election deniers are winning, losing in the midterms

But in 2020, Trump became the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/06/trump-set-be-first-president-since-1932-lose-reelection-house-senate/" target=_blank>first president since the Great Depression to lose the House, the Senate and the presidency</a> in a single term. And you’d think ushering the party to a potential loss of a very winnable Senate majority and a subpar midterm election might cause certain people to decide maybe this isn’t working for them.

They’ll probably just hope that it blows over — a tack they have almost always taken — and that DeSantis or someone else will come to their rescue in 2024 without forcing them to confront all of this. But they had a chance to attempt a full break with Trump in early 2021, and no doubt many of them are ruing that they didn’t force the issue then.

University of Minnesota

Aaron Blake is senior political reporter, writing for The Fix. A Minnesota native, he has also written about politics for the Minneapolis Star Tribune and The Hill newspaper.