Can We Learn from Trump's Endorsements During the 2022 Senate Races How to Look at His Position in the 2024 Race
American Eclectic posts articles twice a month, on the 1st and 15th. This is the third year of publication; previously published articles can be found on my site.
July 1, 2024
Mo Brooks was running for a Senate seat in Alabama in the November 2022 election. Initially, in 2022, he had the endorsement of Donald Trump. Brooks, a Republican who represented a district that included Huntsville, Alabama had been first elected to the House of Representatives in 2010 and then wanted to represent Alabama in the Senate.
After Trump lost the 2020 Presidential election, Brooks did the usual to ingratiate himself to Trump saying there was “massive voter fraud” in that election. But then an odd thing happened. Brooks said at a rally, where Trump was waiting offstage to address the crowd:
There are some people who are despondent about the voter fraud and election theft in 2020. Folks, put that behind you. Put that behind you.
The crowd did not want to put the 2020 election behind them, and neither did Trump. Trump was annoyed that Brooks was looking beyond the 2020 election at Republicans winning in the 2022 Congressional elections and winning again in both the Presidential election and Congressional elections in 2024.
Brooks was able to briefly placate Trump but the issue of moving on from the 2020 election was not over. Brooks's remarks about looking forward to Trump winning in 2024 festered in Trump and he let Brooks know it. After this campaign appearance, Trump called Brooks and wanted Brooks to push the notion that Trump should be reinstated as President, kicking Biden out of the White House. As Brooks stated:
President Trump asked me to lie to the public in four different ways. First, he asked me to publicly call out for a recission of the election, which violates the United States Constitution and federal law. So that’s not a remedy. Second, he asked me to call for an immediate removal of Joe Biden from the White House. And there’s no right that Donald Trump or anyone else has to do that. Third, he asked me to publicly state that Donald Trump be allowed to move back into the White House, reinstated as president. And fourth, Donald Trump asked me to publicly call for a special election for the presidency of the United States.
This conversation did not go well with Brooks telling Trump he could not do any of this. Soon after this conversation, Trump decided that endorsing Brooks was not a good idea and withdrew his endorsement.
In the Alabama Republican Primary, Brooks lost to Katie Britt, neither candidate received a majority of the vote, but Britt got 44.8 percent, and Brooks got 29.1 percent. Britt received Trump’s endorsement after he withdrew it from Brooks. Trump’s endorsement of Britt (who went on to easily win the Senate seat in a reliable Republican state) was endorsed by Trump in June, a week and a half before the Republican primary.
The 2022 Congressional elections were seen as something of a window into how to look at Trump’s chances of winning the Presidency in 2024. In Republican primaries, involving a nonincumbent he endorsed, about four out of five won. Trump stated of his endorsements, “I’m the king of endorsements.” Trump’s endorsements, however, were aimed less at helping Republicans win seats in the 2022 elections and more that those he endorsed supported his election fraud belief. As a New York Times article stated:
The unifying thread through the majority of Mr. Trump’s endorsements has been a candidate’s willingness to help him spread the lie that he won the 2020 presidential race.
Trump’s endorsements, which mattered in Republican primaries, did not carry the same weight in the November election. Certainly, in three key battleground states heading into the 2024 Presidential elections, his endorsements of Senate candidates in 2022 in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona all lost.
In Pennsylvania, Mehmet Oz lost in a race that the Republicans might have won. John Fetterman, the Democrat, performed poorly in a debate with Oz that took place shortly before the election. Fetterman was recovering from a stroke and his appearance at the debate showed voters that his health was still affected. One poll released after the debate had Oz leading 48 percent to 46 percent. Another poll, however, also taken about the same time had Fetterman leading 48 percent to 44 percent. In the end, Fetterman won by five percentage points.
Georgia had Trump’s endorsement of Herschel Walker on full display, as he backed him in the Senate primary. A CNN report stated:
[T]he prospect that Walker could have the field to himself is causing anxiety among some Republicans in Georgia and Washington, who privately are uncertain whether the first-time candidate and Texas resident could handle the enormous challenges ahead. And they’re worried that Trump is propping up a candidate simply because he has been a loyal friend, rather than assessing the former NFL running back’s electoral viability in a pivotal battleground that could again determine the next Senate majority.
The Georgia Senate race was a tight one with Walker losing by less than three percentage points to Raphael Warnock, the incumbent who was elected in a special election in January 2021. Walker was seen as a weak candidate, particularly as the campaign unfolded, and it was revealed he suffered from mental illness, violently threatened women, and paid for a girlfriend to have an abortion, all that factored into voters determining who to vote for. Despite all that, Walker lost a close race. There were Republicans in the primary race who stood a good chance of defeating Warnock, but Trump’s endorsement made the difference. (I addressed Walker in an American Eclectic article, “Will E. Jean Carroll Do Political Ads for Biden if Trump is on the Ballot. If not, Her Case Might Still be Used.”)
In Arizona, Blake Masters, despite Trump’s endorsement, lost to Mark Kelly by five percentage points. Kelly was the incumbent, winning in a special election in 2020. During the primary race to win the Republican nod to oppose Kelly in the general election, Masters did something odd: He referred to a book by a white supremacist (Samuel Francis, Beautiful Losers: Essays on the Failure of American Conservativism) and said it had an impact on how he looked at his brand of conservativism. The author of the book that inspired Masters made a statement in 1994 about how he looked at whites:
What we as whites must do is reassert our identity and our solidarity, and we must do so in explicitly racial terms through the articulation of a racial consciousness as whites.
Mehmet Oz, during a debate to win the Republican primary, said that “we cannot move on” from the 2020 election, showing his support for Trump’s position that he won that election. Herschel Walker began backing Trump’s position that he won the 2020 election, soon after that election ended. Walker saw “country wide election fraud” and wanted Trump to find out who “stole the election.” Blake Masters posted an ad as he was beginning his campaign to win the Republican primary that had Masters looking into the camera and saying, “I think Trump won in 2020.” Trump’s stolen election theme worked its way through all three races.
A study that looked at races across the country in 2022, pointed out that candidates who supported the position that the election was stolen from Trump, did not do well:
States United found that in 2022, Election Denier candidates who ran for statewide office paid a penalty at the ballot box for their embrace of election lies. Our research shows that in races for state offices that oversee voting, Election Denier candidates received 2.3 to 3.7 percentage points less of the vote than expected, compared with similar candidates in similar races.
This report further added:
Our research also shows that Election Deniers did not have a direct effect on voter turnout in these races, suggesting that the Election Denier penalty was largely driven by vote-switching. Voters who otherwise would have voted for the Republican candidate instead voted for the Democrat when the Republican was an Election Denier.
It is useful to look back on these 2022 Senate races and recall that Trump so publicly endorsed each of these three candidates and that they each pushed the election denial theme and all lost. Yet, one recent poll, which includes Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona shows Trump slightly ahead of Biden. We need to wait maybe two weeks or so to see how polls in these states look after Biden’s disastrous debate performance. A BBC report includes these three states in addition to Wisconsin, Michigan, and Nevada as the states that will determine the outcome of the election.
A May poll has Trump leading Biden in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan, Georgia, and Nevada with Biden ahead in only Wisconsin. Again, where will Wisconsin be in polling say two weeks from now after the first Presidential debate. This particular poll was similar to a November 2023 poll that had Trump ahead in the same five battleground states and Biden ahead only in Wisconsin. Trump’s position has not changed in five battleground states in more than half a year.
This contrast between Trump’s endorsements in 2022 and the election denial positions supported by three Senate candidates and where we are now with the same states and Trump still pushing the election denial theme, leads to three possibilities.
The first is that we might see an increase in split-ticket voting, where Republican voters vote Republican for every other office on their ballots but vote for Biden. I addressed this in an earlier article where the end of straight-ticket voting in Texas in the 2020 election, did not help Trump, but led to an increase in votes for Biden (“Does split-ticket voting matter: It will if Trump is on the ballot”). In Texas, the Republicans pushed to end straight-ticket voting, and the Democrats opposed it, yet, in the end, it helped Democrats.
The second way to look at these polls is that many voters are still making up their minds about who they will vote for. For many people, the election season is not yet in full swing, and they are not paying close attention to many specifics associated with what both Trump and Biden are saying. I asked several people who closely follow the news about some details associated with Trump’s hush money trial in New York where he was convicted and surprisingly found that almost all of them knew little to nothing about the trial except that it happened.
The third way is that, unlike the Senate races where Trump was not on the ballot, the direct matchup of Trump versus Biden has polls reflecting that many voters are not supporting Trump as much as they are against Biden. This third way of looking at swing state polls is the most interesting since it raises the issue of whether Biden can shift the focus so that many of Trump’s potential voters will vote for him because they will decide to vote against Trump. His terrible performance in the first Presidential debate might only add to more voters deciding to vote against Biden.
The first Presidential debate has only just happened so the dust is still settling on how to determine its impact on voters. I am planning on doing an article for July 15th on the impact of the first Presidential debate. Just as the Senate races in three swing states showed that voters were turned off by election denial, if Trump continues to push the theme that he won in 2020 (and deserves to be in the White House now) that might lead to more voters voting against him rather than for Biden. Biden’s debate performance, however, might end up mattering more than Trump pushing the election denial theme. The three Senate races addressed here showed that the election denial issue mattered in the outcome of those three races. If Biden had performed even somewhat reasonably well in his debate, the election denial issue might have mattered to voters and could have affected the outcome of this year’s election, now it might be that the election denial issue matters little.
Notes
“Bad Politics, Bad Policies: Election Denial in 2023,” States United Democracy Center (April 28, 2023): https:// statesuniteddemocracy.org/resources/cost-of-denialism/
Michael Bender, Rebecca Lieberman, Eden Weingart, Alyce McFadden, and Nick Corasaniti, “How Trump’s Endorsements Elevate Election Lies and Inflate His Political Power,” New York Times (August 21, 2022): https:// www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/08/22/us/trump-endorsements.html
Philip Bump, “Asked to reject false election claims, Blake Masters elevates them,” Washington Post (October 7, 2022): https:// www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/07/senate-arizona-trump-masters-false-election-claims/
Nate Cohn, “Trump Leads in 5 Key States, as Young and Nonwhite Voters Express Discontent With Biden,” New York Times (May 13, 2024): https:// www.nytimes.com/2024/05/13/us/politics/biden-trump-battleground-poll.html
“Cross-Tabs: October 2023 Times/Siena Poll of the 2024 Battlegrounds,” New York Times (November 5, 2023): https:// www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/11/07/us/elections/times-siena-battlegrounds-registered-voters.html
Alec Dent, “The Right’s Quiet Uncanceling of a Dead White Supremacist,” Vanity Fair (October 14, 2022): https:// www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/10/right-uncanceling-dead-white-supremacist-sam-francis
James Fitzgerald, “Six swing states set to decide the US election,” BBC News (June 13, 2024): https:// www.bbc.com/news/articles/c511pyn3xw3o.amp
Jonathan Karl, Tired of Winning: Donald Trump and The End of The Grand Old Party (New York, Dutton, 2023)
Julia Manchester, “Oz passes Fetterman for first time after PA Debate: Poll,” RealClear Pennsylvania (November 3, 2022): https://www.realclearpennsylvania.com/2022/11/03/oz_passes_fetterman_for_first_time_after_pa_debate_poll_862856.html#!
Holly Otterbein, “Dr. Oz: ‘We cannot move on’ from the 2020 election,” Politico (April 25, 2022): https:// www.politico.com/news/2022/04/25/dr-oz-pennsylvania-debate-trump-00027712
Alex Rogers and Manu Raju, “With Trump’s backing, Walker freezes Senate GOP field in Georgia,” CNN (April 22, 2021): https:// www.cnn.com/2021/04/22/politics/georgia-senate-race-2022-herschel-walker-donald-trump/index.html
Abby Vesoulis, “Big Lie Proponent Herschel Walker Is Getting Campaign Help From Officials He Suggested Should Go To Jail,” Mother Jones (November 22, 2022): https:// www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/11/herschel-walker-kemp-raffensperger/
Youjin Shin, Courtney Beesch, and Anu Narayanswamy, “How Trump’s endorsements fared in the 2022 primaries,” New York Times (May 3, 2022): https:// www.washingtonpost.com/elections/interactive/2022/trump-endorsements-republican-primaries/