Senate Republicans give away how much they fear Donald Trump will cost them the midterms
Most of the public probably doesn’t know this, given how most of the media has spent all year trying to paint him as on the verge of a magical 2024 comeback, but Donald Trump is toxically unpopular. Republican Glenn Youngkin certainly knew this when he spent his campaign trying to at least nominally distance himself from Trump. And when Youngkin pulled off the upset, it was a reminder that Trump is an unpopular figure the Republicans have to work around, and not someone the GOP wants to embrace any more than it has to.
Now the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the fundraising arm for Senate Republicans, has confirmed over the weekend that it’s putting its money behind Senate Republican Lisa Murkowski in 2022 over Trump’s handpicked Republican primary challenger. This is notable for a few reasons.
Murkowski is the closest thing the Republican Senate has to a defector. She votes with them most of the time, but can’t always be counted on, and in fact she’s now working with the Democrats to try to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act (because it happens to benefit her reelection odds).
So the GOP Senate doesn’t exactly want Murkowski to stick around. But it clearly worries them that if Trump’s handpicked candidate Kelly Tshibaka wins the Republican primary race, she’ll go on to lose the general election to the Democratic candidate. Given how toxic and non-viable Tshibaka is, the GOP has good reason to worry about this kind of outcome.
This means that the National Republican Senatorial Committee has decided to directly defy Donald Trump, and work to defeat his candidate, for the sake of trying to retain the Senate seat in Alaska. This is an even bigger deal when you consider that the NRSC is run by Republican Senator Rick Scott, who has previously always been a huge Trump ally.
Virginia was obviously good news for the Republican Party, in the sense that it won. But it also appears to have served as a wakeup call for the Republican Party, in the sense that its candidate had to run away from Trump in order to win. Now the Republican Party has decided to go far more sharply against Trump in Alaska, having realized that running away from the unpopular Trump – at least in competitive races – is its only shot at winning the midterms.
This leaves us to wonder what might end up happening with the 2022 Senate race in Georgia. Mitch McConnell recently decided to back Trump’s handpicked candidate Herschel Walker, who has a ton of baggage and will have a difficult time winning. But now that the Virginia race has made clear that the GOP has to run away from Trump in competitive races, and now that the NRSC is spending money to defeat Trump’s handpicked non-viable candidate in Alaska, will we see the Republicans stick with Walker in Georgia or not?
In any case – as Palmer Report declared last week – Virginia has turned out to be a big loss for both the Democrats and Donald Trump. The Republican Party now seems to understand that Trump’s toxic unpopularity outside his own too-small base means that he could cost them in the midterms just by being anywhere near the midterms. So much for the notion that Trump is in the midst of some kind of magic comeback; even his own party is trying to figure out how to flush him.
