Republicans believe they have a good shot at taking Congress next year. But there’s a catch.
The GOP’s ambitions of ending unified Democratic control in Washington in 2022 are colliding with a considerable force that has the ability to sway tens of millions of v**es: former President Donald Trump’s increasingly vocal demands that members of his party remain in a permanent state of obedience, endorsing his false claims of a s****n e******n or risking his wrath.
In a series of public appearances and statements over the past week, Trump has signaled not only that he plans to work against Republicans he deems disloyal, but also that his meritless claims that widespread v***r f***d cost him the White House in 2020 will be his litmus test, going so far as to threaten that his v**ers will sit out future e******ns.
“If we don’t solve the P**********l E******n F***d of 2020,” Trump said in a statement last week, “Republicans will not be v****g in ’22 or ’24. It’s the single most important thing for Republicans to do.”
The former president’s fixation on disproved conspiracy theories is frustrating to many in his party who see it as needlessly d******e at a time when Republicans feel they are poised to take back the House of Representatives and perhaps the Senate in the 2022 midterm e******ns. They worry he could cost Republicans otherwise winnable seats in Congress and complicate the party’s more immediate goal of winning the governor’s race in Virginia next month.
The concern over Trump’s attempts to make all federal e******ns a referendum on him points to the larger debate among Republicans over what his role should be, as someone who remains singularly popular with the party’s base but is also a liability with swing v**ers and a motivator for Democrats to turn out.
Some rising stars in the Republican Party — like Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, who ousted Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming from a House leadership post in a bitter intraparty fight over the J*** 6 r**ts and Trump’s attempts to downplay them — have been clear: They want Trump to play a role in the 2022 midterms. Stefanik called him “an asset to Republicans on the b****t” at a fundraiser last week.
And top party strategists said they expected the former president to remain front and center in the Republicans’ campaign to retake control of the House. “He’s the leader of the party,” said Corry Bliss, a consultant to Republicans on congressional races. “The more energized and engaged he is, the better we’ll do.”
But party officials believe Trump’s threat about his supporters staying home en masse is real. And the potency of his false claims about 2020 caught even some of his staunchest allies in the party off guard.
The stakes are amplified by Trump’s increasingly pointed hints that he plans to be the party’s nominee in 2024.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia has supported exhaustive audits of the 2020 results to look for evidence of v****g irregularities that repeated reviews have failed to produce. Still, she has told colleagues that she was surprised by a recent survey of Republican v**ers in her district, according to one person who spoke with her about it.
The internal survey found that 5% of Republican v**ers said they would sit out the 2022 e******n if the state of Georgia did not conduct a forensic audit of the 2020 e******n — a demand that some of Trump’s hard-core supporters have made. Another 4% said they would consider sitting out the e******n absent an audit.
The possibility that nearly 10% of Republicans could sit out any e******n — even one in a solidly red district like the one held by Taylor Greene — was something Republican strategists said they found alarming.
Since Trump left office, polls have repeatedly shown that large majorities of Republican v**ers want him to run in 2024. And roughly 40% of Republicans say they consider themselves to be primarily his supporters rather than supporters of the party — about the same share who said so last November, according to the political research firm Echelon Insights.
Many Republicans don’t seem to want to hear anything critical about him. A recent poll by the Pew Research Center, for instance, highlighted the lack of an appetite for much dissent. Nearly two-thirds of Republicans, Pew found, said their party should not be accepting of elected officials who criticize Trump.
Trump’s recent interference in the Virginia contest — where polls show the Republican candidate, Glenn Youngkin, narrowly trailing his Democratic rival, former Gov. Terry McAuliffe — worried advisers to Youngkin’s campaign. They watched as their carefully scripted plan to keep the race focused on their candidate and on claims that Democrats have veered too far left became engulfed by news coverage of the former president praising Youngkin at a political rally last week.
Some Republicans said they feared they were watching a preview of the awkward and unpleasant dilemma their candidates would face for the foreseeable future, as Trump remains the most popular figure in their party, determining what candidates say and how v**ers think.
“Here is where Trump is so destructive,” said Barbara Comstock, a former Republican member of Congress who lost her seat in suburban Virginia in 2018. That year, v**ers in swing districts across the country turned against centrist incumbents like her in a repudiation of Trump.
“He doesn’t want other people to win without groveling to him. That’s the threat,” Comstock added. “It’s not about winning. It’s all about him. And that’s what’s so stupid about Republicans even trying to deal with him, because you never know when he’ll drive the car off the cliff.”
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