Trumpism hits a wall

||| FROM HEDRICK SMITH for RECLAIM THE AMERICAN DREAM|||

Washington -The crucial long-term consequence of the 2022 mid-term election is that no matter who controls Congress, Trumpism has hit a stone wall. A broad coalition of voters in pivotal swing states has firmly rejected former President Donald Trump’s naked attempt to stage his own comeback in 2024 by pushing slates of handpicked election deniers into major state offices this year, in position to manipulate the next election.

The stunning defeat of Trump candidates in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, New Hampshire, and probably Alaska, signals that the Trump tide has peaked and is ebbing among the U.S. electorate. Exit polls make clear that the final week of warnings from President Biden and Barack Obama about the Trumpist threat to American democracy was widely heard and that helped turn the tide.

 Nearly 44 percent of 94,000 voters polled by the Associated Press all across the country said that the fate of democracy was their primary worry in this election, almost as many as the 50 percent who cited the economy as No 1. Ten percent of all voters said they had made their vote decisions in the final ten days. ”They wanted to protect democracy and their right to choose,” Biden crowed at his post-mortem press conference.

Election returns also bore evidence that Republican defections – the refusal of hundreds of thousands of mainstream Republican voters to back Trump-echoing extremists –  contributed to the losses of Trump’s picks. These mainstream Republicans found Trump’s proxies either too extreme or lacking in any experience to qualify them for public office.

President Biden celebrates election: but Trump grimaces at his losses

Publicly Trump put on a brave front, but  the shock of defeat left Trump privately  “livid” and “screaming at everyone,” according to one Trump adviser. The former president, this adviser told CNN, was ranting that “they were all bad candidates,” and blamed others, including, his wife Melania for supposedly selecting celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz to run for the Senate from Pennsylvania.

More broadly, the wave of Trump losses shattered the facade of Republican unity. Recriminations from other Republicans against Trump for promoting extremist right-wing candidates blossomed on air, in print, and on social media. Fox News, long a Trump cheerleader, aired a volley of GOP post-mortems blasting Trump for the party’s weak showing. Joining the chorus, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, once a Trump ally, blamed the GOP’s losses in competitive states on Trump’s putting his own interests ahead of his party.

Trump’s Miserable Batting Average

The final tally on Trump’s brazen stratagem to maneuver his own team into power in swing states awaits the runoff for the U.S. Senate seat in Georgia on Dec. 6 and final results in Alaska. But already, it is in shambles.

Only seven of thirty high-profile Trump Class of 2022 picks for major state offices have won. Among eight high-profile campaigns for the U.S. Senate, the Trump camp lost five, won two – best-selling author J.D. Vance in Ohio and three-term Congressman Ted Budd in North Carolina – and the eighth is headed for the Georgia runoff. Among Trump’s candidates for governor in nine states, his single, solitary victory was by his former press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders in Arkansas.

To many voting rights advocates, the most dangerous threat of Trump foxes getting into the election henhouse were Trump candidates running for secretary of state in 11 states with radical, unproven claims of mass voter fraud and vows to fix an unbroken system. So far only three have won in the red states of Alabama, Indiana and Wyoming. Eight others were stopped cold in Arizona, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, and Vermont.

Fiery Trumpists Lose to Cool Opponents

In tight Arizona battle for governor, low-key Democrat  Katie Hobbs (left) outpolls Republican Kari Lake (right) , fiery former Fax News anchor.

Arizona was a prime target of high-voltage Trumpist campaigns but it dealt the Trump camp a crushing setback. Majorities of voters vetoed the full Trump slate  – fiery former Fox news anchor Kari Lake for governor, Blake Masters for senator, Jan 6. activist Mark Finchem for secretary of state, and Abraham Hamadeh for attorney general. Victory was especially sweet for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Katie Hobbs, who as secretary of state in 2020 certified Biden’s win. This fall, Hobbs ran a low-key, common-sense campaign and stoically endured Lake’s mocking taunts that Hobbs was an invisible rival.

In Michigan, too, the entire Trump slate went down in flames – Tudor Dixon for Governor, Kristina Karama for Secretary of State and Matthew DePerno for Attorney General, all running on Trump’s false voter fraud narrative. That story didn’t sell in Michigan where voters chose to return incumbent Democratic  Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and her team to office. In Nevada, the Trump challenge was more intense. But incumbent Democratic Senator  Catherine Cortez Masto managed to narrowly defeat pro-Trump Republican Adam Laxalt. Voters more emphatically turned thumbs down on Republican Mark Finchem, the bristling, combative leader of the national Trump movement to elect secretaries of state and take over running state elections.

In Wisconsin, where entrenched GOP domination of state politics has emboldened the far right so much that pro-Trump businessman Tim Michels boasted that if he got elected governor, Republicans ”will never lose another election in the state” because they would control all levers of power. Embattled incumbent Democratic Governor Tony Evers  shot back that Michels’s disdain for  rank-and-file voters marked him as “a danger to our democracy.” That pitch resonated and Evers narrowly beat back the Trumpist takeover.

Republican Defections Torpedo Trump Picks

So many mainstream Pennsylvania Republicans were outraged and alarmed by Mastriano’s inflammatory stance that they formed Republicans for Shapiro to campaign openly for Mastriano’s Democratic opponent, Joshua Shapiro.  “They were people who really thought Mastriano was inappropriate as the nominee, They couldn’t vote for him,”  said Craig Snyder, the group’s director. Mastriano lost nearly 250,000 voters who cast ballots for his GOP running mate.

In Georgia, Republican Herschel Walker (left) faces off vs Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock (right) in a Dec. 6 runoff.

Similar Republican defections occurred in Georgia where slightly more than 200,000 people who voted to re-elect GOP Governor Brian Kemp refused to vote for the former University of Georgia football star Herschel Walker, Trump’s choice for senator.  On the litmus test of the 2020 election, Kemp and Walker were poles apart. Defying Trump, Kemp had certified Biden’s victory in Georgia. Last spring, Walker joined a pro-Trump slate that declared Trump the true winner in 2020. The rest of the Trump slate lost in last May’s Republican primary, This fall, Walker was blocked from victory by Republican ticket-splitting and forced into a dicey runoff against Democratic incumbent Senator Raphael Warnock.

To be sure, in deep red states, from Florida, Alabama and Texas to Iowa, Missouri and the Dakotas, roughly 200 Republican incumbents, either in Congress or holding major state offices and publicly supporting Trump’s challenge to the 2020 election, have just won re-election But their re-election merely perpetuates a status quo ante.

The new and essential message of the mid-term election is that outside these red strongholds, there is a high political cost to the Trumpist strategy. In battleground states, Trump’s narrative is a loser. It turns off most voters. The evidence is clear. Tens of millions of Americans, defending the democracy they know and believe in, have just voted to block Trump’s attempted power grab in swing states that usually decide presidential elections. And the impact of their verdict will be felt in 2024.