The GOP’s Alternate Senate Reality – Charles Hilu

Why did Republicans lose those 10 races? In anywhere from two to five of them Trump’s shenanigans were a major factor in the losses. In some, political analysts have said Trump artificially depressed turnout in Republican areas during the general election. In others, he used his influence to carry a primary candidate to the Republican nomination who later proved to be unpalatable to general election voters.

Of course it’s impossible to know whether Republicans would have won a race without Trump’s meddling, but it is worth trying to place a number on how many seats he likely lost his party. Just how big would the Senate majority be today had Trump been more discerning in his endorsements or simply stayed on the sidelines?

To give Republicans the best chance in the 2026 midterms, Trump will need to find viable candidates in Georgia and North Carolina while also resisting the urge to endorse Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in his bid to primary Sen. John Cornyn. The breakdown of the 2026 Senate map makes it unlikely that Democrats will gain enough seats to regain control of the chamber, but Republicans will not want their majority to shrink, and 2026 is an opportunity for Trump to avoid the mistakes of the past.

The Republicans’ losses in Georgia look the most preventable. Trump lost the state in 2020, but both Senate seats—occupied by GOP incumbents—were up for election that year. Had just one of the incumbents won, Republicans would have had control of the Senate for at least the first two years of President Joe Biden’s term and could have stopped Biden from passing party-line bills such as the American Rescue Plan Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. 

Instead, after both races went to runoffs, Trump, still bitter from losing to Biden, falsely claimed he was the rightful victor and called both his race and the Senate races “illegal and invalid.” Days after that remark, Ossoff and Warnock prevailed by about 55,000 votes and 93,000 votes, respectively. Many observers blamed Trump’s false narrative for the low GOP turnout that led to the losses.

“I think he absolutely bears some responsibility,” Jessica Taylor, Senate and governors editor at the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, told The Dispatch. “It’s impossible to say how much, but, when you are actively saying that the election was rigged, and you just look at where the turnout fell and where Democrats had higher turnout—they would have had a Republican majority had it not been for those races.”

Turnout for runoffs is usually lower than for general elections, and both Democrats and Republicans had fewer of their voters go to the polls. However, the higher Trump’s margin of victory in a county, the greater its drop in turnout tended to be in the runoffs. Erick Erickson, a Georgia-based conservative radio host, told The Dispatch Republicans would have won one or both of the seats had Trump not insisted he was the rightful victor.

“People literally didn’t go vote in the runoff because they were convinced it was going to be stolen, and they were mad that the Republicans hadn’t done anything,” he said. “And so, his rhetoric about the stolen election was a significant contributing factor.”

Ossoff will face voters again in the 2026 midterms, where he is the Republicans’ top Senate target. Warnock, whose 2020 victory was in a special election, could have been ousted by Republicans in 2022. But Trump endorsed former University of Georgia Heisman Trophy winner Herschel Walker to take on Warnock. Walker was dogged by revelations of alleged violent behavior toward women and having fathered multiple out-of-wedlock children, and Warnock subsequently pulled out a 2.5-point runoff victory.

“You had this wild election in 2022 where literally every single Republican gets across the finish line. [Walker] makes it to a runoff and loses because he doesn’t have the force of [Georgia Gov.] Brian Kemp and all the other Republicans on the ballot to turn people back out,” Erickson said. “It was a bad endorsement that should not have happened.”

Taylor and Erickson both suggested that Gary Black, who had already won three statewide races to serve as the state’s agricultural commissioner for 12 years, would have been a viable alternative to Walker. He finished second in the GOP primary, losing by 55 points, as he tried unsuccessfully to convince the Republican electorate that Walker’s past was a liability. “Imagine what Democrats would do to Herschel Walker if he becomes the Republican nominee,” read text in an ad from the Black campaign that highlighted allegations of domestic violence against Walker.

Trump’s questionable endorsements in the 2022 midterms were not limited to Georgia. Two months before the Arizona Senate primary, Trump backed tech entrepreneur Blake Masters, who began his November 2021 campaign announcement with the declaration, “I think Trump won in 2020.”

The endorsement cleared the way for Masters to become the nominee, but is it fair to say that Trump bears the responsibility for the reelection of Sen. Mark Kelly? Republican politics in Arizona was already moving to the right before Trump became dominant. In 2016, eventual state party chair Kelli Ward tried to mount a primary challenge to the late Sen. John McCain from his right and although she lost by 11 points, it marked the first indication of a shift. The 2022 race took shape with that trend in the background. “I think that more centrist candidates in Arizona have not run because they sort of see the writing on the wall,” said Cook’s Taylor.

Two years later, even before independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema announced she wouldn’t seek reelection in 2024, Trump endorsed Kari Lake, an Arizona TV personality who denied the results of the 2020 presidential election. Lake’s 2024 Senate campaign came two years after she lost by 17,000 votes in the governor’s race to then-Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a result she also challenged. Lake went on to lose to then-Rep. Ruben Gallego by more than 80,000 votes as Trump took the state by 180,000.

In the 2024 Republican primary, Lake’s chief opponent was Mark Lamb, a county sheriff who criticized Biden for the surge in illegal border crossings that occurred under his presidency. While Lake positioned herself as a MAGA stalwart, Lamb supported Trump but did not embrace the MAGA label. “I don’t love the term MAGA. I don’t love ‘RINO.’ I don’t love any of that. I’m an American,” he told the New York Times en route to a 16-point primary loss to Lake.

“Mark Lamb would have been a much, much, much better general election candidate, but Kari Lake got the Trump endorsement, and she went on to win,” Arizona Republican consultant Barrett Marson told The Dispatch. “So some of it can be directly attributed to Trump backing fundamentally flawed candidates.”

Trump’s most glaring endorsement miss may have come in the GOP primary for Pennsylvania’s 2022 Senate race. The two major candidates were Dave McCormick, a hedge fund manager and military veteran who served in President George W. Bush’s administration, and Mehmet Oz, a physician and TV personality. Trump endorsed Oz in the primary, and he edged McCormick by fewer than 1,000 votes.

Oz faced then-Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, who suffered a near-fatal stroke in May 2022 and was unable to give his victory speech after winning the Democratic nomination because he was still hospitalized. Questions about his fitness for office persisted through the general election and remain today.

But many Pennsylvania voters saw Oz as a carpetbagger. According to his campaign, he had moved into a house in the Philadelphia suburbs in 2020, but he lived for decades in a multimillion-dollar home in New Jersey. Fetterman used his property ownership to attack him as an out-of-touch elite. Oz did not help himself when he blamed Biden for the high price of ingredients for “crudités” at “Wegners,” apparently combining the names of the Wegmans and Redner’s grocery store chains.

Ultimately, the voters went with Fetterman, health issues and all, as he defeated Oz by more than 250,000 votes to win the open seat.

There is a good chance that McCormick would have won in 2022 had he been the nominee, especially given that he ran again in 2024, this time winning the GOP nomination and ousting three-term incumbent Sen. Bob Casey.

“You just have to look at, again, the result from 2024, that he was able to beat an incumbent instead of an open seat,” Cook Political Report’s Taylor said. “And I think there’s a very high likelihood that, had Dave McCormick been the nominee instead of Dr. Oz, he would have been a senator two years earlier.”

Political analysts have pinned much of the blame for Fetterman’s win on Trump, but if McCormick, who ran unopposed in the GOP primary in 2024, had won in 2022, he would not have been available to face Casey two years later. However, given that Trump won the state by more than 100,000 votes, and Republican candidates for the House of Representatives together got more votes than Casey (and McCormick), it’s plausible that the political headwinds facing Democrats in 2024 could have propelled a generic Republican to a Senate win.  

“I do think another credible Republican—again, more of a McCormick type of Republican—could have emerged and beaten Casey in ’24, given the whole circumstance of the ’24 election and Trump’s popularity in Pennsylvania in ’24,” Jeffrey Brauer, a professor of political science at Keystone College in Pennsylvania, told The Dispatch.

If such a candidate could have emerged, that person most likely would have come from among the House members who represent the state, according to Brauer, such as Rep. Dan Meuser, who has expressed interest in running for governor, and Reps. Guy Reschenthaler and Brian Fitzpatrick. 

Taking into account the Senate races in the past three election cycles where Trump may have diminished GOP turnout or endorsed flawed candidates in Republican primaries, there are multiple seats Republicans could conceivably have won: likely two in Georgia, maybe one or two in Arizona, and probably one in Pennsylvania, giving the GOP between 55 and 58 seats instead of the current 53. 

Republicans took the Senate in 2024 in large part thanks to Trump endorsing—aside from Lake—much better candidates than in previous cycles, including McCormick in Pennsylvania and Tim Sheehy in Montana. It remains to be seen whether he will do so again.

“Trump was out of office then,” Taylor said of the 2024 election cycle. “He, I think, had more of a motivation to stay on the sidelines, given he was preoccupied with his own reelection campaign. But now he’s in office, and he sees himself with a mandate and sort of a mandate for MAGA-ism. And is he going to get behind problematic candidates again? I think that’s a real question.”