‘Scorpions in a bottle:’ Trump’s leadership style could help and harm Republicans

In 2010, the last time the midterm election climate looked as favorable for Republicans as it does today, the party spent the primary season warring over health care, a ballooning budget deficit, and ending the war in Afghanistan.

Twelve years later, in the first midterm election in the post-Donald Trump presidential era, it’s who can put on the best Trump ventriloquist act.

“He’s a genius in my eyes, so whoever he endorses, I will back,” Lisa Bliskis, an accountant from Raleigh, N.C., said as she stood in the back of a crowd at a Trump rally in nearby Selma last month.

For a political party whose name has been synonymous over the past four decades with tax cuts, immigration, and the economy, Republicans appear to have entered a post-policy moment. The Republican National Committee in 2020 declined to update its platform. The Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell (R-KY), announced the party wouldn’t put forward a legislative agenda ahead of the midterms, and in state after state, Republicans are declining even to participate in primary debates.

Eighteen months after the 45th president left office, the GOP remains beholden to him. And the primary campaign, once a parsing of conservative ideas, has instead become a scene out of “The Apprentice” where contestants will do and say anything to get the attention of Trump.

At the rally in Selma, Bliskis said she doesn’t care who is on the ballot in that state’s looming primaries. She already knows she will only choose the candidate with Trump’s stamp of approval. In primaries everywhere, that endorsement more than anything is the dominant prevailing currency.

“I … will not stand for cowardly Rino Republicans that seek to dismantle the America First movement,” Bo Hines, the Trump-endorsed congressional candidate for North Carolina’s 13th

Congressional District, said from the red, white, and blue colored stage while Bliskis looked on.

‘Midterm history’

Midterm elections are historically challenging for a president’s first term, with the party that holds the White House losing an average of 26 House seats.

In 2018, the Republican Party under Trump lost 40 seats, and in 2010, the Democratic Party under President Barack Obama lost 63 House seats, in what Obama famously declared a “shellacking.”

President Joe Biden’s approval rating has swayed between 41-43% since January, according to a FiveThirtyEight average of polls.

While the GOP is widely expected to retake the House in November, it’s the primaries - and Trump’s shadow over them - that are defining what that party will look like if it does.

Trump targeted all 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach him for “incitement of insurrection” after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. All are facing challenges from MAGA hardliners, except for the four who have announced they will retire.

Harriet Hageman, an attorney and former RNC official from Wyoming, is challenging Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, one of Trump’s most vocal critics. “Liz Cheney cast her lot with the Washington, D.C. elites and those who use their power to further their own agendas at their own expense. She doesn’t represent Wyoming and she doesn’t represent conservatives,” Hageman said on her campaign website.

Joe Kent, the Trump-endorsed Republican candidate for Washington’s 3rd Congressional District, said on his campaign website that the 2020 election must be “fully adjudicated.” He also wants a congressional hearing to “show the American people exactly what transpired in November 2020.”

There is one common thread among all of the candidates who have won Trump’s endorsement: they all embraced Trump’s baseless claims that there were irregularities in the 2020 presidential election, despite no evidence of widespread fraud.

“For him, everything is about loyalty and loyalty to the lie that the election was stolen,” said Center for the Political Future at USC Dornsife Director Robert Shrum, who has worked on multiple presidential campaigns.

‘Scorpions in a bottle’

Chris Stirewalt, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said candidates “audition” for Trump’s blessing, often saying “crazy things” to win the nomination.

“Trump’s leadership style is scorpions in a bottle,” said Stirewalt, a former Fox News digital politics editor. “He likes to pit people against one another.”

Perhaps nowhere was the fight for Trump’s endorsement more evident than in Ohio, where four candidates made pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago, competing to determine who could out-Trump one another.

Jane Timken, a former lawyer, boasted that Trump endorsed her to be the chair of the Ohio Republican Party. “I spent 150,000 miles in my car fighting for that America First agenda. You know who I didn’t see? Josh Mandel, Mike Gibbons, or J.D. Vance,” she said, citing the others on stage at a March debate.

“Hillbilly Elegy” author Vance called Trump “the greatest president of my lifetime,” even while acknowledging that he previously criticized Trump.

“I’ve been very public about the fact that I voted for the president in 2020, that I was wrong about the president back in 2015 [and] 2016,” Vance said.

The mudslinging for Trump’s endorsement ended with the former president giving Vance his “complete and total” blessing, ultimately putting him over the top. He defeated runner-up Josh Mandel by almost 88,000 votes.

Republicans also have a chance of winning the Senate. But one risk in riding Trump’s coattails is how unpopular he is in the suburbs critical to some House races.

In 2018, 52% of suburban voters supported Democratic candidates for Congress, compared with 45 percent who supported Republican candidates, according to FiveThirtyEight.

The reason most former presidents don’t get involved in primaries, Stirewalt said, is because it “divides and isolates.”

Obama, for instance, only endorsed 16 congressional candidates in 2010 and eight candidates in 2014. Biden endorsed Oregon Rep. Kurt Schrader and Ohio Rep. Shontel Brown, who defeated former state Sen. Nina Turner by 5.5 percentage points in a May primary that was a repeat of their 2021 special election.

A Biden adviser told CNN to expect more endorsements except in open primaries without incumbents. He will be “endorsing incumbents who have been with him on votes and supporting his agenda which is helping the American people,” the adviser told CNN.

Stirewalt said Trump is both bringing in and alienating voters because he “sees himself as an outside actor acting on the Republican Party.”

The former president’s endorsement of controversial candidates such as Vance in Ohio, Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania and former Sen. David Perdue in Georgia has disappointed some of his own supporters.

“There are people in Georgia who like [Gov.] Brian Kemp, who support [Ohio Senate candidates] Josh Mandel or [Mike] Gibbons,” Stirewalt said.

‘Financing’

Trump’s Save America PAC has amassed a war chest of almost $93 million but has donated little money, only offering small contributions to candidates.

The political action committee gave $500,000 to a group called “Get Georgia Right,” which runs attack ads on Kemp, according to federal campaign records.

Political newcomer Hines, 26, has struggled on the fundraising front, raising less than $120,000 in the first quarter of the year. He didn’t receive a single campaign donation of over $50, and

only six contributions came from residents in North Carolina, according to WRAL. None of the donations came from the district where he’s running.

Club For Growth, a conservative political action committee, has donated almost $25,000 to Hines’ campaign in the first quarter of the year, campaign finance records show. The PAC also runs attack ads on leading Democratic candidate Kelly Daughtry.

‘Looking forward’

For several candidates within the MAGAverse who advance from the primaries, the real test will come in November. If the GOP outperforms expectations, it will likely cement Trumpism within the Republican Party for decades to come. Many of the Trump-endorsed candidates running are relatively young and could hold influence in public office for years: Vance is 37, attorney Madison Gesiotto Gilbert in an Ohio congressional race is 30, Rep. Madison Cawthorn is 26, and Rep. Ted Budd is 50.

Even people in Trump’s orbit do not expect him to run the table. Kemp, who is likely to win re-election, has been a vocal critic of Trump’s false election fraud claims. Trump has not been shy about his disdain for the Georgia governor, suggesting his supporters will boycott the state’s gubernatorial election. “Trump voters— MAGA—Trump voters will not go out and vote for Kemp,” the 45th president said at a rally in Georgia in late March.

Though Trump’s influence on the GOP in 2022 is not absolute, he still remains the singular most important part of the Republican playbook.

At the event in North Carolina, Bliskis said she wants Trump’s ideas to “influence the leaders of the state,” adding that the candidates he endorses “hold a lot of the same ideologies.”

For most of the Republican Party, the dominant ideology is not an ideology at all, anymore, but fealty to the former president.

Sixty-six percent of Republican voters still believe his lie the election was stolen, 69% would vote for him again in 2024, and 61% say they are more likely to support the candidates he endorses this year.

“I hold Trump at a very high regard,” Bliskis said.