Candidates who craved Trump’s endorsement are backing away rapidly
Donald Trump’s vitriol-fuelled address in Ohio underscored again the dilemma facing Republican candidates as the midterm election race enters its final stretch.
Donald Trump’s vitriol-fuelled address in Ohio underscored again the dilemma facing Republican candidates as the midterm election race enters its final stretch.
Trump was reported not to have been invited by JD Vance, the Republican Senate candidate. The former president simply informed Vance that he was coming. He did the same thing a week ago in Pennsylvania, turning up at a rally for Mehmet Oz, his endorsed Senate candidate, despite having had no formal invitation.
Both Vance and Oz were powerless to refuse Trump, and the result for both was the same: a former president railing against the criminal investigations against him, repeating his insistence that he won the 2020 election, and teasing another effort to retake the White House in 2024. On stage in Ohio, he mocked Vance for seeking his support and said that most Republican candidates would lose without his support.
Both Vance and Oz are struggling. Vance holds a narrow lead over the Democrat Tim Ryan, and Oz is trailing badly to John Fetterman.
They and many other candidates are battling to reconcile the Trump effect. His presence, requested or otherwise, whips up his loyalists but risks distancing undecided or more moderate conservative voters.
Republican hopes of making the midterms a referendum on Biden have been undermined by the maelstrom of controversy that accompanies Trump.
Many candidates who cravenly repeated that the 2020 election was stolen as they vied for Trump’s endorsement in the primaries have quietly backed away from the claim as the general election nears. Some have performed U-turns. Don Bolduc won the Republican Senate nomination in New Hampshire last week after repeating Trump’s claims of voter fraud in 2020, before reversing his position two days later. “I want to be definitive on this: the election was not stolen,” he told Fox News.
Other Republican candidates in competitive midterm races are quietly stripping Trump’s image and endorsement from their campaign websites in an effort to sway moderate conservative voters appalled by his Maga movement, with its support for QAnon conspiracy theories and its naked threats of political violence.
Already on the defensive over social issues such as abortion, many GOP candidates have calculated that they cannot afford to be tied to the criminal investigations accumulating around the former president.
A New York Times/Siena College poll last week found that 60 per cent of independent voters have an unfavourable view of Trump since the FBI seized top secret documents from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
Even among his loyalists, Trump’s endorsement has become a burden in the final scramble for votes. Three days after the former president joined him in Pennsylvania, Oz said that he would have certified Trump’s 2020 defeat in the election, and removed mention of his endorsement from his campaign website.
