Republicans haven’t forgotten about the red wave that got away two years ago but have one big reason to hope Tuesday will turn out differently: Former President Donald Trump will be on the ballot.
Trump isn’t the sole determining factor in differentiating the midterm elections from this year’s presidential race. Republican operatives are mostly bullish on the uptick in early voting by the GOP rank-and-file. President Joe Biden’s position became so untenable he dropped out after the primaries and he still weighs down his replacement, Vice President Kamala Harris.
But Republicans are counting on Trump to be able to entice lower-propensity, disproportionately working-class voters who stayed home in 2022 to make their way to the polls on Tuesday.
Not only will this be the key to winning the Electoral College and returning to the White House. Republican congressional majorities in both houses will be much more likely if Trump prevails.
PATHS TO VICTORY FOR HARRIS AND TRUMP IN 2024
This is different from where Republicans largely expected to be two years ago. Republicans lost control of the House in 2018, while Trump was still president. Trump was defeated in his reelection bid in 2020. Republicans then lost the Senate after Trump’s repeated assertions that the election was stolen depressed GOP turnout in a pair of runoff elections in Georgia, a contested state Biden narrowly won. Then Trump’s endorsements were blamed for Republicans underperforming in the midterm elections and failing to win back the Senate.
This record became a central part of the case Trump’s Republican primary opponents made against nominating him for the third time. Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), who won reelection by a landslide in 2022, and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, who boasted greater crossover appeal outside the base, especially presented themselves as more likely to win in November.
Predictions of Trump’s inevitable defeat mounted as he was indicted in four cases across multiple jurisdictions in addition to fighting multiple civil cases. “Now he has three judgments against him. He’s going to be in court March and April, May and June. He has said himself he is going to spend more time in a courtroom than he is on the campaign trail. And so he’s been on a rant about what a victim he is,” Haley warned at an event in South Carolina earlier this year.
But the legal cases rallied the Republican base behind Trump in the primaries and have largely been a nonissue in the general election campaign. Days before the election, Trump leads in the RealClearPolitics polling average both nationally and in the top battleground states, however narrowly.
If Trump loses, Republicans might gain somewhere between one and three Senate seats in states he is going to carry regardless of the national outcome: West Virginia, Montana, and possibly Ohio. A Trump win potentially puts as many as five additional seats in play. The more battleground states Trump wins and the bigger his margin, the more likely Senate races in places such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan become pickup opportunities.
The former president has been running ahead of nearly all the Republican Senate candidates in competitive races this year, with the exception of Larry Hogan in Maryland.
Conversely, the more battleground states Harris carries, the more Democratic Senate candidates and incumbents running in those places will win their races.
The razor-thin Republican House majority may also rest on Trump’s performance, though the number of genuinely competitive congressional districts is in decline.
Democrats would like to see a repeat of the midterm elections, hoping that whatever rightward shift happens in the electorate is confined to blue states Trump cannot flip and red, rural areas he was going to win anyway without much movement in the battlegrounds. That’s how Republicans won a national plurality two years ago but didn’t gain as many House seats as expected and came up short in key Senate races.
But just as some voters turned out for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 while staying home during the midterm elections (both of which were red waves under his administration), there are people who skipped 2022 who will cast ballots for Trump. Even in his past electoral setbacks, Republicans gained Senate seats in 2018 and House seats in 2020.
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This is why most of Trump’s GOP detractors outside of hardcore Never Trump circles or blue-state Republicans trying to win their own races, Trump-skeptical figures like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA), are on board this time around.
Republican fortunes rise or fall with Trump.