President Donald Trump’s once-formidable primary endorsement record took another hit this week, raising questions about the limits of his kingmaker status within the Republican Party after three of his preferred candidates lost on Tuesday.
Embattled Rep. Cory Mills (R-FL) and Catalina Lauf both lost their Florida congressional primaries, while Megan Degenfelder fell short in her gubernatorial primary. Including Tuesday’s results, at least 10 Trump-backed candidates for state and federal office have lost their primaries this cycle.
Republican strategists cautioned against interpreting the defeats as evidence that Trump has lost his grip on GOP voters. Instead, they argued, the losses demonstrate the limits of even a presidential endorsement when voters are presented with scandal-plagued candidates or political novices who have failed to make their own case.
“Trump’s endorsement is still very valuable. You will still see people in Republican primaries seek out Trump’s endorsement,” said Ohio GOP strategist Matt Dole. “But it is not sacrosanct. The voters still get to decide, and the voters look at the people and make those decisions.”
Mills presented perhaps the clearest example: the two-term incumbent entered the primary facing domestic abuse allegations, questions about his finances, and a House Ethics Committee investigation. While Mills has denied wrongdoing, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) refused to endorse him for reelection, while two colleagues, Reps. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) and Mike Haridopolos (R-FL) endorsed and campaigned for his primary challenger.
Trump himself admitted on Wednesday that he’d asked Mills to step aside ahead of the primary.
“I told Congressman Cory Mills of Florida, a friend of mine, to get out of the Race, but he wouldn’t listen,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “He thought he could win, so who can blame him?”
The White House told the Washington Examiner that anyone claiming that Trump’s endorsement has been diminished by the recent losses “is a complete and utter fool.”
“The President’s record speaks for itself: out of more than 260 endorsements, the President has a 97% success rate,” said Allison Schuster, a White House spokeswoman. “President Trump is committed to maintaining Republican majorities in Congress and continuing to lower costs for working families.”
Patrick Arnold, a South Carolina GOP strategist, argued that Trump’s endorsement can be particularly valuable for fundraising and generating attention, but cannot necessarily overcome serious problems with a candidate.
“Given my perspective on the impact of endorsements, I definitely think a domestic abuse charge trumps the Trump endorsement,” he said of Mills’s loss.
Angie Wong, a Miami-based Republican strategist, similarly argued that Mills’s defeat reflected his own political problems rather than a decline in support for Trump. She also blamed Lauf’s loss in Florida’s 19th Congressional District on the candidate rather than the president who endorsed her. Lauf previously ran for Congress in Illinois in 2020 and 2022 before moving to Florida.
“I really thought once she secured a Trump endorsement that it cleared the lane of any other candidate, but apparently [the district] wanted nothing to do with that,” said Wong. “A lot of that is because Catalina is an out-of-stater; she’s a carpetbagger.”
Trump’s endorsement will next face a major test in South Carolina’s special GOP Senate primary runoff to replace the late Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham. The president has endorsed Graham’s sister, Sen. Darline Graham Nordone (R-SC), who was appointed to the seat last month.
Graham Nordone finished first in the initial primary but failed to secure the nomination outright, setting up an Aug. 25 runoff against Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC). Trump is set to campaign with her in South Carolina on Friday.
Polls show a tight contest. Graham Nordone has also faced questions about her command of policy issues. During a debate with Norman on Tuesday, she went viral after acknowledging that she was “not that informed on national security” when asked about Taiwan and China.
“Voters have a good [bulls***] meter,” said Dole. “I’ve done 350 races. Voters can sniff out BS, and someone like Cory Mills or Darline Graham- voters are going to sniff that out and make their decisions based on what’s best for them locally, and not in service to the president nationally.”
Yet concerns about Trump’s political standing are also beginning to emerge from some of the president’s most fervent supporters, who warn that the durability of his coalition could ultimately depend less on his endorsement record than on whether Republicans believe he is delivering on the agenda that returned him to the White House.
During Wednesday’s broadcast of War Room, former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon highlighted a warning from former U.S. Border Patrol commander-at-large Greg Bovino that younger Republicans could abandon the GOP if the party fails to deliver on priorities such as immigration.
“Young Republicans are not bluffing. They will walk. The GOP is currently on a suicide mission,” Bovino wrote on X.
TRUMP HAS A 96% ENDORSEMENT SUCCESS RATE. HERE ARE THE REPUBLICANS HE’S BACKED WHO HAVE LOST
That makes November a potentially more consequential test of Trump’s political strength than his primary endorsement record alone.
“If flying the Trump flag doesn’t achieve what they hope it will achieve, if they lose control of Congress and if the agenda items get kind of stopped in their tracks, then yes we will probably see several Republicans going rogue,” said Scott Huffmon, director of the Center for Public Opinion & Policy Research at Winthrop University in South Carolina.