Donald Trump built his political career in the United States projecting an aura of a born winner.
“I keep complaining until I win,” he said after announcing his presidential run for the Republican Party in 2015.
“We’re going to win so much that you’re going to get tired of winning”, he promised in 2016, the year of his great electoral triumph that took him to the White House against many forecasts.
And, despite having lost his re-election in 2020, Trump tried to maintain an image of invincible before his followers: he refuses to accept that result to this day and falsely insists that he won.
But Tuesday’s midterm elections in the U.S. to decide control of Congress and several state governments have cast new, perhaps definitive, doubts on Trump’s winning ability.
While no ballot included his name, Trump endorsed different candidates and positioned himself as the protagonist of the election, suggesting that he would announce his new presidential candidacy for 2024 a week after what he anticipated as a great wave of Republican victories.
However That “red tide” never happened: President Joe Biden’s Democratic Party maintained control of the Senate, it is still uncertain who will control the House of Representatives and some experts believe Trump may have backfired.
“This weakens his position and influence within the Republican Party,” Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University who has written several books on elections in the US, tells BBC Mundo.
There are a couple of reasons for this.
A pivot point
U.S. midterm elections often bring painful defeats for the president’s party. And the certainty that this would happen again this time was based not only on Biden’s low popularity but on the economic situation of the country, with the highest inflationary wave in decades.
However, there are several signs that this election was also a referendum on Trump and his allies in several key states.
While some Republicans backed by the former president triumphed, others suffered heavy defeats.
Among the first is J.D. Vance, the best-selling writer once a critic of Trump who was elected senator from Ohio after the support he received from the former president in a state where he won handily in the last two elections.
Among the losers is Mehmet Oz, a Trump-backed TV doctor defeated in his Senate race by Democrat John Fetterman, who managed to snatch a valuable Republican seat in the upper house from Pennsylvania despite having suffered a stroke during the campaign.
In that state’s gubernatorial race, Democrat Josh Shapiro defeated Doug Mastriano, a denier of the 2020 election results who was also endorsed by the former president.
Another Trump ally who falsely claimed he won the election two years ago, investor Blake Masters lost the battle for his Arizona seat to Democratic Senator Mark Kelly.
The confirmation that Biden’s party will maintain control of the upper house came over the weekend from Nevada as Democratic Senator Catherine Cortez Masto was projected to win over Republican Adam Laxalt, a former prosecutor who helped Trump’s attempts to reverse his 2020 defeat in that state.
Thus buried the hope of the Republican Party to fully control Congress and increased the unease of Republicans critical of the former president.
“This is the third election in a row that Trump has cost us the outcome,” Maryland Republican Gov. Larry Hogan told CNN on Sunday, recalling that his party also lost control of the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterm elections, when Trump was president.
“He said we would get tired of winning. Well, I I’m tired of losing” he added.
Accusations against Trump from his own party began to surface on Wednesday, when Geoff Duncan, Georgia’s Republican lieutenant governor, told the same network that “this is really a pivot point for the Republican Party.”
“It’s a time when Donald Trump is certainly in the rearview mirror and It’s time to move forward with the party“.
Duncan recalled reservations expressed before the election by Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell about the “quality” of Trump-backed candidates.
But Abramowitz points to the fact that Trump-backed candidates in key states perWhether or she had worse results than expected, “raises questions about the effect their participation is having on the party.”
Instead, Trump and some of his allies attacked McConnell.
“It’s Mitch McConnell’s fault. Spending money to defeat big Republican candidates instead of endorsing Blake Masters and others was a big mistake,” Trump said Sunday on his Truth Social platform.
“It ruined the midterm (elections)!” he said.
“They blame me”
The former president had already admitted on Wednesday that the election had been “somewhat disappointing”, although he also described it as “a very big victory”.
On the same day of the vote, Trump predicted that Republicans would win Congress, but said they would blame him personally if something different happened.
“What usually happens is that when they do well they don’t give me any credit, and if they do badly they blame me for everything,” he told the conservative network. NewsNation.
Of course, the rejection of Trump and his candidates is far from the only issue that mobilized Democratic voters, who also went to the polls on issues such as abortion rights.
But another reason why the election could be a setback for Trump is that the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, consolidated himself as a rising conservative star when he was re-elected by a wide margin.
In fact, the 44-year-old Republican is considered one of Tuesday’s big winners, reinforcing his image as a potential Republican presidential candidate in 2024.
“DeFUTURO,” the conservative newspaper headlined its front page Wednesday. The New York Post, a play on the last name of DeSantis, who appeared in a photo celebrating with his family.
Trump seems to dislike the idea of this governor running for the Republican nomination for the White House.
“If he shows up, he could hurt himself a lot,” the former president told the network. Fox News on Tuesday. And he warned that he could reveal “things about him that won’t be very flattering.” Days later he released a statement harshly attacking DeSantis.
Speaking to the BBC, Republican pollster and strategist Patrick Ruffini describes Trump as a “wounded animal,” comparing him to DeSantis’ election moment.
A key question is how many allies of the former president will stop supporting him and back DeSantis or other potential candidates for 2024, when the White House signals that Biden could seek re-election driven by the results of this election.
If Republicans now regain control of the House of Representatives as it looks like, albeit by a smaller margin than anticipated, they could claim a partial victory and end the investigation into the violent attack by Trump supporters on Capitol Hill in January 2021.
Since leaving power, the former president has been subjected to other investigations for different reasons, from his handling of classified documents to business practices.
Trump may point to those cases as efforts to halt his potential run for the White House, which he is expected to announce Tuesday. And his followers are likely to believe him again.
The former president has already shown on other occasions that he is a Hard-to-beat politician at the ballot box. With a mobilized fan base like his, he would be again by 2024.
But since he entered politics, many saw his relationship with Republicans as transactional: the party supported him despite all its controversies and he provided the winning votes to push the conservative agenda.
Perhaps this has begun to change.
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