Why the 2022 election was such a disaster for Trump

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Former president Donald Trump has made no secret in recent days that, even as Republicans were aiming for takeovers of both the House and Senate, he was utterly preoccupied with his own political fate.

While ostensibly campaigning for fellow Republicans, he has repeatedly prioritized teasing his own potentially imminent presidential campaign and sought to begin the intraparty maneuvering that comes with that — most notably by going after his erstwhile ally Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R).

He could scarcely have picked a worse time. Election Day 2022 is looking like a growing disaster for Trump. The question is whether anyone in the party summons the courage it has lacked to actually call that out and course-correct.

We’ll never know for sure — and the results are still coming in — but it’s quite possible that Trump cost the GOP the Senate majority, two elections in a row.

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As in recent days, Trump was focused two years ago on himself during the runoffs in Georgia — specifically, with a far-flung attempt to overturn his election loss. While he perhaps views those baseless claims as legitimate, even Trump himself acknowledged last year that Georgia Republicans didn’t want to vote because they didn’t trust the process.

Today, consider his favored candidates, who had won primaries in each of the four key Senate toss-ups: At least three of the four carried notable image problems into the general election, in potentially decisive ways.

One of the them lost what had appeared to be a very winnable race Tuesday: Pennsylvania’s Mehmet Oz, who probably would have lost his narrow primary without Trump’s help. Now the GOP depends on both Blake Masters in Arizona and Herschel Walker in Georgia — both candidates who brought significant baggage, in different ways.

Pennsylvania Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman declared victory over his Republican opponent Mehmet Oz on Nov. 9. (Video: The Washington Post)

Current data suggests Democrats are slight favorites in the outstanding races in Arizona and Nevada, where heavy mail voting leads to a slow count. Georgia, meanwhile, appears headed for another runoff, on Dec. 6, according to Gabriel Sterling of the Georgia secretary of state’s office.

If Democrats can win both Arizona and Nevada, they wouldn’t even need Georgia for the majority. If they win one of them and Georgia goes to a runoff, the majority would come down to the prolonged and highly flawed candidacy of Walker, who has faced a series of ugly allegations about his family life even beyond the women who say the antiabortion hard-liner urged them to abort their pregnancies with him.

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On top of these unpopular Senate candidates, other results Tuesday tell a similar tale. To wit:

Trump endorsed extreme Republican governor candidates Tudor Dixon in Michigan and Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania. Both helped cost the GOP winnable swing-state governorships, with Dixon trailing by eight points early Wednesday morning and Mastriano losing by double digits — both in states the GOP should rightly have been competing for in a midterm that almost always favors the party that doesn’t hold the White House. Republican Tim Michels also lost in Wisconsin by a wider-then-anticipated four points.
His primary-endorsed candidates also lost winnable races against Reps. Chris Pappas (D-N.H.) and Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), as well as a pretty pure swing district in North Carolina. Kaptur’s opponent, in particular, appeared to win Trump over thanks in large part to the mere gesture of painting a Trump banner on his lawn for all to see.
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), Trump loyalist and GOP provocateur, found herself in perhaps the nation’s most surprisingly competitive race. She trailed her Democratic opponent for much of the night despite coming from a district Trump won in 2020 by more than…