So Andrew Gelman had an interesting series of posts on the 2022 midterms (1) (2) and his takeaway was that running moderate candidates is not always an optimal political strategy. Running more moderate and/or centrist candidates usually only swings the polls by about 2%. Therefore, if you expect a wave election year, it makes sense to prioritize loyal candidates over moderate candidates to secure control over the party. Gelman thinks that this is basically what the 2022 Trump wing did and they just miscalculated the effect that the Dobbs decision had on the electorate.
This made me curious about whether Trump had actually consolidated political power within the Republican party and it’s…actually pretty impressive. Ballotpedia has an excellent page (3) on Donald Trump’s endorsements but I’d like to highlight a few statistics.
In 2018, Trump endorsed 132 candidates, by 2022 he endorsed 495 candidates.
Of the current 218 Republican Congressmen, 149 were endorsed by Trump.
Of the current 49 Republican Senators, 17 were endorsed by Trump in 2022, 18 were endorsed by Trump in 2020, and 10 were endorsed by Trump in 2018, for a total of 45 Republican Senators.
Now I had to handcount some of these figures, so I’d welcome correction, but these are actually really impressive numbers that I haven’t seen Trump get much credit for.
And I see a lot of very intelligent conservatives, like Richard Hannania, go hard for DeSantis for 2024 (4). For, let’s be fair, a ton of really good and defensible reasons. But running these numbers bothered me because, well, a lot of Washington Republicans want to return the party to the Jeb! Bush days (5). It’s actually incredibly important than incumbent Senators and Congressmen are not RINOs. If 70-80% of elected Republicans were endorsed by Trump and they’re able to stay in power for 8-10 years, that’s actually incredibly important because the Trump base is absolutely sick of being sold out.
And, while I’m very pro-DeSantis, I can’t imagine his endorsements mattering to this extent. Partly because Trump’s influence seem disproportionate even by his peer’s standards, see Obama and Sanders (7) endorsements. And partly because, well the never-Trumpers seem to have rallied around DeSantis, at no fault of his own, so he’s hardly going to endorse anti-RINO candidates.
But overall, I was surprised, especially in the Senate, exactly how much influence Trump has had. Maybe I’ve miscalculated, if so please correct me, but I think there’s a case to be made to back Trump in 2024, even if he loses, to permanently entrench a new class of non-RINO incumbent congressmen and senators.
(3) https://ballotpedia.org/Endorsements_by_Donald_Trump#Analysis_.282022.29
(4)
(5) Call them RINOs, whatever. There’s two clear factions with distinct agendas and bases of support.
(6) https://ballotpedia.org/Endorsements_by_Barack_Obama