Republicans are nervous Trump-endorsed candidates won’t be able to win in general elections and could wash away the red wave they’re hoping for in the fall.
Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance has had, to say the least, something of an odd relationship with former President Donald Trump. At one point during the 2016 presidential campaign, the Yale-educated, best-selling author was a prominent “never Trumper,” publicly begging the question of whether Trump was “America’s Hitler.” The “policy proposals [Trump ran on] — in particular his hostility to immigration, range from the immoral to the absurd,” Vance later wrote. But once Trump was in office, as Vance contemplated the possibility of his own political career, he began to change his tune, apologizing profusely, on Fox News and in other forums, for previous criticism of the president. On April 15, those apologies paid off when Trump endorsed the political neophyte in his race for an open Senate seat in Ohio, and announced he would soon campaign for him. The endorsement infuriated many of Trump’s own supporters in the state. “We were stunned when we learned he would endorse J.D. Vance, who has no connection to us,” said Tom Zawistowski, president of the We the People Convention, a national Tea Party group headquartered in Akron. “Vance was nowhere in Ohio when we were electing Donald Trump twice.” But for Vance — and for Trump — the endorsement has apparently had its intended effect. According to the most recent Fox News poll, taken from April 20-24, Vance has vaulted to a five point lead in the race. Just a week earlier, according to a poll from the Trafalgar Group, former state treasurer Josh Mandel led the field by five points. A senior Vance campaign official told Newsweek that the candidate’s internal polling shows that the Trump endorsement “is decisive. We feel very good now going into this last weekend.” To Trump, the trajectory of the Ohio race conveys an undeniable truth: he controls the commanding heights of the Republican party, and his endorsement is pure gold. But even if Trump’s endorsement does help catapult Vance and others to primary victories, some Republicans are nervous that Trump-endorsed candidates won’t be able to win in general elections. For one, Trump “remains toxic in the suburbs,” said Berwood Yost, director of the Center for Opinion Research and the Floyd Institute for Public Policy at Franklin and Marshall College. Yost’s polling work suggests that in Pennsylvania, where another critical Senate seat is on the line this year, the number of voters who consider themselves core members of the Trump coalition has diminished since 2020. Interviews with candidates, GOP strategists, and donors across the country, as well as Republican insiders in Washington, made clear the risk: A sufficient number of ‘Trumpian’ candidates could wash away some of the red wave they’re hoping for in the fall. Trump remains a deeply polarizing figure. He retains fervent, cult-like support among his political fans, but still repels many moderate voters, including those who deserted him in 2020: country club Republicans, suburban women, and a big chunk of independent voters. For candidates in competitive states or districts, particularly in reliably blue states, that remains a problem. It forces them to “thread the Trump needle,” said Jeff Roe, former campaign strategist for Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, who successfully did just that last year.
