Newsweek provides a summary of the main political losers of 2023 following another turbulent year in American politics.
It’s been another tumultuous year in American politics defined by chaos within the House Republican caucus, the launch of an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden and above all the four indictments and potential political resurrection of former President Donald Trump.
Over the course of 2023 there have been plenty of winners and losers, ranging from the rise in prominence of vaccine sceptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to the sudden defenestration of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis began 2023 as a figure widely admired across the Republican Party. Leading to July 2022, his state was the fastest growing in the union, while a number of its most prominent Democratic-led counterparts actually shrank.
When DeSantis launched his bid for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination on May 24, via a rocky Twitter Spaces event co-hosted by Elon Musk, he was the clear second choice after Trump, with polling analytics website FiveThirtyEight showing he was the preferred candidate of 22.7 percent of GOP primary voters.
However, the next six months saw the erosion of DeSantis‘ support, as he came under relentless attack from Trump and his political allies, with FiveThirtyEight showing he was the preferred candidate of only 12 percent of Republican primary voters on December 19, with his hold on second place coming under threat from former U.N. Ambassador and South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley.
Former Vice President Mike Pence launched his own White House bid in June but failed to make his campaign take off and dropped out of the race four months later.
Pence struggled to land blows on his former boss, who deprived his rivals of any face-to-face confrontation by refusing to participate in any of the Republican debates, and never established himself as anything more than an also-ran.
„To talk losers is to talk anyone who theorized that there was a lane for a non-Trump candidate in 2024,“ he said. „That’s DeSantis, Pence, [Chris] Christie and virtually everyone else who has stepped foot on the Republican debate stage. Unless there’s a seismic shift between now and Iowa and New Hampshire, that increasingly looks like a doomed exercise from the start.“
In January, Kevin McCarthy was elected as House speaker following 15 grueling rounds, which saw him forced to make major concessions to a number of hard-right representatives. However the California Republican largely failed to stamp his authority on a deeply divided House Republican caucus, and in October was outed as speaker by a group of GOP rebels that voted with the Democrats to bring him down.
„Various Republicans, groups of Republicans, and the party as a whole have surpassed prior standards of political failure and defeat,“ he said. „The House Republicans‘ unprecedented difficulties in electing and retaining a speaker of the House, their defeats on the debt-limit and budget measures, and their not-ready-for-prime-time impeachment skits are among the notable failures.
„Yet, the dire condition of the Republican party organizations in swing states—depleted and discredited by their failed efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election—may be even more important. Still, the most resounding and consequential failure is the Republicans‘ inability, thus far, to move past a twice impeached, prolifically indicted, cognitively impaired aspiring dictator in the selection of their presidential standard-bearer.“
Including Joe Biden on this list is likely to be controversial as in some ways the president had quite a good year.
