With just months to go before the November election, Donald Trump’s political machine is operating in full force. Endorsements are rolling out in Truth Social posting sprees, and candidates hoping to ride the former president’s coattails into office lavish praise upon him at his weekly rallies. But in recent weeks, a string of defeats and close calls for Trump-backed candidates in battleground state primaries is once again pulling back the curtain on the former president’s limitations, and echoing concerns raised by the party in past election cycles.
Prominent MAGA candidates made a poor showing in Tuesday’s Republican primaries, which took place in Colorado, New York, Utah, and South Carolina. In the biggest blow to the former president’s supposed king-making power, Trent Staggs — his pick to replace outgoing Republican Utah Senator Mitt Romney — was defeated in a landslide win by Rep. John Curtis (R-Utah), a Romney-style Republican who has kept Trump at a distance throughout the election cycle.
In Colorado, state GOP Chair Dave Williams — a hardline MAGA candidate who publicly bragged about having Trump’s personal number saved in his phone — lost his House primary by more than 30 points. In South Carolina, Trump-endorsed televangelist Mark Burns was narrowly defeated by nurse practitioner Sheri Biggs, who had secured a competing endorsement for the state’s Republican Gov. Henry McMaster.
Ahead of the vote, Burns declared during a debate that the district “needs a Trump-endorsed pit bull, not a poodle,” and called Biggs a “swamp creature.” Voters disagreed.
Tuesday’s losses are not the only recent string of defeats and near misses likely to raise alarms within MAGAworld. In Virginia, the race between incumbent Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.), chairman of the far-right and very Trumpy House Freedom Caucus, and Trump-backed state Sen. John McGuire remains too close to call, and is likely headed to a recount. In his own use of Trump’s playbook, Good has so far refused to accept the results of the election, raised claims of fraud, and has threatened to block the certification of results in a key city within the district.
Earlier this month, Trump’s last-minute bid to push state Rep. Julie McGuire to victory in Indiana’s race for the lieutenant governor failed to boost her over the line.
It’s also not the first time Trump’s endorsement record has raised concerns about his true influence on voters. In the 2022 midterms, a slew of Trump-backed down-ballot candidates failed to make it past their primaries, and the “red wave” the GOP was expecting turned out to be little more than a pink ripple, with Democrats managing to expand their control of the Senate as the GOP belly-flopped into an extremely narrow majority in the House.
For a brief moment in the aftermath of the midterms, the Republican Party was forced into a state of self-reflection regarding whether or not Trump’s bombastic, scorched-earth persona was actually translating to electoral gains worthy of the subjugation of the party to his image.
“Looking at President Trump, what has he gotten right? And what has he gotten wrong? And how do we learn from that to win elections going forward?” Henry Barbour, an RNC committeeman from Mississippi, said in an interview at the time. The RNC went so far as to weigh outright blaming the former president for their underperformance in their midterm post-mortem.
Trump himself was loath to take any of the blame. “It wasn’t my fault that the Republicans didn’t live up to expectations in the MidTerms,” he raged on Truth Social. In this election cycle, the former president’s loyalists managed to oust longtime RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel from her position and install Trump’s daughter-in-law — Lara Trump — as her replacement.
The RNC isn’t likely to consider blaming Trump for any electoral failures, but as the GOP barrels toward another general election, candidates hoping that a Trump endorsement alone will be their ticket to victory in November may want to reevaluate their strategies.
