Ron DeSantis holds an advantage over Donald Trump in the GOP establishment

[ad_1]

Republicans hold the slimmest majority in the New Hampshire House right now and GOP officials in the state worry they won’t hold onto it if former President Donald Trump becomes the party’s presidential nominee next year.

During the years that Mr. Trump, Chris Maidment, chairman of the Hillsborough County Republican Party, said swing voters have turned away, particularly in the suburbs.

“If the election is tomorrow and Donald Trump is the nominee, I’m nervous,” Mr. Maidment in The Washington Times. “Currently, I don’t think he is in the right position to grow the party.”

It’s a remarkable turn of events for a man who promised Republicans in 2016 that they would “get tired of winning” with him at the helm.

During his four years in office, the GOP lost its majority in both the US House and Senate and lost eight governorships.

Meanwhile, in Florida, Republicans have enjoyed a boom since 2018 under Mr. Trump’s most prominent GOP rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis, who entered the presidential primary race on Wednesday.

Under Mr. DeSantis, Florida Republicans swept the state’s top offices and claimed supermajorities in both houses of the legislature. Mr. DeSantis cruised to a landslide 19-point victory over his Democratic opponent, former Gov. Charlie Christ.

Registered Republicans also outnumbered Democrats for the first time in state history on Mr. DeSantis.

“In addition to bringing new voters to the Republican Party, DeSantis won independents, women, and Hispanics in his 2022 re-election and flipped some traditionally blue counties for the first time in a generation,” said a senior DeSantis campaign official. “In an election where returning voters to the group is critical to our party’s success, there is only one candidate with a proven record of doing so.”

Mr. challenged Trump is the idea that Mr. DeSantis deserves credit for the GOP’s win in Florida.

“Florida has been successful for years, before I put Ron there It’s amazing what Ocean and Sunshine will do!” Mr. Trump said the endorsement helped Mr. DeSantis who was elected in 2018, in a recent email blast.

While much of the GOP primary discussion next year will center on policy, the ability to build the Republican Party will be a significant undercurrent and for good reason.

If Republicans win the White House but fail to secure a majority in Congress, the next president will struggle to get big things done on the policy front. The better the GOP does at the ballot box, the more a president can achieve.

Not only Mr. DeSantis is the first Republican candidate with gubernatorial experience to build the GOP.

Nikki Haley, who was governor of South Carolina from 2011 to 2017, oversaw a slight increase in the number of Republican seats in her state legislature.

In Arkansas, Asa Hutchinson, who stepped down after eight years as governor, led Republicans to major gains in his legislature, adding more than 30 state House and Senate seats to the GOP column.

The record of Mr. Trump is not very good.

Heading into the 2016 election, Republicans held 54 seats in the US Senate and 247 seats in the House. They lost control of the Senate in 2020, as Mr. Trump sought re-election, and slipped further in 2022, falling to 49 seats.

In the House, Republicans lost their majority in Mr. Trump in 2018 and then regained the majority last year albeit by a thinner margin than analysts expected.

The GOP also lost about 200 seats in state legislatures between 2017 and 2021, and the party saw seven governorships switch from Republicans to Democrats.

In 2022, even without Mr. Trump in the White House, some party operatives blamed him for the Republicans’ subpar showing, saying he found a way to turn what should have been a referendum on President Biden into a choice between the politics of Biden and Trump.

Mr. Trump, for his part, blamed abortion politics and a complacent GOP election for the party’s struggles in 2022.

Mr. Trump’s team said if he gets another chance at the White House, he is well-positioned to reinvigorate Republicans by continuing a realignment that sees lower-income and less-educated voters. are drifting into the orbit of Republicans, even college-educated and higher- income voters are fleeing.

“President Trump is the undisputed leader of the party, which has now become the party of working men and women,” said Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung. “In his first term, he led the economy to record highs, appointed the three Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, made the United States respected on the world stage, secured the border, and built the America First movement from the ground up. up.”

Ford O’Connell, a Republican strategist, continued, saying that Mr. Trump may be the only person who can lead the Republican Party to victory against a Washington establishment bent on derailing the GOP.

“We’re at a point where the next commander in chief can’t learn on the fly because you have to adjust the mechanics in Washington to lift the party’s brand,” Mr. O’Connell said. “We need someone with experience to come to Washington DC to clean it up.”

Jim Merrill, a veteran GOP strategist based in New Hampshire, acknowledged Mr. Trump’s ability to find voters who did not support Republicans.

“I think with Trump one good thing that he’s shown in his years in public life is his ability to bring out non-traditional voters, or not your typical Republicans, and engage them in the process, ” he says.

But he said it was an “open question” whether voters were loyal Republicans, or just loyal to Mr. Trump.

“I think Ron DeSantis came here from a Republican Party first perspective, whereas Donald Trump came from a Donald Trump first perspective, which is not always good for the party,” he said.

David Kochul, an Iowa-based GOP strategist, put it more bluntly: “I don’t see how an unpopular one-term president in his late seventies can be good for the long-term health of a party political.”

[ad_2]