The NPR Politics Podcast - Many Trump Picks Did Well Running For Open Seats, But Struggled Against Incumbents

Episode Date: June 8, 2022

Trump voters largely remain enthusiastic about the former president and would considering voting for him again in 2024, but some had a hard time seeing past their affection for the conservative, incumbent politicians he was opposing when casting their primary ballots. That was great news for Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.This episode: White House correspondent Asma Khalid, national political correspondent Don Gonyea, and national political correspondent Domenico Montanaro.Support the show and unlock sponsor-free listening with a subscription to The NPR Politics Podcast Plus. Learn more at plus.npr.org/politics Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Julia from Macomb, Illinois, and today I finished my 30th year as an educator. And to celebrate it, I'm treating myself to a shot of some really expensive whiskey. This podcast was recorded at 1 10 p.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday, June 8th. Where are the beverages in here? Things may have changed by the time you hear this. Okay, here's the show. This is so here. Things may have changed by the time you hear this. Okay, here's the show. This is so good. I want to know what kind as a bourbon enthusiast myself. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the White House. I'm Don Gagne, National Political Correspondent. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.

Former President Donald Trump has been an omnipresent factor in elections in state after state this year, endorsing GOP candidates up and down the ballot. And sometimes it seems that he is taking revenge against an incumbent that he believes is disloyal. Other times he is boosting unknown Trumpy-esque candidates competing in a very crowded field. But I think the key political question that a lot of us have had is, are these endorsements working? And now that we have gotten a few primary races into the season, we can actually begin to take stock of that question. Domenico, there were more primary races last night, and it does not seem like Trumpism was the golden ticket. Well, yeah, I mean, there were a lot of candidates who tried to wrap themselves in the politics of President Trump. In South Dakota, one accusing another of not being Trump enough, despite this candidate

having been somebody who had previously been endorsed by President Trump. She was promoting Trump's election lie, this challenger, and it didn't work out for her. And it didn't work out for a lot of candidates who are like that, who've tried to jump on the sort of golden ticket, you know, lightning rod, whatever you want to call it, in a lot of different states. It just hasn't really worked so well. You know, for Trump himself, he's had some mixed results of the candidates he's explicitly endorsed and certainly has boosted some, you know, but it's been really more of a mixed bag with a lot of variables for why. And Don, I want to bring you in because you've spent so much time in recent months

interviewing Republican voters and the folks you speak with at times, it seems like are still huge fans of Donald Trump. They absolutely are. While I'm always trying to find out who they support in this current primary that's coming up, I always look for that context. You are a Republican. Are you a Trump voter? Do you still support Donald Trump? Do you still want Donald Trump to run again for office in 2024? And overwhelmingly, they are still, you know still answering in the affirmative to those things. They still like Donald Trump. But what is interesting is when it comes to his endorsements, you don't necessarily find unanimity. They are not just like getting marching orders from Donald Trump. Just because the former president says that he likes somebody. Exactly. So I want to play a couple of pieces of tape for you here. First, we're going to hear someone in Lancaster, Ohio, kind of 45 minutes outside of Columbus. Her name is Kathy Deal, works at her local church, a loyal Republican. And when I talked to her, Trump had not yet endorsed in the Ohio Senate race, the race that was eventually won by Trump and Dorsey J.D. Vance.

But at this point, we were still waiting. Listen to her and how how eager she is to hear from the president. Trump had not given an endorsement. No, he's not. That would that would definitely seal it for sure. If he were to endorse. It would seal it. It would seal the it for sure. If he were to endorse. Yes, it would seal it. It would seal the deal for her.

But now we're going to go to a place called Lidditz, Pennsylvania, Lancaster County, a GOP stronghold. This is a gentleman named Bob Rapp. Again, he is a loyal Trump supporter, but Trump endorsed Dr. Oz in that race. He did not like Dr. Oz. I asked him if that made him really uncomfortable being at odds with his guy, Donald Trump. No, because it's his prerogative. You don't agree with your leaders 100% of the time, but he wasn't afraid to lead. Could his endorsement sway you in this Senate race?

No. That's a flat no. No. And I checked in with him after the election and he voted for Dave McCormick, who ended up losing to Oz in that recount. But again, he insists, still a loyal Trump supporter, thinks he was a great president, hopes he runs again. So it sounds like from your interviews, the anecdata, Don, that the support of President Trump is not swaying the direction that voters feel. And it's certainly not swaying the result of elections either everywhere. Here's what I'm hearing. And then I'd be interested to hear what Domenico's take is on it. We know Trump is popular among Republicans, very popular among Republicans. But in these primaries, especially where it's kind of a crowded primary, a Trump endorsement tends to get you about 30 percent.

Now, that doesn't sound like a lot. But again, in a crowded primary field, it is a lot. Now, let's break that down by some of these individual races. Dr. Oz, endorsed by Trump, got 31% of the vote. In Pennsylvania. In Pennsylvania, and he won. In Ohio, J.D. Vance, endorsed by Trump, got 32% of the vote, I think it was. And he won. But you go to a race like Congressman Madison Cawthorn, you know, the very scandal, plague, freshman representative from North Carolina. He was endorsed by Trump. He got 31 percent of the vote. But he lost.

So it depends on the place. It depends on the place. It depends on the field. And if you have a candidate like the victorious Republican Senate nominee now in North Carolina, Ted Budd, a member of Congress, people didn't know him around the state that well. He got Trump's endorsement very early. So extrapolating here, you can say he started with about 30 percent because of that Trump endorsement. But what he did was then run a pretty solid, well-funded campaign. And he built up from there and he ended up winning very, very easily. So it sounds like you're saying it depends on the number of candidates in the field. What do you think, Domenico? Well, there's a lot of things that are relative for why Trump's endorsement matters or doesn't. I mean certainly if you had a lot of people in the field and he could get – someone could get 30 percent of the vote, then sure, it would help propel them. And certainly that's not nothing, right? But when it comes to a place like Georgia, for example, we saw Trump's saw the limits of Trump's endorsement against incumbents in particular.

Open races, I think it's a little easier for Trump to kind of sway people a little bit more in the Republican primary. But you are seeing people sort of be able to veer away from just what Trump wants by dictate, as Don found there in Pennsylvania, depending on how people feel about those particular candidates. And part of that can be potentially because Trump's favorability ratings, while still very high among Republicans, the strength of that intensity, when you ask people whether they strongly approve of Trump, that's eroded some since election day, since before election day, it's declined about 20 points when you look at the survey data. So that I think just shows you the further away you get from power, the less the strength of your hold is on the base where they're just going to do whatever you say.

Now, the caveat is if Trump were to run, I'm sure a lot of those folks would then firm up. But when you're looking at a midterm election, that's why you might see people maybe go their own way, but still like the former president. All right, well, let's take a quick break. And we will be back in a moment. And we're back. And I think it's important when we discuss Donald Trump endorsements to talk about the state of Georgia, because that state, to me, really represents some of the limits of Trump's sway. You know, there were two major races there, the governor's race, as well as the race for the secretary of state. And Donald Trump's

picks lost in both of those races. And how do you make sense of that? His approach in Georgia was really rooted in punishment or even revenge, right? And it almost wasn't about the policies of these two popular incumbents who were on the ballot. And I had the chance to watch some focus groups that featured Georgia Republican voters, Georgia Trump voters. And what they would say is, I like Trump. I'm interested in these people he's endorsed. But isn't that Governor Kemp doing a good job with the economy? And I kind of liked how he wasn't in our face about COVID rules and stuff like that. And there was also a sense that Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state with whom Trump had the famous phone call trying to get him to find votes for him after the election, people felt he's doing a pretty good job as well. And absent any kind of substantive disagreement with Trump on policy,

maybe they'd have been willing to flip and go for one of these other candidates Trump endorsed. But they felt pretty good about the economy and other things. So they did not abandon these two incumbents. And I think it shows that just because Trump says, you know, he's against somebody or has some kind of vengeance against them, especially when it comes to governing in a state, you know, it's not like voting for a senator or for a congressperson when you really are voting more along ideological lines there because of what national laws could be created. It's different when you have a governor, there's stuff that's practically happening in your state. And if you like the job that your governor's done, I think it makes it harder for someone like Trump to just come in and say, I don't like the guy, vote somewhere else.

Not to mention when it's Governor Kemp, who has governed in kind of a Trumpy fashion, not in terms of style, but in terms of policy. You're talking about some of his immigration rhetoric, some of the other rhetoric that we heard from earlier. So it's not like he opposes Trump on any of these things. He only opposed him. But the key thing was on the election results. Yes. And that wasn't enough for the voters. And I think that that's something I've heard from a lot of Republican strategists, actually, who've said that there's a limit to how far this election lie pushing goes as a voting issue, especially when they're coaching their candidates to be talking about things like gas prices, for example. Inflation is still on the rise. Pocketbook issues are a real big deal in politics as we know. That trumps almost anything else, so to speak. So for Trump to continue pushing an election lie,

it'll only go so far. And it feels a little off beat when people are concerned about other things. So I want to ask you all about Georgia, because it seems like both the issue of the election lie and the power of incumbency were two big factors in those races there. So do you all interpret that being that Georgia was an anomaly? Or are there lessons for other Republicans to take from Georgia who perhaps want to themselves keep a distance from former President Trump? Well, it's difficult in the primary. But one of the other things I think that we saw there was a bit of a sustained push against Trump or Trumpism, you know, being able for Republicans as a wall, as a unit to be able to

say for as elected officials that they disagree with Trump on the election lie, whether it was Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger or Governor Kemp, who largely ignored Trump, but still pushed against this idea of the election lie. And let's not forget in Georgia, there was another race, a Senate race, and Trump's pick there, Herschel Walker, the former Heisman Trophy winner, football star. So it's not like his endorsement means nothing there. But it did not work when he was trying to take down these two popular incumbents. Yeah, I think the bigger takeaway here is that it works, but not all the time and only to a degree. So before I let you all go, Domenico, I wanted to ask one final question. And that is that it seems like some of the reporting that you have done has indicated that the intensity of support that Republicans feel for Donald Trump today is not as strong as it was when he was president. So do you interpret that as being that, you know, as we move towards a general election

in November, that Donald Trump's influence is waning and will continue to wane. I think it's something to watch because we've clearly seen these numbers happen and move toward a little bit of a decline, a little bit of an erosion with the party. He's still the biggest name in the room and still matters the most in Republican politics by far. You know, Republican elected leaders follow his message, follow his path. They don't want to cross him. Until those things start to change, I'm very skeptical that Trump, quote unquote, won't matter. You know, but when you look at something like 2024, beyond the 2022 elections, you know, his standing isn't all that great

either. You know, just because President Biden's standing, for example, has declined, Trump's favorability ratings are equal or below Biden's. So I think if it were to be Biden and Trump in 2024, you're still looking at, at the start, something that lines up to be very close. All right, well, let's leave it there for today. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the White House. And I'm Don Gagne, national political correspondent. I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. Thank you all, as always, for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.