Donald Trump, through his influence over Republican primary voters, has ended a number of high-profile Republican careers in the past few weeks. These include Texas Senator John Cornyn, Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, and five Indiana state senators. He did this by championing primary challengers who were much more in his mold and who professed allegiance to him, unlike the incumbents who occasionally criticized him. Trump has made it clear that he will be a very active participant in this fall’s midterm elections (notwithstanding his recent claim that he doesn’t care). This is very much the pattern we saw in 2022, when Trump’s involvement likely cost his party control of the Senate.
Trump appears to believe that Republican officeholders will fare better if they are seen as closely aligned with him. Perhaps the best expression of this belief is the Republican Party’s intended midterm convention this September. This is a pretty novel move, driven almost entirely by President Trump. Details on the midterm convention are vague so far, but it looks likely to be held in Dallas or Las Vegas. My guess is that its effect on Republican fortunes in the fall is likely to be zero or negative. But it also nicely highlights Trump’s idea of just what conventions are for (which is not what conventions are for).
Just some background on midterm conventions: Democrats actually held them in 1974 and 1978, as Ed Kilgore noted last year. The 1974 one mainly focused on policy and helped ratify some of the new nominations reforms Democrats had been working on since 1968. The 1978 convention is actually something closer to what Republicans have in mind this year — it was to rally Democrats behind President Carter, whose approval ratings were sagging and who was increasingly on the outs with the left in his party. It ended up being more of an embarrassment for the party, highlighting rather than smoothing over the divisions, and the party abandoned these conventions
What Republicans are proposing for this year is not really policy-based. Rather, they seek to highlight Trump’s accomplishments in his second term. More generally, it’s an attempt to nationalize the midterm vote. As Chief of Staff Susie Wiles explains,
Typically in the midterms it’s not about who’s sitting at the White House. You localize the election, and you keep the federal officials out of it. We’re actually going to turn that on its head and put him on the ballot because so many of those low propensity voters are Trump voters.
A few points on this:
