AP poll found majorities said GOP Senate candidates were too supportive of Trump
President Donald Trump rejected personal responsibility for Republicans’ sweeping midterm losses, saying he was not on the ballot and voters simply did not like the candidates. Republican losses swept Democrats into control of Congress on a wave of Senate victories that once seemed far-fetched in GOP strongholds — wins in South Carolina and in Kansas, which had not elected a Democratic senator since 1932. In Texas, Democrats had been shut out of every statewide race for more than three decades, until Tuesday. Trump had urged supporters to “pretend I’m on the ballot,” placing his own record at the center of the party’s performance.
Trump was already backpedaling before the full scope of his party’s defeat was clear. On election night, he sounded more humble than usual, in AP’s description, and pledged to work with Democrats and to accept the election results. Even then, he was seeking to deflect responsibility. “I don’t like to consider it a defeat for me. I wasn’t on the ballot,” he told Fox News. Voters, he said, just “didn’t like the candidates” on the ballot.
The AP Voter Poll suggested that Trump was a drag on GOP candidates. Only 4 in 10 voters nationwide approved of how he was handling the presidency. In Ohio, Iowa, Maine and North Carolina, states Republicans lost, majorities said the Republican Senate candidates were “too supportive” of him.
An Associated Press analysis of the 39 speeches and rallies Trump staged since Sept. 1 found that he used a version of the appeal in 30 of them. In some addresses, he returned to the subject more than once, meaning there were at least 40 instances in which he asked voters to engage in that bit of make-believe. Before the full extent of the defeat was known, Trump wrote on his social media site that if he had been running, “We would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!”
Trump has a long history of passing the buck, especially when there are ballot-box failures. After Republicans lost the House in the 2018 midterms during his first term, he blamed defeated members of his own party. Utah Rep. Mia Love, who had tried to distance herself from him, “gave me no love, but then she lost. Too bad,” Trump said. He mocked other losing lawmakers for not embracing him — Florida’s Carlos Curbelo, Colorado’s Mike Coffman, Virginia’s Barbara Comstock and Illinois’ Peter Roskam — with the same words he would use eight years later: “My name wasn’t on the ballot.”
After their parties take hits in midterm elections, most White Houses engage in some soul-searching, with the president publicly shouldering at least part of the responsibility. A day after big Republican congressional gains in 2010, President Barack Obama said he took “a shellacking.” President George W. Bush described Democratic victories in the 2006 midterms as “a thumping.” But Trump began laying the groundwork for avoiding blame well before balloting began, telling Punchbowl News in August that voters were angry at Republicans “but they’re not angry at me.”
Not all of Trump’s blame-shifting came after the results. Last month, before Election Day, he posted on his social media site that should Texas Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton lose — and Paxton did lose — “it will be because of WEAK and INEFFECTIVE Political Hacks like John Cornyn and Karl Rove.” That post came despite Trump’s endorsement of Paxton, whom AP described as scandal-marred, in the primary over incumbent Cornyn, who first got to the Senate in 2002 and was considered the safer bet — an endorsement the AP report described as risky. Rove is a political strategist who helped Bush win the White House.
Also losing was Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Trump ally. Trump posted on social media that if Abbott “hadn’t become a RINO in the last six months of his Political Life, he wouldn’t have lost” — suggesting the governor had backed away from his staunchly conservative credentials and become “Republican in Name Only.”
One thing Trump did not do in the immediate aftermath of Tuesday’s results, however, was level accusations of widespread election fraud. He has done that after past defeats. After losing in 2020, Trump falsely claimed that his opponents had cheated, even as a parade of recounts, audits and scores of lawsuits on his behalf were tossed, confirming Democrat Joe Biden’s victory. Trump’s own attorney general said there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud.
The restraint came despite Trump having called, before voting even began, for the criminal prosecution of Democratic Senate candidate Mary Peltola in Alaska. That followed revelations that Peltola’s campaign appeared to be involved in recruiting a candidate with the same name as Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan. Peltola denies involvement.
Trump’s focus went beyond Alaska. At a recent rally in Youngstown, Ohio, he said “the only way” Democrats “can win elections is to rig the election.” Democrats won races for governor and Senate in the state. Similarly, he posted on social media that “the only way” Minnesota Republican Senate candidate Michele Tafoya “can lose is if they cheat by playing games with the Ballots.” She lost.
Avoiding responsibility, for Trump, extends beyond elections. “The buck stops with everybody,” he said in 2019, during a lengthy government shutdown. Trump had first bragged that he would be proud to own the shutdown as he unsuccessfully sought to pressure congressional Democrats to approve additional border security money. The following year, on the same day he declared the coronavirus pandemic a national emergency, the president said, “I don’t take responsibility at all” for a lack of COVID-19 testing.
Since returning to the White House, it has been more of the same. In February, bipartisan backlash forced Trump to delete a social media post that AP described as racist and that depicted Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama as primates. He refused to apologize, saying, “I didn’t make a mistake.” As the midterms approached, Trump faulted Biden, who by then had been out of office for more than 18 months, for Americans’ concerns about inflation. He also kept insisting that the delayed, costly and problem-plagued revamp of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was marred by vandalism, even though the office of the federal prosecutor he put in the job blamed the damage on shoddy workmanship.
Trump has even faulted other presidents for the war in Iran that he started with Israel in February, saying he was making up for earlier administrations that squandered nearly 50 years of opportunities to curb Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. That view marked a break even with his own vice president, JD Vance, who wrote on Wednesday, “The reason we lost is the war.”
None of those justifications helped Republicans much on Tuesday. It was an outcome even Trump seemed to foresee last month, while shifting blame to voters who had not yet cast ballots. “If we don’t win the midterms, they’re going to blame me,” he warned during a rally in Clarksville, Tennessee, on Oct. 10, before adding, “You better get out there and vote.”
The Associated Press report was by Will Weissert; AP writers Josh Boak and Aaron Kessler contributed to it.