It’s deja-vu all over again, with Georgia is in the spotlight and the Senate majority potentially hanging on the outcome of the December 6 run-off. Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock has been able to pivot immediately to getting out vote for in a shortened process while Republicans are occupied, as usual, with Trump.
The glaring deficiencies of Trump’s guy in the race, Herschel Walker, was enough to give Senate Republicans heartburn. The specter of Trump big-footing his way into the run-off and using it as a platform for his 2024 presidential launch is enough to give them heart attacks. Anonymously, of course.
“Hopefully Trump will stay out of the race as much as he possibly can, and if that means holding off announcing his campaign for the White House, that would be a smart move not just for Republicans’ chances in Georgia but Trump’s hopes to win the nomination for president,” one GOP aide told The Hill.
“If you talk to Georgia election strategists, they believe Trump was a huge drag on Walker in suburban Atlanta, and there’s just no reason to risk repeating that,” the source said. “If Trump injects himself into the race somehow and Walker comes up short, that’s really bad for Trump too.”
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They’ve got good reason to worry—it’s just what Trump did in the 2020 run-off during his “Stop the Steal” campaign. He had an hour-and-a-half-long rally, ostensibly for the Republicans in the double run-off, in which he railed about the rigged election and how he could not have possibly lost the state to Joe Biden. It wasn’t exactly inspiring for Republicans to go out and vote again for Republican Sens. Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler. And they didn’t. Jon Ossoff and Warnock took the seats, and Democrats the Senate majority.
“I think it’s still possible that we win Nevada and then it all comes down to Georgia,” another anonymous source, a Senate Republican aide, said. “I think that we can win Georgia if Trump doesn’t tell people not to vote.
“But if he’s going to come out in five days and announce his presidential run, that’s not going to be great for us,” the aide continued. “He doesn’t know how to do anything other than make things about him.”
Retiring Sen. Pat Toomey, whose seat flipped to Democrat John Fetterman on Tuesday, is one Republican who no longer has anything to fear from Trump, so he’s on the record telling CNN that Trump is a disaster, and so are his candidates. Mehmet Oz, the loser in the race for Toomey’s seat, was dragged down by Trump’s pick for the governor in Pennsylvania, Toomey said. “President Trump had to insert himself, and that changed the nature of the race, and that created just too much of an obstacle,” Toomey said.
Doug Mastriano, the far-right Trump pick, “ended up losing in an epic beat down,” taking the rest of the ticket down with him, Toomey said. “There’s a very high correlation between MAGA candidates and big losses,” he added. “I think my party needs to face the fact that if fealty to Donald Trump is the primary criteria for selecting candidates, we’re probably not going to do really well.”
Even former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (MS) had to be dusted off to encourage Trump to stay away, telling SiriusXM host Steve Scully that Trump possibly lost Georgia for Republicans in 2020. “When President Trump went in there, I got the impression it depressed the vote on the Republican side, and we lost both senators,” he said. “That cost us the majority in the Senate.
“We’re going to have to be careful about what we do, and I would hope that former President Trump would be careful about what he does there,” he added.
Trump probably doesn’t know Trent Lott exists, so that’s probably not going to help much in convincing him to stay away from cameras, the rally stage. So have fun with that, GOP.
Meanwhile, we’ll all be here helping the good Rev. Sen. Warnock make it back to the Senate.
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