Donald Trump Is Political Kryptonite | Opinion

By any objective standard, the 2022 election was a historically bad election for Republicans. While votes are still being counted and important races have yet to be called, the so-called "red wave" Republicans had spent months promising turned out to be less than a red ripple.

While Republicans will likely win control of the House, they will do so having won nowhere near the 60 seats Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy had predicted and well below the 28-seat average the party out of power traditionally gains in midterms. The razor-thin four- to eight-seat majority Republicans will have in the next Congress is the smallest Republican majority in recent history. And in the Senate, once all the votes are counted in Nevada and Arizona, Democrats appear well positioned to keep control of the chamber, regardless of the outcome of the upcoming Georgia runoff.

The results will mean Democrats just had the best midterm performance of any party in power in the president's first term in more than 20 years.

And the one person they can thank for their historic showing is the once and future presumptive Republican nominee for president, Donald Trump. While there are many winners in Democrats' history-defying election, it is clear Trump was the night's biggest loser.

As he has done repeatedly in the past, Trump, with his insatiable need to be at the center of the political universe, has cost Republicans an election they should have won in a landslide.

It happened in 2017, in deep-red Alabama when Trump went all-in to support Roy Moore, despite numerous accusations Moore sexually assaulted underage women, and handed Democrats a key Senate seat, sending the first Democratic senator from the state in 25 years to the Senate. It happened again in the 2018 midterms as Trump lost the third-most House seats of a sitting president in modern history, giving Democrats their biggest gains in the House since Watergate. In 2019, against the political odds, Democrats flipped the governorship in Kentucky and won the governor's race in Louisiana. And in 2020, Trump worked his political magic for Republicans, becoming the first incumbent president in nearly 30 years to fail to win reelection and, in doing so, handed Democrats the Senate with an improbable double runoff win in Georgia.

On top of all that, Trump was the first Republican president to see a net loss of Republican-held state legislative seats during a first term since Richard Nixon.

For a man who told us that he would win so much we'd get tired of it, that is an impressive record of losing.

In fact, despite all his bluster, the man who is about to declare his third presidential run in as many presidential election cycles, as soon as next week, has never gotten more votes than his opponent. In the one election Trump managed to win, via the Electoral College, it was by fewer than 78,000 votes spread across three states—or fewer people than fit in many college football stadiums on Saturday afternoons.

The truth is this was an election in which Republicans had no business underperforming. Record-high inflation, high gas prices, a record number of Americans believing the country is headed in the wrong direction, and an incumbent president with an approval rating stuck underwater for months all should have led to big, and potentially historic, gains for Republicans in this election.

But thanks to Trump's ensuring the election was not a referendum on President Biden but rather a choice between Democratic policies and MAGA extremism, and by handpicking and pushing through the primaries weak candidates whose sole qualification was blind loyalty to Trump's election denialism—candidates like Mehmet Oz, Blake Masters, Don Bolduc, Kari Lake, and others—Democrats were able to defy political gravity and historic trends.

And in a telling sign of just how politically weak Trump is, the few Republican bright spots on Tuesday—the reelections of Governors Kemp and DeSantis—were with candidates who ran from, not toward him and his brand.

Without question, Donald Trump has a loud, active, and loyal group of followers. Probably more than any other politician in modern history. But the problem for Republicans is that it's a small and shrinking percentage of the overall voting population. And voters have now rejected Trump—and the MAGA agenda—in five straight elections.

In May of 2016, Lindsey Graham famously tweeted, "If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed ... and we will deserve it." He was right.

Donald Trump is political kryptonite for Republicans. The question now is this: Will they do anything about it, or will they roll the dice once again in 2024 with him at the top of the ticket?

Doug Gordon is a Democratic strategist and co-founder of UpShift Strategies who has worked on numerous federal, state, and local campaigns and on Capitol Hill. He is on Twitter at @dgordon52.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.