Tuesday’s loss in Georgia caps a disappointing midterm cycle for Republicans.
There are plenty of lessons to learn from the GOP’s shortcomings, but Washington, D.C.’s insider class is trying to sell the most lazy and predictable narrative: it’s Donald Trump’s fault.
As always, the swamp is wrong.
An honest look at the midterms underscores President Trump’s role as the lifeblood of the new Republican Party and the key to its electoral math.
First, most have conceded that Democrats outraise and outspend Republicans.
If you’re playing the blame game, blame can be placed on technology and organization that fails to capture and funnel small, hard-dollar contributions at a massive scale.
Republicans can also blame it on the number of Democratic millionaires and billionaires who are not just writing a few generous contributions, but instead, are parting with significant portions of their net worth to fund long-term investments in the leftist agenda.
They're not just spending disproportionately on high-profile statewide races, but they are spending millions in district attorney and school board races.
When it comes to money, the one person you can’t fault is former-President Donald Trump.
He fueled small dollar fundraising for not just his own political committee, Save America PAC, which doled out tens-of-millions of dollars to endorsed candidates and causes, but also the Republican National Committee (RNC), the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), and the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC).
In what’s trackable, President Trump was credited with raising these committees over $350 million. However, what’s not trackable is the hundreds of millions of dollars raised by individual candidates, committees, and causes who used his name and likeness, because, in Republican grassroots fundraising, the "Trump" brand is what fuels contributions.
Second, in 2020, President Trump outperformed Mitt Romney’s 2012 vote totals the most in the very same areas where we saw the greatest drop-off in support for Republican candidates in 2022.
That means in the areas where Trump grew the party the most in 2016 and 2020, those gains receded the fastest.
In Pennsylvania, President Trump ran 28,604 votes ahead of Mitt Romney in Luzerne County.
Prior to 2016, Luzerne, which voted 58% and 57% for President Trump in 2016 and 2020 respectively, had not gone Republican since the 1980s.
George Bush in 1988 and Ronald Reagan in 1980 each received just 50% of the vote.
Luzerne is exactly the kind of blue-collar, working-class community that President Trump swung for Republicans.
With Trump's support, Dr. Oz carried Luzerne County with 62,344 votes there — but still earned 24,585 fewer than President Trump received two years prior, and 16,344 votes fewer than President Trump received in the 2016 campaign.
We see a similar pattern in Michigan.
President Trump ran 17,117 votes ahead of Mitt Romney in the critical county of Monroe.
Tudor Dixon carried Monroe County with President Trump's support, receiving 38,212 votes — but it still was 14,498 fewer than President Trump received in 2020, and 5,049 fewer than in 2016.
Conversely, when Republican candidates vocally opposed President Trump, like Colorado U.S. Senate candidate Joe O'Dea, they failed.
In what many forget was the first shot across the bow for 2024, O’Dea earned the endorsement of Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., only after the Colorado candidate pledged to campaign against Trump. O’Dea went on to underperform Trump's share of the 2020 vote in Colorado.
Colorado’s Las Animas County, which had not voted for a Republican since President Nixon's re-election in 1972, voted twice for Trump — in his 2016 and 2020 campaigns.
Trump's share of the vote in 2016 was the highest Republican performance in a presidential election in more than one hundred years.
We observe the same trend in Alamosa County, which narrowly voted for President Trump in 2020 and yet swung back to Bennet over O'Dea by 4.5 points.
Donald Trump is both the leader of the Republican Party and hands down the frontrunner for the Republican nomination.
If a handful of billionaires want to light hundreds of millions of dollars on fire in a GOP primary because they naively believe politics is like trading stock futures, so be it. It was done in 2008 with Mitt Romney, in 2012 with Tim Pawlenty, and in 2016 with Jeb Bush.
Republicans earned 20 million fewer votes in 2022 than President Trump earned two years earlier. The voters who sat out in 2022 will not look kindly on a hostile corporate raiding of Donald Trump’s Republican Party.
The most important takeaway from 2022 is if Republicans want to win big in 2024, Trump is the only way to do so.
Taylor Budowich is the former spokesperson for former President Donald J. Trump and the Head of MAGA Inc, the primary Super PAC supporting Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign for president.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.