During the months between Donald Trump’s re-election to the Presidency in November 2024 and his inauguration in January 2025, the entire political world was transfixed by one question: why Trumpism—dominant, triumphant, culture-conquering Trumpism—had gone down in failure and was swept out of Washington after its first stint in power. If the movement had just been vindicated so thoroughly in the 2020s, why had it not been vindicated in the first place in the late 2010s, when Trump himself was forced to endure four years of chronic unpopularity and endless electoral losses against an inept opposition? Could it be that the movement wasn’t quite as much of a juggernaut as it was suddenly being described as, or did it have an excuse for all of its failures?
From the moment that the election was called, all of the great political minds of the country decided that, whether it be for better or for worse, the answer was the latter. Trumpism, it was said, was entitled to nothing less than a complete mulligan for the entirety of Trump 1.0. The reason for all of the stumbles of that era, the story went, was a simple lack of coordination and experience. This was a very easy story to believe, and practically everyone did. But amidst all of this certainty, celebration, and commiseration about our incoming competent fascist regime, there was still one fly in the ointment—one big reason to doubt that this new big red-hatted machine was actually any better than the infamous clowns of Trump 1.0 when it came to running things like adults.
This was the fact that the Trumpworld of the Biden years, despite being out of power, had not been relieved from a position where it needed to make high-stakes, high-consequence personnel decisions. Trump and his people had spent that entire period effectively running the GOP, making them the ones who decided who the party ran in its important races. The stakes for such decisions were incredibly high, and the bar for success was quite low. If the MAGA movement had actually transformed into something newer and smarter and more vicious over the course of the Biden years, then its transformation should have been visible here, through the nominations of entire classes of high-quality candidates capable of beating the Democrats to a pulp.
But this did not happen. It did not even come close to happening. In fact, the exact opposite occured. In just the 2022 election alone, no less than four Republican candidates—Trump endorsees all—lost four Senate races that the fundamentals said that they should have won. The same exact thing then occurred once again in 2024, when four more Republican candidates lost races in states that voted for Trump on the same ballot. These were extremely high-stakes personnel decisions, not at all unlike the most important ones that a White House would need to make, and they were characterized by extreme incompetence across the board. Blind loyalty was prized over even the most basic qualifications. Messaging came directly from right-wing echo chambers. Things regularly went horribly wrong, and when they did, no adjustments were ever made. At least in this realm, there was no sign of any matured, efficient right-wing populism. Instead, there was only the Trumpist establishment doubling and tripling down on its worst excesses, all while removing all of the guardrails that had kept them from making even bigger mistakes in the past.
It was this pattern of behavior—easily missable to those who don’t live and breathe elections—that stood alone against a near-universal consensus when it came to predicting how the next Trump administration would be run. It was the best and perhaps the only big reason to believe that his second stint in power would be just as politically disastrous as his first one, if not even worse. And now, nearly two years after November 2024, it is overwhelmingly clear that it was the indicator to pay attention to. From the inept, unappealing appointees to the masturbatory messaging to the lack of any real departure from so-called “pre-Trump” conservatism, every single one of the principal failures of Trump 2.0 was presaged by who they ran and how they ran at the downballot level during the Biden years. Kari Lake, not Patrick Deneen; Herschel Walker, not the American Conservative; the disaster candidate JD Vance of 2022, not the ingenious JD Vance imagined by the media. These people and their campaigns were the true predictors for how Trump 2.0 would turn out, and they taught anyone who cared to look at them infinitely more about the nature of the MAGA movement than all of those millions of articles about the oh-so-sophisticated “new right.”
That brings us to today. Now, anyone interested in what the future might hold for the imperiled MAGA movement has only one place to look: how their major campaigns—specifically, their really bad major campaigns—have been run during this midterm election cycle. Who they are at that level is who they eventually become across the board, placing a huge emphasis on a set of very difficult questions. In this absolute catastrophe of a year for Republican recruitment, which candidates were the worst? What were the common traits between them, and what do they say about where the right will go during the next two years and beyond? Conversely, were there any conservatives anywhere in the country whose campaigns gave their party anything to build on? Who were they, and what did they do right?
And finally, when all is said and done, what was the single worst Republican election campaign of the entire year?