GOP Summer of Chaos: “Trump’s Election Lies Are Taking Over Republican Senate Races”

A series of new reports detail the latest in the GOP’s summer of chaos: Republican candidates in nearly every top Senate battleground state embracing “Trump’s election lies” in a desperate attempt “to out-Trump” their rivals and “one-up one another as the biggest Trump sycophant.”

The widespread embrace of the dangerous conspiracies is “fresh evidence of Trump’s continued grip on the GOP.” The former president is “barreling” into key Republican primaries “like a wrecking ball,” causing headaches for national Republicans who worry that his “furious insistence on fealty and refusal to let 2020 go could cost them” in 2022. 

Read more about how “Trump’s meddling has dimmed GOP hopes”:

Vice: Trump’s Election Lies Are Taking Over Republican Senate Races
By Cameron Joseph
July 7, 2021

Key Points:

• Most of the GOP front-runners in key Senate races are clinging to the lie that Trump actually won the 2020 election, seeking to out-Trump one another to win the GOP base. In the process, they run the risk of alienating swing voters in purple states.

• As the national Republican Party pledges to stay neutral in open-seat GOP primaries, Trump is barreling in like a wrecking ball, elevating his most sycophantic and conspiracy-minded allies while wounding some of the candidates Republican leaders and strategists think would be the strongest in the general election.

• Trump’s conspiracies about the 2020 election have become an issue in nearly every one of the top Senate battlegrounds, with the former president elevating some candidates and disparaging others as Republicans scramble to get his blessing in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Wisconsin.

• Some Republicans worry that Trump’s furious insistence on fealty and refusal to let 2020 go could cost them their chance of netting the one seat they need to retake the Senate in 2022.

• “The point is to win,” said former Virginia Sen. George Allen, who ran Senate Republicans’ campaign efforts for the 2004 cycle. “And that means [nominating a candidate] who is going to be most persuasive to motivate people to vote for them to be the next U.S. senator as opposed to who’s the most ardent about expressing grief about the last election.”

• [In Georgia] Trump froze the GOP field by repeatedly, and publicly, pushing former University of Georgia football star Herschel Walker as his preferred candidate to face Warnock, even though Washington Republicans are worried he might not be up for the challenge. “Run, Herschel, run!” Trump declared in March.

• Florida Sen. Rick Scott, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (and one of only eight GOP senators who voted to object to certifying Biden’s win in at least one state on Jan. 6), has pledged that the NRSC will stay neutral in open-seat primaries, even as Trump rides roughshod over primary candidates.

• Trump is coming for the handful of Republicans who’ve refused to bend the knee, complicating the GOP’s path to victory in key states.

• Trump’s meddling has dimmed GOP hopes in Arizona, another key Senate battleground and one that’s emerged as an epicenter of election conspiracy theories as a result of a partisan, bumbling “audit” of state ballots by local GOP officials.

• In states where Trump has yet to weigh in, the GOP candidates are acting even more desperate for his and his voters’ affection.

• In Ohio, two of the top candidates in a crowded field to replace retiring GOP Sen. Rob Portman are fighting like hell to one-up one another as the biggest Trump sycophant.

• A similar dynamic is playing out in Pennsylvania, where the top three Republican candidates to replace retiring GOP Sen. Pat Toomey are embracing the Big Lie.

• “The facts are very clear: We had a free and fair election. And to have candidates that continue to want to spread the Big Lie is something that I do not think will be rewarded in general elections,” Michigan Democratic Sen. Gary Peters, the chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, told VICE News. “I think it will be a real negative for them.”

See also: CNN: Republican candidates back Trump’s election lies across the 2021 and 2022 maps; New York Magazine: Republicans Face New Litmus Tests in Trump Era; Washington Post: In ramp-up to 2022 midterms, Republican candidates center pitches on Trump’s false election claims   

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