Republicans need to dump Trump for win

Two functional political parties shouldn’t be too much to ask of American democracy. At the moment, though, one of them is toying with outright disaster.

By any sane calculation, Donald Trump should not be the Republican Party’s nominee for the 2024 presidential campaign. Trump is worth opposing for all the familiar reasons, including the chaos, corruption and manifest incompetence that characterized his first term. Even ignoring all that, rejecting him is in Republicans’ self-interest.

Electorally, Trump is (to borrow a phrase) a loser. He’s the first president since the Great Depression to have lost the House, Senate and Oval Office in a single term. In 2020, he not only squandered the advantages of incumbency but underperformed the average Republican statewide candidate in eight of 12 battleground states. With control of the Senate at stake in two Georgia runoffs, Trump then spent weeks claiming the election was a fraud and that Georgia state officials were complicit in it. Many GOP strategists agree he likely gave the chamber — and hence unified control of government — to the Democrats.

In last year’s midterms the story was the same. An analysis of statewide contests found that candidates who had denied the legitimacy of the 2020 election results —Trump’s main preoccupation since leaving office — underperformed by an average of 2.3 percentage points. In competitive races, his preferred candidates underperformed their expected baselines by about 5 percentage points. Even that understates the damage: By touting inexperienced or implausible candidates in otherwise winnable contests, Trump probably cost his party several governors’ mansions and the Senate.

Looking ahead, things get worse. A poll last month found that 70 percent of Americans — including 63 percent of independents and 44 percent of Republicans — don’t want Trump to run for office again. Another survey found that putting Trump at the top of the ticket would give a five-point advantage to Democratic congressional candidates, a swing that would almost certainly give them control of the House.