Trump picked Senate candidates — Republicans paid the price

• By Jacob Bogage, Jarrett Renshaw, Nandita Bose and Steve Holland / Reuters, WASHINGTON

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US President Donald Trump asked voters to pretend he was on the ballot in the midterm elections and handpicked Republican candidates in some of the country’s most consequential Senate races. By Tuesday night, voters had rejected them.

Trump-backed candidates in South Carolina, North Carolina, Texas and Michigan all lost, handing Democrats control of the chamber and exposing the limits of Trump’s political power.

Trump has spent more than a decade reshaping the Republican Party around his MAGA movement, dictating primary matchups and pushing aside conservative figures he felt were insufficiently loyal or not aligned with his vision. Trump repeatedly favored loyalists and ideological allies over more established Republicans with stronger statewide networks and proven electoral track records, betting that his endorsement could overcome their political liabilities.

Tuesday’s results revealed he was unable to persuade the broader electorate to back his choices.

BLUE UPSETS

One of the most stunning repudiations came in South Carolina, which had not elected a Democratic senator since 1998 and which Trump won by 18 percentage points in 2024. Trump backed Darline Graham, the sister of late Republican senator Lindsey Graham. However, Democrat Annie Andrews won the seat in a stunning upset.

In North Carolina, Trump endorsed former national Republican campaign official Michael Whatley, who lost in a rout to former Democratic governor Roy Cooper.

In Texas, Trump intervened in a messy Republican primary election to promote scandal-plagued Attorney General Ken Paxton over Senator John Cornyn, a Trump ally who some in the party considered a safer pick in the general election.

Democrat James Talarico glided to a victory on Tuesday night, delivering Democrats a seat the party had not won since 1988.

Former US representative Mike Rogers, Trump’s choice in Michigan, was defeated by Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, who would be the first Muslim to serve in the Senate.

The losses came as Trump’s popularity was lower heading into Tuesday’s vote than in the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, Reuters and Ipsos polls said. That helped fuel concerns among Republicans that the president had become a drag on the party he remade around himself.

‘TRUMP QUAKE’

“This is a Trump Quake,” said Doug Heye, a veteran Republican strategist, pointing to voter frustration over high prices caused by tariffs and the war in Iran. “Trump spent the year telling voters what was important to him, not to them.”

Trump struck a defiant tone as election returns arrived.

“I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” Trump wrote on social media.

One White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Trump “did a better job promoting many of the candidates on the ballot than the candidates did themselves.”

A senior White House official, also speaking anonymously, told Reuters that the administration had polling data as far back as six weeks ago showing Republicans would lose the House of Representatives and Senate, and Trump embarked on a month-long nationwide campaign to try to salvage Republicans’ prospects.

Some independent analysts said the Senate losses bore Trump’s fingerprints specifically. American University professor Thomas Kahn said that the president’s intervention in the Texas Republican primary had cost his party a safe seat, arguing that a nomination for Senator John Cornyn “would have been a slam dunk for Republicans to win.”

North Carolina was another clear case, Kahn said. The Republican incumbent senator, Thom Tillis, said last year he would not seek re-election after a public split with Trump, who threatened to back a primary challenger against him after Tillis balked at Medicaid cuts in the president’s tax-and-spending bill.

“He essentially gave that seat away to Democrats,” Kahn said. “Roy Cooper would not have run if Thom Tillis had run for re-election.”

Former Republican North Carolina governor Pat McCrory said Trump’s interventions in his party’s primaries had divided Republicans in state after state.

In South Carolina, McCrory said, the president went against two local congressmen, a fight that “really divided the party” — an example, in his telling, of a president spending his political capital against his own side.

McCrory’s sharpest criticism was aimed at Trump’s connection with the voters who built his coalition.

“I think President Trump’s greatest strength was he had a common touch with the working class people,” McCrory said. “He lost that skill. He better regain that skill for the good of the country.”