The Sweep: The Value of a Trump Endorsement

Persuasion ‘22

The Democratic-affiliated data firm Civis Analytics just finished crunching the 2021 voter data numbers from Virginia and New Jersey. Obviously, turnout went up from 2017. In Democratic precincts, turnout increased 6 to 8 percent from four years earlier. In Republican precincts, turnout was up 12 to 13 percent. Clearly, this is a big part of the story of 2021. But this stood out to me even more:

Vote switching accounts for about 80% of the shifts in each state from Biden in 2020 to the Democratic candidates for governor in 2021. Changes in turnout only account for about two-tenths of overall movement1. In terms of the final margin, a switched vote is worth twice as much to the recipient because one side loses a vote while the other side gains one.

Before 2020, I believed that our elections were always going to be about turnout more than persuasion. People had their worldviews and the only question was what types of messages or candidates would motivate each side to vote. But as I said after 2020, I was wrong. Despite the increased polarization that is driving our politics these days, people are actually changing their minds as well. 

So that means that Gov. Glenn Youngkin owes his win as much to Biden voters as any single other factor. At first glance, this sounds like a good thing. It means that partisanship, for one,  isn’t as strong as we think. But I also doubt these vote switchers all look the same. Some are no doubt political independents who have been left behind by both parties in some form or fashion. But others are perhaps so frustrated with the direction of the country that they are most open to messaging that blames whomever is in office for the sorry state of affairs. 

As we keep an eye out for persuasion messaging in the 2022 general election, I’ll be most interested to see who the candidates think are persuadable.

What Is a Trump Endorsement Worth?

Patrick Ruffini, co-founder of Echelon Insights, recently put out the results of an experiment designed to determine which traits in a candidate are most important to voters in each political party.

For example, Ruffini found that for Democratic voters, a candidate endorsed by President Biden would start out with a 14-point advantage but a candidate endorsed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would start out with a 12-point disadvantage. Similarly, a white male would have a 12-point disadvantage, but a nonwhite woman would have a 6-point advantage. 

On the Republican side, there was a whopping 29-point advantage for a candidate that had been endorsed by Donald Trump … but only if that candidate had also been endorsed by other Republican officials. Without those other endorsements, a Trump endorsement alone was a wash. 

But experiments like this one can only take us so far. So what are we learning in the field? I’ve been thinking about this question very carefully for the last few months and three races stand out:

Georgia governor’s race: There is no higher profile race to test Trump’s endorsement than the now-purple state of Georgia that voted for Biden and sent two Democrats to the Senate. Andrew just wrote a great profile of the race between Gov. Brian Kemp vs. former Sen. David Perdue here, but here are some highlights: 

For Trump, the 2022 midterms are about one thing: punishing Republicans who failed to support his claims of a stolen election when he lost to Joe Biden in 2020. And Kemp—who despite Trump’s 2018 endorsement declined to involve himself in Trump’s efforts to overturn Biden’s win in Georgia—may be enemy number one.

Trump has therefore selected Perdue as his instrument of vengeance, and in return Perdue has lashed himself more completely than ever to Trump’s stolen-election lies.

Since Perdue jumped into the governor’s race last year, he has consistently trailed Kemp in fundraising and in the polls. This has permitted Kemp to largely ignore Perdue thus far, focusing in speeches on the ultimate threat of Stacey Abrams, who is running unopposed in the Democratic primary. But with a significant number of Republicans still unaware Trump is backing his candidacy, Perdue’s hoping that events like Saturday’s will give him the boost he needs to get over the top.

“If there’s one thing the people of Georgia need to know about this race, it’s that Brian Kemp, he sold you out,” Trump says. “He didn’t look, he didn’t wanna look. He didn’t want anything to do with it.” More: “Brian Kemp is a turncoat. He’s a coward and he’s a complete and total disaster.” 

Kemp is ahead by double digits over Perdue with just under two months to go until the May 24 primaries. In some ways, it’s a good race to isolate the impact of Trump’s endorsement: Both candidates are well-known, have won statewide elections before, and are considered plenty conservative for the state. Plus, Trump is actually campaigning for his chosen candidate—unlike in some of the races he’s endorsed in in the past. But when primary voters have known both candidates for years, it also means there’s a lot more than Trump’s endorsement going on and it’s hard to say we’re testing Trump’s endorsement alone.

Alabama Senate race: Last April, Donald Trump endorsed Rep. Mo Brooks, the first to vote against certifying the 2020 election, to replace retiring Sen. Richard Shelby. 

But Brooks’ campaign never seemed to find steady footing. His fundraising numbers were weak and few of his colleagues had much of anything nice to say about him. Plus the 87-year-old Sen. Shelby had his own thoughts on who should take his seat, endorsing his former chief of staff Katie Britt, who continued to defy expectations—both in polling and fundraising—leading to rumors that Trump thought he might have backed the wrong horse. 

And then lightning struck last week. “Mo Brooks of Alabama made a horrible mistake recently when he went ‘woke’ and stated, referring to the 2020 Presidential Election Scam, ‘Put that behind you, put that behind you,’” Trump said in a statement rescinding his endorsement.

Brooks explained the turn of events this way: “President Trump asked me to rescind the 2020 elections, immediately remove Joe Biden from the White House, immediately put President Trump back in the White House, and hold a new special election for the presidency. As a lawyer, I’ve repeatedly advised President Trump that January 6 was the final election contest verdict and neither the U.S. Constitution nor the U.S. Code permit what President Trump asks. Period.”

On the one hand, this means that we won’t be able to test the effects of Trump’s endorsement in this race. On the other hand, it feels like we already did. Per Ruffini’s metrics, Brooks wasn’t able to secure the endorsements of local leaders like Sen. Shelby, so Trump’s endorsement alone wasn’t enough to pull him far enough ahead of the pack. Still, it will be interesting to see if Trump chooses to endorse again in the race and what, if any, effect that may have. 

Tennessee congressional race: Donald Trump endorsed former Department of State spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus for the newly drawn 5th Congressional District.

Local Republicans immediately balked at Trump’s pick of someone who had moved to the state only last year. As Allan Smith of NBC reported:

For the month she’s been in the race, Ortagus has come under intense scrutiny from her rivals, as well as fellow conservatives across the state and nationally. Her critics are quick to point out that she didn’t move to the district she’s running to represent. Nor, they say, does she seem to know basic facts about the area, like which interstate highways cut through the district. They also have highlighted her years-old criticism of Trump and her support for Jeb Bush in the 2016 GOP primaries, as well as the fact that her wedding was officiated by the liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg. 

In many ways, this is the most interesting endorsement because it squarely pits Trump against other Republicans in the state and in a race where the candidates’ names don’t mean much on their own. It’s the perfect field experiment for Ruffini except for one potential hiccup. Republicans in the state are so upset that the legislature is close to passing a bill that would “require congressional candidates to be Tennessee residents for three years — and residents of their districts for at least one year — to qualify for primaries.” 

And lastly we’ve got a piece from Audrey about House Republican leaders taking a page out of Newt Gingrich’s 1994 playbook ahead of the midterms. Though it is probably worth remembering that the Contract with America was introduced only six weeks before the 1994 elections, making its actual electoral impact less certain, Republicans have been chasing the memory of that year ever since:

Partying Like It’s 1994

PONTE VEDRA, Fla.—Former House GOP Speaker Newt Gingrich approached the 1994 midterms with a clear campaign strategy—give his members a concrete legislative agenda to campaign on and make the case to voters that Democrats had tried and failed to govern effectively despite controlling both the White House and Congress. 

His strategy paid massive electoral dividends. That year, Republicans netted 54 seats in the House, eight in the Senate, and retook both chambers for the first time in four decades. 

Nearly 30 years later, Gingrich is playing a behind-the-scenes role ahead of the 2022 midterms, having addressed the House GOP conference during a closed-door session last Wednesday at this year’s three-day issues retreat in Ponte Vedra, Florida. 

House Republican leaders made clear to reporters at this year’s issues conference that they are keeping Gingrich’s 1994 playbook in their back pocket: running on a concrete legislative agenda while keeping the central focus on Democratic failures in Washington. It likely also means using media much the same way as Gingrich, with fiery floor speeches and combative, made-for-TV congressional hearings.  

House GOP leaders spent Wednesday through Friday camped out in Ponte Vedra’s ritziest resort to hammer out the details of the party’s “Commitment to America,” a rhetorical spinoff of Gingrich’s “Contract With America” that Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy says he plans to unveil by the end of the summer. 

At least when it comes to policy, for now McCarthy’s yet-to-be-released agenda isn’t shaping up to look anything like Gingrich’s 1994 legislative playbook, which focused mostly on un-flashy policy issues like welfare reform, a balanced budget, and tax policy.

Instead, House GOP leaders say that this year they are zeroing in on a sprawling slate of domestic policy issues, from promoting American energy independence and parental control of K-12 education, to fighting Big Tech and rising crime at the Southern border and beyond. Republicans have also vowed to adopt a hawkish foreign policy posture toward China and eliminate proxy voting, House Democrats’ pandemic-era policy that allows members to vote on legislation remotely. McCarthy has appointed leaders of seven task forces to hammer out the fine print.

The driving focus of House GOP leaders’ midterm strategy is inflation. “I’m a believer that the American people are smart,” House GOP conference chair Elise Stefanik told reporters Wednesday evening at the retreat. “They know they cannot afford Democrats’ far-left socialist agenda any longer.” 

It’s a pocketbook pitch that Republican leaders hope will resonate with middle-class voters at a time when year-over-year inflation has hit a 40-year-high of 7.9 percent and the national average gas price is $4.24 for regular unleaded. 

McCarthy’s decision to unveil his “Commitment to America” is a departure from that of  Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has said he has no plans to release a legislative agenda before Senate Republicans retake the majority. 

That’s not a foregone conclusion among all his colleagues. “That’s the big debate on our side right now is the answer to that question,” South Carolina GOP Sen. Tim Scott told The Dispatch earlier this month after Florida Sen. Rick Scott—who is also chairman of the National Senatorial Campaign Committee—unveiled an 11-point agenda ahead of the midterms in a split from McConnell.

But Republican leaders in the House seem united on their calculus. “We can’t just be the anti-Democrat Party,” GOP Rep. Don Bacon—co-chairman of the Problem Caucus who is running for reelection in a district President Joe Biden won in 2020—said in an interview on Thursday. “You gotta stand for something.”

Still, there will be plenty of criticism of the Biden administration. 

“A lot of this election is gonna be about how bad they are,” GOP Rep. Jim Jordan, ranking Republican member of the House Judiciary Committee, said last week. That message came with a promise: “You can’t do what you said if you haven’t said what you’ll do.”

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