Former President Donald Trump has defended his candidates’ performance in the mid-term elections, but a Sky News analysis finds reports of their poor performance are correct.
“Almost every person I endorsed WON,” the former president wrote on his social media platform Truth Social early Thursday morning.
While that’s true, nearly all of the Trump-backed candidates were defending Republican seats, so they’re likely to win anyway.
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Looking at the House of Representatives, for example, the former president officially endorsed 174 of the 430 Republican candidates.
Although 159 of Trump’s chosen candidates were victorious, 149 of them were defending Republican seats.
A truer measure of a candidate’s success is the extent to which they managed to increase the share of people voting for the Republican Party compared to the 2020 presidential election.
Taking into account the 71% of counties where more than 90% of the results have been reported, Trump-backed House candidates managed to increase the Republican vote share by two percentage points.
That’s well below the party’s 7.1 percentage point increase in counties with no Republicans backed by Trump.
The difference was greater in the areas defended by the Democrats. In areas where the local Republican candidate was supported by Trump, the party’s share of the vote fell 3.6 percentage points. But when the Republican challenger was not endorsed by Trump, the Republican vote share increased by 5.9 percentage points.
Similar patterns were seen in races to unseat Democratic senators, governors and secretaries of state.
Here the Republican vote share fell in areas where candidates had Trump’s endorsement and rose where they did not.
Electoral deniers
While Trump’s endorsement may not have helped Republican candidates, those who doubted or denied the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s 2020 election did relatively well.
Of the 430 Republican candidates in the Chamber, 224 had already denied or questioned the legitimacy of those elections. These candidates performed slightly better than average, increasing the Republican vote in their areas by six percentage points (compared to 5.2 percentage points for other Republican candidates).
But it didn’t seem to help Republicans win seats. Election deniers were relatively successful in holding Republican seats, but fared much worse than other Republicans when they took on sitting Democrats.
However, many election naysayers won their races. Of the 36 new Republicans in Congress, 18 have cast doubt on the 2020 presidential outcome. That includes eight of the 18 Republicans who won Democratic House seats.
Two of those 18 aren’t exactly new to the building they’ll now call their office. George Santos (NY-3) and Derrick Van Orden (WI-3) were both present outside the Capitol on January 6 of last year, attending a pro-Trump election denial rally that culminated in the violent assault of the American legislature.
Read more: Trump’s reverse Midas touches Republican fortunes
For Republican Senate candidates, denying the 2020 presidential election could have done them more harm than good. His vote share increased by just 0.6 percentage points, while candidates who have not denied Joe Biden’s legitimacy as president saw a 4.6 percentage point increase.
This analysis of Senate races is based on the results of 67% of counties, while the analysis of other races is based on 71% or more. Counties were excluded from the analysis if they had not reported results for at least 90% of their precincts at the time of writing, to ensure that comparisons with 2020 results were valid.
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