Earlier this week, during a rally in Greenville, North Carolina, President Donald Trump admitted that Democrat Roy Cooper is “going to become your senator and it’s crazy.”
It was especially embarrassing for Cooper’s Republican opponent. As chair of the North Carolina GOP, Michael Whatley ingratiated himself with Trump to such an extent that Trump made him chair of the Republican National Committee. But Cooper, a popular former governor and attorney general, has consistently led Whatley in the polls. His current average lead is more than 10 points.
Just down the Atlantic coast, Georgia Republicans are also reeling in their Senate contest. Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., is running away with the race against Rep. Mike Collins, an ultra-MAGA conservative who has come under fire for his ties to his white nationalist influencer son-in-law.
The two Senate contests, though, are just portents of much bigger problems facing North Carolina and Georgia Republicans — two state parties hollowed out in the age of Trump.
Just over a decade ago, North Carolina Republicans were riding high. After the state voted for Barack Obama in 2008, Republicans, led in part by state House Speaker Thom Tillis, took control of both legislative chambers in 2010 for the first time since 1898. In 2012, voters elected Republican Gov. Pat McCrory with a veto-proof legislature. In 2014, Tillis defeated Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan.
Though McCrory narrowly lost the governorship in 2016 to Cooper, Trump won the state by nearly 4%. The state GOP largely maintained its grip in the years following until 2024, when Trump backed then-Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson as the party’s nominee for governor.
Democrat Josh Stein would win the race by almost 15 points against Robinson, who had a history of inflammatory remarks even as Trump won the state. Late in the race, CNN reported that Robinson “made a series of inflammatory comments on a pornography website’s message board more than a decade ago, in which he referred to himself as a ‘black NAZI!’ and expressed support for reinstating slavery.” Robinson denied writing the messages, but thanks to Stein’s margin of victory, Republicans lost the lieutenant governorship while Democrats held the attorney general’s race, their legislative supermajority and a seat on the state supreme court.
And Trump’s clash with Tillis forced the latter into retirement after they split over the Medicaid cuts in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. Tillis likely would have struggled in a midterm year. But Trump booting him and filling the state party with loyalists made matters worse.
The state GOP’s reversal of fortune is almost as bad in Georgia. The Republican takeover of Georgia began in 2002 when Roy Barnes lost to Sonny Perdue to become the first Republican governor of Georgia since Reconstruction. The state senate also flipped thanks to multiple party switches. In 2004, Republicans would win the state house.
Georgia has elected Republican governors, most recently Brian Kemp, ever since. Trump endorsed Kemp in 2018. But Trump turned against Kemp, who now enjoys a 70% approval rating, after he refused to help overturn the 2020 election results, when Joe Biden won the state. While Kemp easily won re-election in 2022 without Trump’s help, the latter’s endorsement of former football player Herschel Walker led to Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock winning re-election.
And this year, the president boosted Collins over a Kemp-backed rival. Republicans in Georgia would likely be in trouble anyway this year, largely due to migration from other states, particularly from African Americans and suburban college-educated whites. But Trump has accelerated this trend propping up apparatchiks. Even those loyal soldiers have their limits. Look no further than Marjorie Taylor Greene, who represented a deep-red district, only to quit after a public falling out with the president.
In fact, the one Republican statewide candidate doing well in Georgia right now is Rick Jackson, the self-funded businessman who beat Trump’s preferred candidate for governor, Lt. Gov. Burt Jones. Jackson now leads most polls against former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms. But if Bottoms somehow wins, she likely will also flip at least one chamber of the Legislature.
If Georgia and North Carolina’s state Republican parties want to see where Trump-driven hollowing out leads, they can look to Arizona. The home of Barry Goldwater, the 1964 Republican nominee for president, Arizona was long a bastion of conservatism. But it has been 10 years since a Republican last won a Senate seat, when Trump’s nemesis John McCain was re-elected to his final term.
Since then, Democrats have won every Senate race. In 2022, the same year Mark Kelly won a full term for McCain’s old seat, fellow Democrat Katie Hobbs narrowly won by beating election denier Kari Lake in the gubernatorial race. Lake had famously said McCain Republicans should “get the hell out,” but she would be joined in defeat by Trump-endorsed ideologues for secretary of state and attorney general.
In 2024, even as Trump won the state, Lake’s campaign for a Senate seat ended in defeat to Ruben Gallego. Now, Hobbs is facing Rep. Andy Biggs, who tried to challenge the 2020 election results and who has Trump’s endorsement. Polling shows Hobbs beating Biggs decisively. In addition, Democrats have a good chance of flipping up to three Republican-controlled House seats and potentially both houses of the state Legislature for the first time in 60 years.
While Trump, over the past decade, has displayed a remarkable ability to survive and win elections, his acolytes in these former GOP strongholds are losing down the ballot. These two phenomena are connected: Trump has turned the Republican Party that cares about electing like-minded individuals into a party meant to support him, and him alone. In doing so, it has lost its ability to save itself.
The post The MAGA era is hollowing out these three states’ Republican parties appeared first on MS NOW.
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