Tuesday night’s election results in Florida and Wisconsin have Republicans on Capitol Hill growing increasingly nervous that the “shock and awe” ushered in by President Donald Trump’s second-term administration will hand the GOP a midterm shellacking.
That’s according to a new report in Politico, which detailed the internal struggle among Republicans over concerns the party should shift focus to economic issues with next year’s midterms looming.
“The Republican anxiety comes in the wake of a landslide defeat in a Wisconsin Supreme Court race and double-digit underperformance in two Florida special elections,” Politico reported Wednesday. “Both reverberated across the party on Wednesday, as some Republican elected officials and strategists called for Trump and his billionaire adviser Elon Musk to adopt a more cautious approach to governing.”
Former GOP strategist Brian Reisinger, a rural policy expert, told Politico that Republicans running in battleground races in next year’s midterms must pay attention to Tuesday’s poor results and focus on bread-and-butter issues.
“This is as clear a sign as you’re going to get — ringing like a bell — that they have to talk about addressing economic frustration and they have to show they have a plan for it,” he told the publication. “There’s a lot of support in these communities for getting tough on trade, for cutting government spending, but if tariffs spin out of control, and there’s no results on trade deals, then rural communities are really going to be hit by that.”
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Whit Ayres, a longtime GOP pollster, viewed the results in Wisconsin as more of a referendum on Musk, who became a lightning rod in the judicial race he pumped millions of dollars into, than on Trump himself.
“Elon Musk is hurting Donald Trump, there’s no question about that,” Ayres told Politico.
Republicans, Ayres added, should “take his money and tell him to go to Mars.”
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) warned in an interview with Politico that his party must be “smart and measured” or otherwise be prepared to face backlash at the polls. The publication noted that Tillis pointed to the 2010 midterm elections where early opposition to President Barack Obama led to bruising Democratic defeats.
“What we don’t want to do is overreach,” Tillis is quoted as saying. “We’ve got to be careful not to do the same thing. And I think that these elections are going to be proxies, or almost like weather devices for figuring out what kind of storm we’re going to be up against next year.”