GOPers who backed 'stop the steal' did better in midterms than others: new study

A new study paints an ominous picture for democracy: In 2022, House Republicans who backed former President Donald Trump's effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election performed better in their races than House Republicans who did not, according to New York Magazine's The Intelligencer.

This result cuts against the conventional wisdom that 2022 was an unexpectedly weak year for Republicans in general as they failed to win control of the Senate, lost governorships and state legislatures, and only won the House by a razor-thin margin.

And other studies that have looked at a broader range of votes, like Senate and governor races, found that election deniers in 2022 performed badly, often fumbling competitive races, like Kari Lake in Arizona and Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania.

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But this might not be telling the whole picture, argue political scientists Larry Bartels and Nicholas Carnes, because many of these candidates were deeply flawed in other ways beyond simply denying or trying to block the results of the 2020 election — Mastriano, for example, supported the QAnon movement and barely campaigned.

A proper study, they argue, should try as much as possible to compare candidates who are identical in every way except whether or not they supported the coup plot, and see if that variable specifically makes candidates perform worse. To do this, they compared a variety of candidates to their own past elections, factoring in how they voted on blocking the election results, impeaching Trump for the January 6 attack, and setting up a January 6 commission.

What they found is that supporting Trump on all three of these measures, on average, did not affect members' performance in the 2022 general election at all compared to the 2020 general election — but that members who consistently voted against Trump on these issues were much likelier to lose their primary.

It is possible that the correlation actually runs the other way, noted New York Magazine. Republicans who knew their prospects of winning another nomination were low may have simply been more emboldened to vote against Trump. Regardless, the report said, "The study indicates that triumphalist accounts of the 2022 midterms were overly sanguine," since GOP voters rewarded coup plotters and punished Trump opponents, while the reverse was not necessarily true for general election voters.