Traditionally, midterm elections are not very kind to the party in the White House, and there’s no reason to expect that they will be nice to majority Democrats in 2022.
But Republicans don’t aren’t taking any chances: They’re loading up with the grandmaster of the party, former President Donald Trump.
While Trump continues to remain coy about his future — will he run in 2024 or not? — in the meantime, he has embraced his role as kingmaker. Candidates for office that he backs tend to do well, but perhaps more than anything, GOP voters continue to respond well to Trump’s endorsements because those candidates have subscribed to the former president’s winning ‘America First’ platform.
Meanwhile, Trump still polls solidly with the GOP voting base, and Republican leaders know that, which is why they are plotting with him to ride a red wave into power next year, as Breitbart News reported Friday:
Former President Donald Trump met with Republican leaders in Bedminster, New Jersey, Thursday to plot a path to win back the House majority in 2022.
The Republican Study Committee’s (RSC) chairman, Rep. Jim Banks (R-ID), and members of the caucus’s leadership conferred with Trump about the committee’s strategy for immigration and election integrity.
“We talked for most of the time about the work that the Republican Study Committee is doing to define the agenda for the future course of the Republican Party, which is fighting for the Trump agenda,” Banks said in an interview with the New York Post. “We talked about our election integrity bill, The Save Democracy Act, which he was very supportive of and we talked about what we’ve done to define immigration moving forward.”
“We spent nearly two hours with the President with President Trump who’s in great spirits,” Banks continued. “We believe we take back the majority by focusing on the Trump agenda, and President Trump plays a big role in that
“He’s obviously planning to go out and hit the road and campaign for candidates who share our vision, and we were excited to talk to him about that,” Banks added. “I can say that members of our group are very encouraging, and if not encouraging him to run in 2024, encouraging him to continue to communicate with American people and engage with the American people.”
Last month, another survey showed that GOP voters are still solidly behind the former president, with two-thirds of respondents saying it was important to remain loyal to him and, more importantly, his policies and vision.
”Breaking News! New polling by CBS News on the state of the Republican Party (which is very strong!). President Trump has a stronghold on the GOP,” Trump said in response.
“Eighty percent of Republicans agree with the removal of Liz Cheney from GOP Leadership and only 20% disagree,” he added. “The poll also showed that 67% of Republicans said that they do not consider Sleepy Joe Biden to be the legitimate winner of the 2020 Presidential Election. I agree with them 100%, just look at the facts and the data—there is no way he won the 2020 Presidential Election!”
In February, Banks said plainly his goal as head of the RSC was to emulate the former president’s agenda.
“So it’s a recognition of the moment that the traditional Reagan-era platform of the Republican Party has to adapt to what we’ve learned in the Trump era,” he said.
