Republican Party study on poor 2022 election showing doesn’t mention Trump

A draft Republican Party autopsy report on the 2022 midterm elections examining why the GOP failed to win the U.S. Senate and posted smaller-than-expected gains in the House does not mention Donald Trump or his role as the de facto leader of the party, according to people familiar with its contents.

The report, which is slated to be discussed at a Republican National Committee meeting in Oklahoma City this week, has sparked debate within the GOP, according to five people who described its contents and the discussions about the report to The Washington Post. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal details of an internal document. The Post has not reviewed a full draft of the report, which is being written by RNC committee members and Republican Party employees.

GOP leaders are avoiding Trump in part because RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel has vowed to be neutral in the 2024 Republican primary as the former president seeks a second term. Comments praising or criticizing Trump would break that vow, some of the people involved in the report said.

Many of the Senate candidates who ran campaigns that were privately viewed within the party as flawed are also considering 2024 bids for Senate, and the GOP does not want to give opponents fuel for criticism, so authors were loath to mention them by name.

In addition, GOP officials want a detente with Trump, who has turned on many advisers but has stayed close with McDaniel, who has regularly met with him since he left office. Trump recently threatened to skip the GOP debates, and his team is in negotiations with the party over those events.

An RNC spokeswoman declined to comment.

The draft report says abortion hurt the Republicans in the midterm elections, with candidates trying to avoid the issue and alienating some voters while Democrats saw their base’s energy grow, according to the people familiar with the document. It calls on Republicans to talk more about abortion than they did in the midterm elections.

The report also says Republicans have to do better at fundraising - citing various ways the Democrats outraised Republicans in the last cycle. And it says the GOP has to convince voters to use early voting and mail-in voting - two forms of voting that Trump has long decried but has recently come to reluctantly embrace.

The report is designed to look both at the RNC and the broader GOP ecosystem, Republican Party officials said.

But according to many in the party, not mentioning Trump - the main figure of the GOP who spent much of 2021 and 2022 campaigning for and against candidates, and giving endorsements from his Mar-a-Lago Club while promoting false claims of a stolen election - in the autopsy report produces an incomplete analysis at best. And it shows how the GOP remains tied in a political pretzel over Trump, eight years after he descended the escalator at Trump Tower to announce his 2016 bid.

“If it doesn’t mention Donald Trump or the candidates with the Trump endorsement, it’s not worth the paper it’s written on,” said Bill Palatucci, an RNC member from New Jersey and Trump critic said. “If you don’t mention Trump, it’s like searching for a light switch with a blindfold on. You’re not going to find the truth. The truth is self-evident.”

“What is the point of doing an analysis of the Republican Party if you’re not looking at Trump? You’re just wasting your time,” said another RNC member, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retribution.

Henry Barbour, a member of the committee who helped craft the report, wrote a part of the introduction that obliquely criticizes candidates who focus on the past, a person who has seen the document said.

“The job of a political party is to win elections, and if you don’t look back at the past election and learn, how are you going to do your job in the next election?” Barbour said. “We certainly can’t ignore what we did in 2022. We underperformed in ‘22. We lost in ‘20. We lost in ‘18. We ought to learn from it. We can’t just keep doing the same things and getting the same results. . . . I have said publicly since after the election that our candidates that focused on the future and focused on results did much better than candidates stuck in the past.”

Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, former vice president Mike Pence, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp have all argued in recent speeches to donors and party leaders that the election fraud arguments hurt the party’s chances. Trump’s endorsements, and his message, was a big factor in the races, GOP strategists and candidates have argued. Christie, Pence and Sununu are all potential 2024 candidates.

“He failed us on election night 2020, not by losing, but by standing in the East Room of the White House and saying the election was stolen when he had no evidence to prove that it was. All of his actions thereafter, including these last candidates, who had to pass one litmus test to get his endorsement. You must say the election was stolen. If you do, you get my endorsement. If not, I’ll work against you,” Christie said at an Austin donor retreat.

“Mr. Trump turned what should have been a referendum on Mr. Biden’s terrible record into a choice between himself and the current president. As in 2020, lots of voters chose Mr. Biden,” strategist Karl Rove wrote in the Wall Street Journal.

In his speech to Republican donors, Kemp argued the Republican Party should have won big in 2022 except for the election fraud arguments. “Not a single swing voter in a single swing state will vote for our nominee if they choose to talk about the 2020 election being stolen,” Kemp said.

And many analysts have argued that in some states, Republicans won statewide races while losing Senate contests in part because of flawed candidates such as Blake Masters in Arizona, Herschel Walker in Georgia and Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania. All three were endorsed and heavily supported by Trump.

For his part, Trump has deflected blame for the losses and said it was the party’s handling of abortion that cost them in 2022. He has continued to falsely maintain that the 2020 election was stolen.

“It wasn’t my fault that the Republicans didn’t live up to expectations in the MidTerms … It was the ‘abortion issue,’ poorly handled by many Republicans, especially those that firmly insisted on No Exceptions, even in the case of Rape, Incest, or Life of the Mother, that lost large numbers of Voters. Also, the people that pushed so hard, for decades, against abortion, got their wish from the U.S. Supreme Court, & just plain disappeared, not to be seen again,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social website in January.

The document is expected to be circulated to RNC members later this spring, people familiar with the matter said. Some involved with the drafting of the report have said privately they wish they could scuttle it entirely. McDaniel and her senior team have decided to release it partly because she promised the report during a difficult reelection as RNC chair.

McDaniel agreed to the report after some members expressed displeasure with the midterm elections and she faced two challengers in the race for chair of the party. She ultimately won overwhelmingly, but only after some members, including Palatucci, were critical of comments from her that seemed to praise the party’s midterm performance.

The Republican National Committee circulated memos before last year’s midterms warning candidates about the danger abortion posed for their elections. The memos recommended candidates go on offense about less popular positions held by some Democrats, including access to abortion in the third trimester. They urged Republicans to support exceptions to abortion bans for rape incest and the life of the mother, a position held by the last four Republicans to win the presidency.

In a speech last week at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, McDaniel was even more explicit, warning her party not to avoid the issue and to try to appeal broadly. She cited recent polling about a 15-week ban, a relatively moderate position in the party.

“Most Democrat leaders refuse to endorse even the most basic limits on abortion,” she said. “Polling shows that when the choice is between a Democrat who wants zero abortion restrictions and a Republican who supports protecting life at 15 weeks, we win by 22 points.”

The last time the party conducted an autopsy - after its loss in the 2012 presidential election - it billed the product as a “Growth and Opportunity Report.” The report said the Republican Party needed to do a better job of reaching minority voters and strike a softer tone, particularly on social issues. But such suggestions were widely ignored by Trump and his acolytes.

“The perception that the GOP does not care about people is doing great harm to the Party and its candidates on the federal level, especially in presidential years,” the 2013 report said. It added: “The Republican Party needs to stop talking to itself. We have become expert in how to provide ideological reinforcement to like-minded people, but devastatingly we have lost the ability to be persuasive with, or welcoming to, those who do not agree with us on every issue.”

No such analysis was conducted after the 2020 election, as Trump continued to falsely maintain that he won. Trump, who is currently the Republican 2024 front-runner in most public opinion polls, has not been briefed on this year’s report, a Trump adviser said.