Trump says he's not to blame for GOP underperformance. He has a point.

Ultimately, voters and candidates are responsible for the decisions and choices they make.

Republicans are making highly marginal gains nationally. They will be fortunate to do even that in Arizona after all the votes are counted. 

This is substantially underperforming expectations. It is massively underperforming opportunity, given the broad dissatisfaction with the direction of the country and the performance of President Joe Biden and his administration.

The underperformance is being widely attributed to the influence of Donald Trump. The wider understanding that Trump is a net drag on Republican prospects, particularly within GOP circles, is an important and healthy development. 

Trump turns out marginal blue-collar Republicans that a traditional Republican might not. But he is an even bigger turnout machine for Democrats. And he’s a big turnoff for independent ticket-splitters who decide the outcome in swing elections, including here in Arizona.

Before the election, Trump told an interviewer that if Republicans had a good election, he deserved much of the credit. But if they had a bad election, he deserved none of the blame.

This was generally ridiculed as yet another example of Trump’s egocentricity. And it is certainly that.

But there is a sense in which Trump is correct, although undoubtedly not in the way he intended.

No one made Republican primary voters choose nominees who would have trouble winning a general election. In Arizona, there were other candidates, all conservative or at least center-right, who probably would have skated to victory in the general election.

No one made the nominees become Trump imitators, parroting his confrontational and, to the independent ticket-splitters, off-putting and offensive, style. No one made the nominees echo every inane thing Trump has said or maintained, particularly about the 2020 election. Glenn Youngkin, Brian Kemp, and Ron DeSantis have demonstrated that there’s another, more successful, way.

Now, in fairness to Arizona primary voters, the more traditional candidates who would have fared better in a general election didn’t try to distinguish themselves in this way during the primary. All were running as faux Trumpians. And if all the candidates were portraying themselves as Trumpians, why not go with the candidates the man himself endorsed. Which is what happened in Arizona’s primary election.

However, those differences in electability could easily have been sussed out and generally were. But the Republican electorate was in a MAGA moment, wanting warriors who would stick it to the RINOs and woke progressives – electability, much less the ability to govern, be damned. 

That was the path Trump urged. But he doesn’t have magical pixie dust to sprinkle on Republican voters and candidates, giving them no option but to do his bidding. Those are conscious choices GOP voters and candidates made. They were free to choose differently and didn’t. They are as much to blame for the Republican underperformance as Trump. In fact, more so.

There is an anti-Burkean view of political representation in this country. Burke famously said that he wasn’t in office to be a passive vessel for the transmission of the views and passions of his constituents. He owed them his judgment as well.

In the age of Trump, too many Republican candidates and officeholders have withheld the value of their judgment, both in what they have done and what they have said in public. 

But if a political movement is to be successful, voters supporting it also have to show some judgment and pragmatism.

Trump developed an intense personal loyalty among MAGA voters because he was willing to take on the cultural forces they felt pressing in on them, and give as good – even better – than he got.

However, the limitations of Trumpism as a political movement, while plainly obvious for a while, are now undeniable. The Republican Party went full MAGA, particularly here in Arizona. And in as favorable an electoral climate as imaginable, came up woefully short.

There’s no influencing how Trump, lost in his egocentrism, will react to this revealed political truth. The consequential question is how other Republican elected officials and future candidates react, and how Republican base voters respond. 

There is no pixie dust. They are free to make their own decisions. This disappointing election result is primarily the product of their choices, not Trump’s. If they want different results, they need to make different decisions.

Reach Robb at robtrobb@gmail.com.