The Daily Fuckup

On Tuesday, May 17, 2022, two of the clearest tests of Donald Trump’s still-active grip on Republican primary voters produced the outcome his allies wanted. In Pennsylvania, state Sen. Doug Mastriano, who made his support for Trump’s stolen-election claims part of his campaign identity, won the GOP nomination for governor. In North Carolina, Trump-backed Ted Budd won the Republican Senate primary. Those results did not settle every race tied to Trump’s influence, but they did show that his endorsement remained a real asset in the kind of nomination battles that now shape the party’s ticket.

Mastriano’s win was especially stark because he did not merely accept Trump’s election narrative; he ran with it. He treated the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen as a political credential, not a liability, and Republican primary voters rewarded him for it. That matters beyond one contest. When a candidate can turn a lie about the last presidential election into a winning campaign message, the party’s internal incentives become obvious: loyalty to Trump and his version of recent history still carries more weight than caution about the general election.

Budd’s victory in North Carolina fit the same larger pattern, even if his race was less dramatic. He had Trump’s backing, and that support helped him clear the field in a competitive Senate primary. The result reinforced a basic fact about the post-2020 Republican Party: a Trump endorsement is still a serious signal to primary voters, especially when the candidate presents himself as dependable, loyal, and unlikely to challenge the former president’s agenda or his grievances.

The broader political problem is that what works in a primary can become a burden in November. Candidates who build their campaigns around Trump’s election-fraud mythology may be well suited to a closed Republican electorate, but that same posture can make them harder to sell to everyone else. So the night was not just a measure of Trump’s influence. It was a reminder that the party’s nomination machinery keeps rewarding candidates whose main qualification is fidelity to a false story about the 2020 election, even when that story has already proven toxic in a broader electorate.

That is the tradeoff Republicans keep making. Trump’s endorsements can still help produce winners, as Pennsylvania and North Carolina showed. But they also keep elevating candidates who are tied to his attempt to rewrite the last election, which leaves the party with nominees who are easier to rally around in primaries than to defend in a general campaign. For now, that arrangement still works well enough to win nominations. It is much less clear that it builds a durable governing majority.