Source: Politics<\/p>\n
For years, Lou Barletta counted himself among Donald Trump\u2019s most diehard allies. The former Pennsylvania Republican gubernatorial candidate and congressman endorsed him at a time in 2016<\/a> when many GOP elected officials saw Trump as radioactive. He served as the co-chair of his first presidential campaign in Pennsylvania.<\/p>\n Six years later, Barletta is finally disembarking from the MAGA train.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m not supporting him,\u201d he said of Trump\u2019s 2024 campaign in an interview with POLITICO. \u201cI was one of his most loyal supporters in Congress. But loyalty was only a one-way street.\u201d<\/p>\n Barletta may have personal reasons for ditching Trump. The former president endorsed his opponent in the GOP primary for governor<\/a>in May. But his sentiments reflect a broader reckoning happening after Republicans underperformed expectations across the country in November.<\/p>\n Having lost high-stakes, expensive races for the Senate, House and governor, there has been a wave of finger-pointing and second-guessing across the party.<\/p>\n In Pennsylvania, several potential candidates are rumored to be thinking about challenging the current state GOP chair, Lawrence Tabas, whose term is up in 2025. And Republicans there are questioning everything from their disdainful approach to mail voting; to whether the state party should have endorsed candidates in the primary; to, yes, Trump himself.<\/p>\n Even the party\u2019s GOP leader concedes things need to change.<\/p>\n \u201cAs a party, we will need to take a critical look at the way we approach endorsements and mail-in ballots going forward and, as always, I\u2019ll look for input from elected party leaders,\u201d Tabas said. \u201cI am not a top-down, backroom-deal leader, and I\u2019m never going to be.\u201d<\/p>\n Not everyone in the party is ready to declare that a course correction is upon it. David Kochel, a top strategist on Jeb Bush\u2019s presidential campaign and a longtime Trump skeptic, said the party features \u201ctoo many people dug into their position\u201d that Trump is still the only way forward for the GOP.<\/p>\n \u201cYou mean some sort of a reckoning that actually resolves things?\u201d Kochel asked. \u201cWe\u2019re not talking about rationality here. We\u2019re talking about people\u2019s feelings.\u201d<\/p>\n But underwhelming midterm performances across the board have already ignited a wave of intraparty conflagrations. And as a post-midterm power vacuum in Michigan, New Hampshire and other pivotal states threatens to weaken Trump\u2019s vise grip on state party apparatuses, Republican insiders are jostling for what they believe will be a great resorting.<\/p>\n Some of the first shots fired came via a Michigan GOP memo leaked on Twitter by none other than the state\u2019s defeated gubernatorial candidate, Tudor Dixon. The Nov. 10 memo, authored by state party chief of staff Paul Cordes, blamed “the Trump effect” for the party\u2019s historic losses in the midterms. Two days later, Dixon tweeted that she was weighing her own bid<\/a> for party chair \u2014 possibly challenging the defeated Trump-backed attorney general nominee, Matthew DePerno.<\/p>\n Some Republicans told POLITICO the memo didn\u2019t go far enough in criticizing and identifying the direction of the party, which they said ceded too much power to co-chair Meshawn Maddock to broker Trump endorsements up and down the ballot.<\/p>\n \u201cFor the GOP to have any chance in [Michigan] in [2024] the leadership has to be changed in full to someone focused on winning and who is totally dedicated to making sure that the people who are encouraged to win primaries are those who will appeal to the median general election voter,\u201d a Republican operative familiar with the state told POLITICO. \u201cA ton hangs on the decisions that will be made on this in the coming weeks and months.\u201d<\/p>\n Jeff Timmer, the former state party executive director and a senior adviser to the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, put it more bluntly. The memo, he said, \u201cwas a \u2018fuck you\u2019 to the Meshawn Maddocks and the MAGAS.\u201d<\/p>\n In New Hampshire, it\u2019s a similar tale. GOP Chair Steve Stepanek, one of Trump\u2019s 2016 campaign state co-chairs, is likely to face a leadership challenge after Democrats trampled the party\u2019s congressional candidates and brought themselves within a few recounts of taking the state House.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s an unhappiness, a restlessness among the troops,\u201d state Rep. Norm Silber, the Belknap County Republicans\u2019 chair who lost his reelection bid this fall, said in an interview.<\/p>\n And in the home of the first-in-the-nation presidential primary, there are signs some Republicans are trying to buy themselves some space before deciding whether to recommit to Trump.<\/p>\n State lawmaker Al Baldasaro was the only one of Trump\u2019s three 2020 New Hampshire co-chairs to attend his Mar-a-Lago campaign launch earlier this month. Fred Doucette, also a state representative, said he was busy with the ongoing recounts but is \u201cwaiting patiently to hear from [Trump\u2019s] people\u201d on rebuilding his campaign apparatus in New Hampshire. Lou Gargiulo, the third 2020 co-chair whose state Senate race this fall went to a recount, said that while he\u2019ll \u201cmost likely\u201d be with Trump, it\u2019s \u201cpremature\u201d to pick sides. \u201cI\u2019d like to see the landscape first,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n But, like Kochel, former New Hampshire GOP Chair Fergus Cullen warned recent Trump skeptics not to underestimate the former president\u2019s staying power.<\/p>\n \u201cI was an original \u2018never-Trumper.\u2019 There are a lot more \u2018not-again Trumpers,\u2019\u201d Cullen said in an interview. \u201cBut the party apparatus is still completely taken over by Trump \u2014 your state party chairs, your county committee leaders, your rank-and-file members. \u2026 That\u2019s not going to just evaporate overnight.\u201d<\/p>\n In Arizona, for one, it\u2019s unclear that the GOP is eager to move away from Trump even after the party saw Republicans lose Senate and gubernatorial races.<\/p>\n Kelli Ward, a Trump diehard who showed preference to election-denying candidates while rushing to censure both sitting and former GOP elected officials she deemed RINOs, has said she won\u2019t seek another term. Her announcement followed recent calls to resign by establishment-minded Republicans, including Karrin Taylor Robson who was defeated by Kari Lake in the party\u2019s gubernatorial primary.<\/p>\n But there\u2019s no sign the fabric of the Arizona GOP is changing, or that a large-tent Republican will be at the helm anytime soon. Insiders suspect someone in the image of Ward is most likely to succeed her, citing a top-down MAGA-minded party apparatus that was built up around her.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is trench warfare,\u201d said Chuck Coughlin, a Republican-turned-unaffiliated voter who remains a political consultant in the state. \u201cThere\u2019s nothing that would tell me they\u2019re willing to give up those positions of authority and sing kumbaya, or even have legitimate conversations about what that would look like.\u201d<\/p>\n In deep-blue Massachusetts, where voters have backed fiscally conservative but socially more moderate Republican governors for the better part of 30 years, a similar dynamic is playing out. Republicans deviated from their battle-tested method for electoral success \u2014 nominating candidates who can appeal across party lines in a state where the majority of voters are independents \u2014 by putting forward Trump-endorsed Geoff Diehl for governor and a slate of mostly hard-right candidates down the ballot.<\/p>\n After Republicans lost every statewide and congressional race and saw their already slim minority in the state legislature shrink even further, Jay Fleitman, the vice chair of the state party, announced his candidacy for chair. Several other state committee members are also considering bids.<\/p>\n But Jim Lyons, the embattled two-term state party chair, has shown no signs of dumping Trump. Lyons, who still hasn\u2019t said whether he\u2019s running for a third two-year term as state party leader, was posting on social media from the ballroom of Mar-a-Lago the night of Trump\u2019s announcement thanking the former president for the invite.<\/p>\n Rising frustration with Trump hasn\u2019t just produced fissures across numerous GOP state parties. It\u2019s created larger uncertainty about the 2024 presidential cycle. Republicans in key battleground states said they now believe there was an opening for DeSantis and other potential Republican challengers.<\/p>\n David Urban, a Pennsylvania native who served as a senior adviser for Trump\u2019s 2016 campaign, said, \u201cI think most people in Pennsylvania are open to somebody else\u201d in 2024.<\/p>\n Urban said that even his longtime friends in Beaver County, who are \u201cTrump until they die,\u201d told him \u201cwe like DeSantis a lot,\u201d though they haven\u2019t yet walked away from the former president.<\/p>\n Still, the GOP civil war, if one ever is launched, is unlikely to resolve itself for months ahead of 2024.<\/p>\n On his way out of La Jolla last week, Kochel, the longtime Iowa GOP consultant, tweeted a video<\/a> of sea lions by the water, heads raised as they barked into the air. \u201cIntraparty squabbles after weak election performance,\u201d Kochel wrote.<\/p>\n \u201cEverybody\u2019s just barking at each other, and nobody\u2019s saying anything,\u201d Kochel said in an interview, elaborating on his sea lions-as-Republicans analogy.<\/p>\n