These candidates are probably finished in politics if they lose this year.
These candidates are probably finished in politics if they lose this year.
L osing an election is almost never good news for the losing candidate, but some losses are costlier than others. Politicians on the way up can sometimes use a high-profile loss to build their brand or to learn important lessons. Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton all survived early-career defeats. Veteran officeholders occasionally come back stronger after some enforced time in the wilderness. And what look like career-enders aren’t always necessarily so: Richard Nixon won the presidency six years after he vowed that his loss in the 1962 California governor’s race, on the heels of losing the 1960 election, meant that, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.”
But then there are elections a politician truly cannot afford to lose — at least, not without requiring a Nixon-level reversal of national fortune to rescue them. A bunch of the 2022 candidates are facing those make-or break elections. Some of those, of course, are heavy favorites: It would take a disaster at this point to sink Chuck Schumer, Greg Abbott, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, or Jared Polis, and a disaster that large would be hard to come back from. Some are favorites with immediate ambitions for higher office: If Ron DeSantis were to lose in 2022, as George Allen did in 2006, his potential as a 2024 presidential contender would evaporate instantly.
More interesting are the candidates for the Senate or governorships who are clinging tenuously to their offices or are challengers who stand a serious chance of professional extinction. Let’s review some of them, noting the office they are seeking:
Stacey Abrams (Democrat, Georgia governor): Abrams can’t lose her cult-hero status among the media and progressives, especially those who credit her voter-registration drives for turning Georgia blue in 2020–21 after two decades of Republican dominance. Abrams emerged from losing her first statewide race in 2018 as a martyr who claimed that she was cheated out of the job. That only works once. Running again against Brian Kemp, Abrams trails 48.5 points to 44 points in the RealClearPolitics poll average. If she loses a second time in a state that voted for Biden and two Democratic senators two years ago, it will be hard for her to sell herself as a viable statewide candidate again or attract serious interest in a run for president or a spot on a national ticket.
Beto O’Rourke (Democrat, Texas governor): Like Abrams and Andrew Gillum, O’Rourke was one of the Democrats’ great Sun Belt hopes in 2018 who came up agonizingly short. But a completely flopped presidential run later, he appears to have repositioned himself too far to the left for the Texas electorate in a good Republican year. Beto is down 48.8 to 40 in the RCP average, and barring a miracle, his career in statewide and national office looks like a future that never came.
Eric Greitens (Republican, Missouri senator): A comeback from scandal can work if a public official’s support is durable enough. Sometimes, as with Mark Sanford returning to the House, it requires taking a step down to lower office first. But if you time it wrong and fail, it’s much harder to convince anyone to take the threat of your candidacy seriously. Greitens already looked like the weakest general-election candidate for Republicans, and that was before new physical-abuse allegations by his ex-wife, which led multiple Republicans to call on Greitens to drop out. Josh Hawley thundered, “If you hit a woman or a child, you belong in handcuffs, not the United States Senate.” Mitch McConnell opined that Republicans “caught a break” with the story coming out now rather than in the general election. The most recent poll following the news had Greitens sliding to second place at 21 percent, with Attorney General Eric Schmitt at 24 percent and Congresswoman Vicki Hartzler at 19 percent. If Greitens loses the primary, or wins it and blows the general election, his name in the Missouri GOP will be mud.
Charlie Crist (Democrat, Florida governor): Only a party as perennially underachieving, and as desperate to wound the incumbent, as the Florida Democrats would be giving yet another chance to the original Orange Man. Between 2010 and 2014, Crist ran for the Senate as a Republican, lost the primary to Rubio, ran in the general election as an independent, lost to Rubio again, then ran for governor as a Democrat, and lost to Rick Scott. Having rebuilt himself in the House, Crist is trying again. If Crist loses the primary to Nikki Fried (whom he led 27 percent to 19 percent in the most recent poll), he would have lost statewide primaries in both parties; if he loses to DeSantis, Crist will have lost to all three of the state’s top elected Republicans, running from both parties and as an independent. Either way, his political brand will be in tatters.
Pat McCrory (Republican, North Carolina senator): McCrory is another comeback story with some bruises on his record. He lost his first bid for North Carolina governor in 2008, was elected in 2012, but was voted out of office narrowly in 2016, running behind Donald Trump and well behind Richard Burr. A Duke Energy coal-ash spill on his watch did a lot of in-state damage to McCrory, who had worked for the company for 28 years. After six years out of office, McCrory is making a bid to replace Burr in the Senate, offering himself as the safer alternative to Trump-endorsed Ted Budd. Like Crist, he is 65 years old, so he does not have an unlimited amount of time to try again. McCrory appears to be leading Budd in a competitive primary, and given the 2022 climate, he would enter the general election as the favorite. But with two statewide losses in his background, McCrory probably isn’t coming back from a third.
Josh Mandel, J. D. Vance, Mike Gibbons (Republicans, Ohio senator): Mandel is still young. At 44, and he spent eight years in statewide office as Ohio state treasurer. But he has whiffed twice now on the Senate: He lost to Sherrod Brown in 2012, and he bailed out after being the presumptive challenger to Brown in 2018 (maybe a savvy move, given the political climate that year). Ohio has gotten appreciably redder since 2012, and with Rob Portman retiring, Mandel’s name recognition ought to carry him to a primary win that will set him up for a general-election victory against Congressman Tim Ryan. But if Mandel loses at one of those steps — he appears, for now, to be narrowly trailing Mike Gibbons in the primary polls — Ohio Republicans are likely to look elsewhere in the future.
The RCP average currently shows Gibbons at 20 percent, Mandel at 18.7 percent, J. D. Vance at 11 percent, Jane Timken at 8.3 percent, and Matt Dolan at 7.7 percent. Gibbons is 69 years old; if he loses the primary, this is likely his only rodeo. For Timken and Dolan, political veterans but first-time statewide candidates, defeat will be bitter, but less certain to end their careers.
Vance is an amateur politician, lavished with SuperPAC funding, national TV exposure, and endless coverage on Twitter. If he ends up losing a very close primary race, he may get another shot. But if he finishes a fairly distant third in the primary, or surges to win it and belly-flops in the general election, he is likely to be remembered as a cautionary tale rather than a prospect for future races.
Mehmet Oz (Republican, Pennsylvania senator): Dr. Oz is, like Vance, an amateur politician. But J. D. Vance is a writer, known to writers; Oz is a mega-celebrity on the scale of Donald Trump. If Oz is any good as a politician, he ought to sweep to victory in Pennsylvania.
So far, he isn’t. The RCP average shows Oz wedged in second place in the Republican primary, with Tom McCormick at 19.5 percent, Oz at 17.8 percent, and Carla Sands at 10.8 percent. That is still a winnable race for Oz, and the Democrats have their own bruising primary between John Fetterman and Conor Lamb, but like 2006 Republican gubernatorial candidate Lynn Swann, the 61-year-old Oz seems unlikely to return to politics if he doesn’t win this one.
Evan McMullin (“Independent,” Utah senator): McMullin ran nationally in 2016, and at the time, he had a respectable reason for doing so: to give disaffected conservatives a place to park their protest votes against Donald Trump without endorsing Gary Johnson’s version of libertarianism. The one place McMullin did genuinely well was in Utah, where many Mormons were appalled by Trump. Since then, McMullin’s Democratic partisan rhetoric has managed to alienate nearly everyone who voted for him before, in pursuit of a fundraising base among people who despise anyone who didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Now, McMullin is running as the de facto Democratic candidate against Mike Lee, of all people, in Utah. If he loses, that is proof that McMullinism has no market anywhere.
Brian Kemp, David Perdue, Herschel Walker, Brad Raffensperger (Republicans, Georgia governor, senator, secretary of state): Georgia is ground zero for the internal divisions of the Republican Party. Kemp and Raffensperger have been under heavy, two-front assault by Trump and Abrams, both of whom blame them for “stolen” elections. Perdue blew an Election Day 2020 victory over Jon Ossoff, losing the January 5, 2021, runoff. Walker, by contrast, is another amateur politician banking on four decades of legendary status as the greatest figure in Georgia football, and he is a personal Trump loyalist dating back decades before Trump entered politics. He also has significant personal baggage. In theory, if Kemp beats Perdue in the primary, a Kemp-Walker-Raffensperger general-election ticket should bring together all of the disparate elements of the party. In practice, any of them who stumble is likely finished in the shark tank of Georgia Republican politics.