GOP Senator Predicts Trump ‘Cannot Win a General Election’
At least one Republican senator has serious doubts about Donald Trump’s chances to win in 2024. Sen. Bill Cassidy said that he believes the former president “cannot win a general election.”
“During the last election cycle, we saw in all the swing states, almost all — Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Arizona — that the candidates for Senate that Trump endorsed all lost,” Cassidy said on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday. “If you had taken the votes that went to other Republicans and put them together, those Republicans would have won.”
The losing GOP candidates Cassidy is referring to include Herschel Walker in Georgia, Dr. Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, Blake Masters in Arizona, and Adam Laxalt in Nevada, all of whom Trump heavily touted and even hosted rallies with. Despite those candidates’ losses, Cassidy noted, other Republican candidates in those states did well, suggesting that Trump’s endorsement sunk their chances.
The Louisiana Republican continued, “I think the president’s kind of high-profile endorsement of those candidates actually hurt those candidates, at least in the general election. So, if past his prologue, that means President Trump is going to have a hard time in those swing states, which means that he cannot win a general election.”
Over the past few years, Cassidy has repeatedly spoken out against Trump. He voted alongside six other GOP senators to convict Trump in his second impeachment trial in 2020, and in 2021, he blasted Trump for losing the 2020 election, declaring he would not support his candidacy in 2024. “President Trump is the first president, on the Republican side at least, to lose the House, the Senate and the presidency in four years. Elections are about winning,” Cassidy said. When asked if he planned to vote for Trump, Cassidy responded, “I’m not.”
The former president currently leads in the polls against other Republican candidates as well as potential challenger Ron DeSantis, the current governor of Florida who is expected to announce his entry into the race for the Republican nomination on Wednesday.