The 2025 Elections Have A Trump-Shaped Trap For Republicans
HuffPost
It holds an ominous warning for 2026.
The 2025 elections, set for this coming Tuesday, tell an unsurprising story: Backlash to an increasingly unpopular Donald Trump is lifting Democratic and liberal causes across the country, from a governor’s race in Virginia to a redistricting referendum in California to New York City’s mayoral battle.
Where the story gets more interesting, and where the implications get more dire for the GOP, is how the Republican candidates in these races have reacted to this backlash. Despite everything, they have neglected to even try to distance themselves from the president, in a sharp break from the expected political playbook.
New Jersey’s governor’s race could, in theory, be competitive. Rep. Mikie Sherrill, the Democratic nominee, has a winning biography as a moderate former Navy helicopter pilot, but has struggled with some interviews and failed to meaningfully separate herself from incumbent Gov. Phil Murphy (D), who has middling approval ratings. Trump made significant gains in New Jersey in 2024, though he still lost the state by 6 percentage points.
Jack Ciattarelli, the Republican former state assemblyman who nearly pulled off a shocking upset of Murphy in 2021, is considered a strong candidate. But while he sat out the 2016 election entirely because he thought Trump was a “charlatan” and spent his 2021 race dismissing Trump as a non-issue – “What does Donald Trump have to do with our property taxes?” he asked at one point – he’s run in 2025 as a full-on MAGA supporter, telling a debate crowd the president is “right about everything that he’s doing” and refusing to even criticize Trump for cancelling an ultra-important infrastructure project in the state.
Ciattarelli’s transformation neatly illustrates the trap the GOP has placed itself in: They’ve turned essentially all of the political decision-making over to a single man. This has some advantages for the party, not least of which is Trump’s popularity with the base means he can break from GOP orthodoxy on issues like abortion with relative ease, and empower other candidates to do so. But in off-year elections defined by backlash to the party in power, it essentially guarantees GOP candidates are not going to be able to meaningfully separate themselves from an increasingly unpopular president.
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