GOP senator says Trump Republicans ‘underperformed’ in midterms

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) on Sunday pinned the blame for midterm losses on Republican candidates aligned with former President Trump, saying the GOP needs to “explain to the American people where we think the party should go” in the future.

Cassidy told NBC’s “Meet the Press” moderator Chuck Todd that those candidates “underperformed” on Election Day.

Republican candidates “who were talking about the future and who had managed their states well, they overperformed,” Cassidy said. “The American people want ideas, they want a future.”

Cassidy said he was looking at the 2022 midterms “empirically” when he said Trump-endorsed candidates underperformed.

“Those closely aligned with the past, those are the ones that underperformed,” the senator said. “We as a party need to have a debate about ideas. In that debate, we need to explain to the American people exactly where we think our country should go.”

Republicans were expected to take control of the House and had a good shot at a Senate majority heading into Election Day as President Biden suffered low job approval ratings and inflation was running at a 40-year high.

And historically, the party in power usually loses seats in the midterm elections.

But on Election Day, Democrats outperformed expectations and on Saturday captured the Senate majority, with a key Georgia race heading into a runoff election set to decide how large that majority will be.

In the House, Republicans need just seven seats to take a majority while Democrats need 17 with about two dozen seats yet to be called. But any GOP lead is likely to be slimmer than anticipated before Election Day.

Trump backed candidates who supported him and his unproven claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election, which some analysts have said was a major reason for the GOP’s performance, in addition to abortion rights being a key focus of voters.