Donald Trump retains a formidable grip on the Republican Party, but a string of recent endorsement failures raises a pointed question: is his political touch beginning to falter, or has his record always been more carefully curated than his supporters acknowledge?
Recent Fox News polling from Iowa and Georgia — two states Trump carried in 2024 — offers uncomfortable reading for the GOP. In Georgia, Republican businessman Rick Jackson trails former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms by five percentage points, 52 percent to 47 percent. Iowa looks worse still: Democratic Auditor Rob Sand leads Republican Zach Lahn by a striking nine points, 53 percent to 44 percent. Trump endorsed neither of these Republican candidates in their primaries. He backed their opponents — Lieutenant Governor Burt Jones in Georgia and Representative Randy Feenstra in Iowa — both of whom lost.
These are not isolated cases. In South Carolina, Trump endorsed Lieutenant Governor Pamela Evette to succeed Henry McMaster, only for the state’s Republican establishment to consolidate rapidly behind Attorney General Alan Wilson ahead of the runoff. Trump then endorsed both candidates simultaneously — a manoeuvre that read less as strategic flexibility than as damage limitation. In Iowa, he had endorsed Feenstra just days before the primary, only for Feenstra to be defeated. His earlier backing of Jones had similarly failed to carry the day.
Texas compounded the picture. Trump declined to withdraw his endorsement of Representative Tony Gonzales in the 23rd district even as a series of scandals accumulated during the primary campaign. Gonzales eventually forced a runoff against MAGA candidate Brendan Herrera before resigning after admitting to an extramarital affair with a former staffer who subsequently died. In the same Texas primary cycle, Trump’s preferred Agriculture Commissioner, Sid Miller, lost to Nathan Sheets, the candidate backed by Governor Greg Abbott.
His record is not uniformly poor. He helped unseat Representative Thomas Massie by backing primary challenger Ed Gallrein, marshalling party resources to do so. He endorsed Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton against incumbent Senator John Cornyn, backed Representative Julia Letlow in her successful primary challenge to Senator Bill Cassidy in Louisiana, and endorsed Mike Collins in the Georgia Senate runoff ahead of a challenge to Senator Jon Ossoff.
Yet the quality of these wins deserves scrutiny. Cornyn was polling well ahead throughout; Trump’s endorsement of Paxton ensured he stood on the winning side while doing little to alter the outcome. Cassidy had effectively sealed his own fate in 2021 when he voted to convict Trump following January 6th — his defeat was a matter of timing, not Trump’s intervention. The Collins endorsement arrived only once polling suggested Collins would likely prevail, and carried the added convenience of embarrassing Governor Brian Kemp, with whom Trump has a long-running feud. Endorsing incumbents facing no serious opposition inflates the headline figure further.
There is a structural tension at the heart of Trump’s endorsement strategy that goes beyond simple miscalculation. Any candidate he elevates risks eventually overshadowing him — an outcome he appears constitutionally disinclined to encourage. With fewer than three years remaining in his presidency, he has given little indication of whether he favours Vice President JD Vance or Secretary of State Marco Rubio as a successor, apparently content to wait for his base to signal a preference before lending his imprimatur. The pattern suggests less a coherent political strategy than an instinct for self-preservation dressed up as kingmaking.
The risk, as his second term advances, is that the gap between the myth of his endorsement power and its measurable reality widens to a point that even loyal Republicans can no longer ignore.