The tumultuous start to the Republican primary, including a sober Senate race that divided Pennsylvania conservatives on Tuesday, has shown how thoroughly Donald J. Trump has reshaped his party in his image — and the limits of his control beyond his creation.
In each of this month’s most contentious primaries — including two close contests next week in Alabama and Georgia — nearly every candidate has campaigned along the lines of the former president’s. Their websites and ads are full of his images. They are promoting his policies and many are repeating his false claims about electoral fraud in 2020.
But Mr Trump’s power over Republican voters has proved less impressive.
Candidates backed by Mr Trump lost the Governor races in Idaho and Nebraska, and a House race in North Carolina. In Senate games in Ohio (where his pick won earlier this month) and Pennsylvania (which stayed too close to call Wednesday morning), about 70 percent of Republicans voted against his approval. In contests next week, his chosen candidates for Georgia’s governor and Alabama senator are trailing in the polls.
Mr Trump has long been known for being called out to his constituents, but it seems that he is increasingly chasing his supporters than he ranks them. Republican voters’ distrust of authority and the desire for hard-line politics — traits Trump once capitalized on — have worked against him. Some have come to see the president they elected to lead an uprising as an established figure within his own movement.
Trumpism is on the rise in the Republican Party, with or without Mr. Trump, said Ken Spain, a Republican strategist and former National Republican Congressional Committee official.
“The so-called MAGA movement is a movement from below,” said Mr. Spain, “not one dictated from above.”
The primaries aren’t the first time conservative voters in Mr Trump’s red constituency have demonstrated their independence from the patriarch of the Make America Great Again movement.
In August, at one of Trump’s largest post-presidential campaign rallies, the crowd cheered after he urged them to get vaccinated against Covid-19. In January, some of the most influential voices in Trump’s orbit openly criticized his choice for a Middle Tennessee House seat, Morgan Ortagus — who had served as a State Department spokeswoman for two years in the Trump administration, but MAGA was deemed insufficient.
These mini-rebellions tend to flare up when Mr Trump’s supporters view his guidelines or approvals as not Trumpy enough.
“There is no clear heir when it comes to America First — he still is,” said Kellyanne Conway, Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign manager and White House adviser. “But people feel they can love him and plan to follow him into another presidential run — and disagree with all of his choices this year.”
How Donald J. Trump is still looming
Yet Republican candidates remain desperate for Mr Trump’s approval. In the Georgia Senate race, Mr Trump’s support for Herschel Walker kept serious rivals away. In some contested races, his endorsement proved hugely influential, such as it was in Tuesday’s North Carolina Senate primary where Representative Ted Budd rode to victory against a former governor and former congressman.
But with the emergence of an autonomous wing of the MAGA movement — one more uncompromising than Trump — even candidates without Trump’s approval have taken the mantle.
“MAGA does not belong to President Trump,” Kathy Barnette said during a primary debate in the Pennsylvania Senate in April.
The late rise of Ms. Barnette, who portrayed herself as a higher-octane version of Mr. Trump, dwindled support for Dr. Mehmet Oz, the longtime television personality who endorsed Mr. Trump, from conservatives who questioned his political credentials. As a result, Mr. Oz neck and neck with David McCormick, the hedge fund manager who has received a wave of criticism from Mr. Trump had endured. Still, Mr Oz had about a third of the vote.
Outside of Mrs. Barnette’s election night on Tuesday, Diante Johnson, a Republican activist and the founder and chairman of the Black Conservative Federation, said she was proud of how the conservative author and commentator fought against the party powers out there.
“The knife came to her and she didn’t step back,” said Mrs. Johnson. “Every individual from the Trump establishment that came after her stood there and fought.”
Ms. Barnette’s rise stunned Mr Trump, who has never considered the possibility of backing her candidacy, advisers said.
But the increasing autonomy of its base should not surprise anyone.
As president, Mr. Trump ruled in a constant state of concern for the care of his supporters. Though he was chosen in part as a political outsider making deals — he’d spent much of his adult life switching political parties — he rarely made major decisions without thinking about how his base would react.
Those instincts prevented him from reaching a major agreement with Congress on immigration policy and sparked battles with Democratic leaders that led to repeated government shutdowns. His fear of appearing weak to his grassroots voters drove him to not wear a mask in public for months during the pandemic.
While Mr Trump has indicated he is poised to run for a third time as president in 2024, some advisers said the volatile and intensely contested primaries risked alienating some of his supporters.
Advisers have urged Mr Trump to make amends with former primary rivals. But the former president has not called Jim Pillen, the Republican nominee for governor in Nebraska who defeated Trump’s favorite candidate, Charles W. Herbster. In Ohio, about 718,000 Republicans voted for anyone other than Trump-backed victor JD Vance.
And there’s still plenty of dust to settle down.
In Pennsylvania governor’s race last week, Mr. Trump backed Doug Mastriano over Lou Barletta, a former congressman who was an early supporter of Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign.
“Where the hell is the loyalty?” said former Representative Tom Marino, another early 2016 Trump supporter, at a campaign rally last week.
“Loyalty to what?” Mr Trump fired back in an interview Monday. Mr. Trump criticized Mr. Barletta for losing a 2018 Senate bid and not fighting harder to support the former president’s false claims that the Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election.
“My loyalty is to a man who was fighting there,” Trump said. “And Mastriano was the man who was fighting. I didn’t even see Lou Barletta fight for it.”
Chris Christie, who is also thought to be considering a 2024 presidential campaign, suggested that the primary results so far reflect a desire to move forward with the baggage Trump is imposing on the party.
“What I think the majority of these primaries are going to tell you is that the party wants to win again,” said Mr. Christie. “Between 2018 and 2020, we lost the House, the Senate and the White House. That is the second time in our party’s history. The other time that happened was when Herbert Hoover was president.”
Other Republicans warn against reading too much into Mr Trump’s approval scorecard. Tony Fabrizio, a pollster who has worked with Trump for a number of years, described the early matches as a muddle, providing no insight into what Mr Trump’s support meant.
Each race was shaped by the candidate, the rivals and the politics of the state, he said. In Ohio, Mr. Vance’s history of criticizing Mr. Trump made voters skeptical. Likewise, the previous support from Dr. Oz for abortion rights a barrier to grassroots Pennsylvania conservatives. In North Carolina, however, Mr. Budd was a better fit.
“In Ohio, it was a test of Trump doing paperwork on never-Trump flaws,” Fabrizio said. “In Pennsylvania, it’s a Trump test that fixes ideological flaws. And in North Carolina, it’s perfect harmony with no never-Trump or ideological flaws.”