Republican US senator Bill Cassidy predicted on Sunday that Donald Trump would fail to win the 2024 presidential race if his party nominates him to run again, citing the poor performance of his endorsed candidates during last year’s midterms.
“We saw in all the swing states, almost all – Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Arizona – the candidates for Senate that Trump endorsed all lost,” Cassidy said of the former president on CNN’s State of the Union. “If past is prologue, that means President Trump is going to have a hard time in the swing states, which means he cannot win a general election.”
The Louisiana Republican delivered those remarks after network host Jake Tapper asked him for his thoughts on comments that Florida’s conservative governor, Ron DeSantis, made on a recent call with donors about his chances of winning the White House.
DeSantis – who has not formally announced himself as a candidate but is widely expected to do so – argued on the private call that he, Trump and Democratic incumbent Joe Biden were the only credible contenders for the presidency in 2024, according to the New York Times.
“And I think of those three, two have a chance to get elected president – Biden and me,” DeSantis reportedly added.
Cassidy said on Sunday that DeSantis’s comments were “a nice way” for the governor to cast aspersions on another “pretty formidable candidate”: the Republican US senator Tim Scott. Scott, of South Carolina, the only Black Republican serving in the Senate, filed paperwork on Friday to run for the presidency ahead of a formal campaign launch on Monday.
“You just have to take this as a competitor trying to diss others,” said Cassidy, whom Louisiana first elected to the Senate in 2014.
However, Cassidy added, DeSantis did have a point in arguing that Trump would be quite beatable in a rematch with Biden, to whom he lost when he ran for re-election in 2020.
Cassidy alluded to how Trump threw his support behind Senate candidates Herschel Walker, Mehmet Oz, Adam Laxalt and Blake Masters in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Arizona, respectively, during last year’s midterm elections. And they respectively lost to Raphael Warnock, John Fetterman, Catherine Cortez Masto and Mark Kelly as the Democrats seized a two-seat majority in the upper congressional chamber.
Cassidy also alluded to how other Republicans in those states performed well in political contests that didn’t draw Trump’s attention, leading the Louisianan to conclude that the former president’s “kind of high-profile endorsement of those candidates actually hurt those candidates” in the doomed Senate campaigns that he backed.
Cassidy’s comments on Sunday were not the first time he has spoken out against Trump, whom polling has shown to be the leading contender for the Republicans’ 2024 presidential nomination.
Trump maintains that lead despite unprecedented legal jeopardy, including over a hush money payment to an adult film actor, his retention of classified materials and 2020 election subversion.
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Cassidy, along with six other Republicans in the Senate, voted to convict the former president after Trump was impeached over his role in the deadly attack that his supporters staged at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. Trump, nonetheless, had more than enough votes to be acquitted at his impeachment trial.
When Cassidy later said that he would not support Trump if he ran for the White House again, he prompted the ex-president to call him a “Rino”, which is an acronym meaning “Republican in name only”.
Cassidy has been able to carve out a seat for himself at the negotiating table for some of the most prominent issues discussed on Capitol Hill by presenting himself as being willing to engage in bipartisan talks with Democrats and the Biden administration.
He was one of the federal lawmakers who successfully pushed for the gun control bill that Biden signed into law last year, which expanded background checks for the youngest gun buyers while funding mental health and violence intervention programs amid a spate of deadly mass shootings across the US.
Despite that legislation, the nation is on track to have its deadliest year in terms of mass shootings in recent memory, leading many to call for more substantial gun control measures.