‘That’s on him’: McConnell allies blame Trump for Georgia

The Georgia races represented a stunning breakdown of the four-year alliance of convenience between McConnell and Trump that helped conservatives accomplish an array of longstanding policy goals — but ended with the GOP losing the Senate. Things finally came apart in mid-December, when McConnell recognized Democrat Joe Biden as president-elect, a declaration that culminated in a tension-filled phone call between Trump and McConnell in which the president made his unhappiness clear.

It was the last time McConnell and Trump spoke before the runoffs.

The tension between Trump and the Senate GOP burst out into the open on Wednesday, as Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock had their victories confirmed and pro-Trump rioters stormed the Capitol to disrupt the counting of Electoral College votes. Before the Capitol was breached, McConnell allies and other Republicans were pointing their fingers directly at the president over the Georgia losses.

Scott Jennings, a Kentucky-based GOP strategist and longtime McConnell confidante, noted that the party had suffered poor turnout in conservative areas of Georgia where Trump had strong support.

“That’s on him. He told them their votes didn’t count, and some of them listened,” Jennings said.

Trump advisers pushed back ferociously. They asserted that the Republican incumbents, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, ran uninspiring campaigns. They expressed disbelief that Perdue ran a TV ad saying he’d been cleared of wrongdoing into insider stock trading allegations, only giving them further attention. And they argued that Senate Republicans’ failure to approve coronavirus relief payments of $2,000 was costly.

“Polling shows that if the U.S. Senate had passed $2,000 stimulus checks, we’d be celebrating the elections of David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler today. Senate Republicans have nobody to blame but themselves,” said Jason Miller, a senior Trump campaign adviser.

As they girded for the runoffs, Senate Republicans found themselves in a bind. To win, party strategists were convinced, they needed to find a way to win over moderate suburbanites who were repelled by Trump. But they felt the president was making their job harder by rehashing the idea the election had been stolen from him, including in Georgia, which was narrowly won by Biden.

GOP officials had conducted internal polling showing that moderate voters were especially receptive to the idea that a Republican-controlled Senate would provide a needed check on the Biden White House. But Republicans concluded they couldn’t wage a check-and-balance focused campaign because it would be an implicit acknowledgment that Trump had lost, something that would alienate the president and his supporters.

“Republicans had everything going for them in this race, except Trump. If this election had been about checks and balances, then the Republicans would have won. Instead it was about Trump and his conspiracy theories,” said Republican…