US Republican Senator Bill Cassidy predicted on Sunday that donald trump he would not 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 midterm elections.
“We saw in all the swing states, almost all (Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Arizona) the Senate candidates that Trump endorsed, all lost,” Cassidy said of the former president on CNN’s State of the Union show. “If the past is a prologue, that means President Trump will have a hard time in the swing states, which means he can’t win a general election.”
The Louisiana Republican made those comments after being asked by network host Jake Tapper for his views on comments conservative Florida Governor Ron DeSantis made in 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 expected to, argued in 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 be elected president: Biden and myself,” DeSantis added.
Cassidy said Sunday that DeSantis’s comments were “a good way” for the governor to cast doubt on another “pretty formidable candidate”: Republican US Sen. Tim Scott. Scott of South Carolina, the only black Republican serving in the Senate, filed Friday to run for president before the formal launch of the campaign on Monday.
“You just have to take this as a competitor trying to put others down,” said Cassidy, who was first elected to the Senate by Louisiana in 2014.
However, Cassidy added, DeSantis was right to argue that Trump would be quite beatable in a rematch with Biden, whom he lost to when running for re-election in 2020.
Cassidy alluded to how Trump endorsed 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 lost respectively to Raphael Warnock, John Fetterman, Catherine Cortez Masto and Mark Kelly as Democrats won a two-seat majority in the upper house of Congress.
Cassidy also alluded to how other republicans in those states he performed well in political races that didn’t catch Trump’s attention, leading the Louisiana resident to conclude that the former president’s “type of high-profile endorsement of those candidates actually hurt those candidates” in the races. doomed Senate campaigns he endorsed.
Cassidy’s comments on Sunday were not the first time he had spoken out against Trump, whom polls have shown is the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
Trump maintains that lead despite unprecedented legal riskincluding a payment of money to silence an adult film actor, his withholding of classified materials, and his subversion of the 2020 election.
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Cassidy, along with six other Republicans in the Senatevoted to convict the former president after Trump was impeached for his role in the deadly attack his supporters staged on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Trump, however, had more than enough votes to be acquitted in his impeachment trial.
When Cassidy later said she would not support Trump if he ran for the White House again, prompted the former president to call him “Rino”which is an acronym that stands for “Republican in Name Only.”
Cassidy has been able to carve out a seat at the negotiating table for some of the most high-profile issues discussed on Capitol Hill by presenting himself as willing to engage in bipartisan talks with Democrats and the Biden administration.
He was one of the federal lawmakers who successfully pushed through the gun control bill Biden signed into law last year, which expanded background checks for younger gun buyers while funding mental health and violence intervention programs amidst of a series of deadly mass shootings in the US.
Despite that legislation, the nation is well on its way to having its deadliest year in terms of mass shootings in recent memory, leading many to call for more substantial gun control measures.