The GOP’s post-election challenge: Turning Trump voters into full-fledged Republicans: From the Politics Desk

Welcome to the online version of From the Politics Desk, an evening newsletter that brings you the NBC News Politics team’s latest reporting and analysis from the White House, Capitol Hill and the campaign trail.

In today’s edition, national political correspondent Steve Kornacki explains why Republicans may not be able to bank on Donald Trump’s coalition moving forward. Plus, Republican senators grow skeptical of the president-elect’s pick to lead the Defense Department.

Sign up to receive this newsletter in your inbox every weekday here.

The GOP’s post-election challenge: Turning Trump voters into full-fledged Republicans

By Steve Kornacki

Even with their success, this election revealed a challenge for Republicans going forward: The “Trump coalition” and the “GOP coalition” are not quite the same.

By driving up support even further with white blue-collar voters and earning substantial new backing from nonwhite, young and first-time voters, President-elect Donald Trump swept the battleground states and secured a national popular vote victory.

But in the five battlegrounds that also featured Senate races, GOP candidates all received far fewer votes than Trump — enough to cost the party four of them (and nearly all five). While it’s customary for fewer total votes to be cast in down-ballot races, the drop-off was notably worse for Republicans than for the Democratic Senate candidates.

Individual candidate and campaign dynamics can certainly account for some of this. In Arizona, for instance, Republican Kari Lake’s broad unpopularity clearly gave an extra boost to Democrat Ruben Gallego, who actually received more votes than Vice President Kamala Harris did at the top of their party’s ticket.  

But taken as a whole, the overall pattern is striking — especially in light of recent history. In the two previous presidential elections combined, just one state produced a split White House/Senate outcome. That was in Maine in 2020, when voters re-elected Republican Sen. Susan Collins while backing Democrat Joe Biden for president. 

There are likely several factors at work here, but two stand out as potential longer-term issues for the GOP.

The first involves voters who were motivated to turn out for Trump, but then skipped all of the other races on the ballot. There’s some evidence for this. My colleague Scott Bland found that in Nevada’s Washoe County, the second largest in the state, 6.6% of Trump’s voters either left the Senate race blank or went with a third-party candidate (or used the state’s unique “none of these candidates” option). Meanwhile, 4.9% of Harris’ voters did the same. 

This only accounts for a small portion of the GOP drop-off in Nevada, but it’s a result that’s consistent with a feature of our NBC News polling this year. We found Trump faring best with infrequent voters (posting a 15-point advantage among those who hadn’t voted in 2020) who expressed a lower level of interest in the election and were disproportionately young, nonwhite and male. It’s plausible that a significant number of these people ended up being “Trump-only” voters, raising the question of whether the GOP can convert them into full-fledged Republican voters in the future, when Trump won’t be on the ballot. 

The other factor the GOP will need to address involves Democratic defectors — traditionally Democratic voters who have essentially made an exception for Trump.

This appears to have been at work in Wisconsin, where Trump won by about 30,000 votes even as Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin was re-elected by roughly the same margin. The drop-off from Trump to his party’s Senate candidate (Eric Hovde) was most pronounced in rural, blue-collar counties, many of which had been Democratic territory until Trump’s emergence. Here Trump expanded his support even further, which was key to his statewide victory, but those gains didn’t trickle down the ballot. 

Republicans will need to find a way to make that happen in the future — without Trump.

Trump’s pick for defense secretary is in peril in the Senate

By Courtney Kube, Frank Thorp V, Ryan Nobles and Garrett Haake

President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Defense Department, Pete Hegseth, is in peril as Senate Republicans grow increasingly concerned over reports about his alleged drinking and treatment of women.

As many as six Senate Republicans, perhaps more, are currently not comfortable supporting Hegseth’s bid to lead the Pentagon as new revelations about the former Fox News anchor’s past continue to be made public, three Republican sources with direct knowledge of his nomination process tell NBC News. Given Republicans’ slim Senate majority in the next Congress, Hegseth can only afford to lose three GOP votes, assuming all Democrats vote against him.

Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, who sits on the Armed Services Committee, would not commit to supporting Hegseth’s nomination and said she planned to grill him about news accounts of his alleged alcohol abuse, mistreatment of women and financial mismanagement. 

“We’re just going to have a really frank and thorough conversation,” Ernst said of Hegseth’s nomination process.

Hegseth, an Army National Guard veteran, was accused of sexually assaulting a woman in California in 2017, according to a police report made public after Trump announced he would nominate the former Fox host for defense secretary. Hegseth was not charged and denied the woman’s allegations, stating the encounter was consensual, although he did pay an undisclosed amount as part of a settlement with her.

Separately, NBC News reported on Tuesday that Hegseth’s drinking concerned his colleagues at Fox News, according to 10 current and former Fox employees. Two of them said that Hegseth smelled of alcohol before he went on air on more than a dozen occasions. Hegseth did not respond when asked for comment on those allegations Tuesday evening at the Capitol.

The initial allegations against Hegseth last month did not appear to put his planned nomination in danger. After his first round of meetings on Capitol Hill last month, Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., the chair of the Armed Services Committee, said he expected Hegesth to be confirmed. But on Tuesday, after a series of other reports about Hegseth’s past but before NBC News reported on allegations concerning drinking at Fox News, Wicker sounded more cautious.

“I think there are questions that some members have and we’re going to be looking for an answer,” Wicker said.

Read more →

🚨 Meanwhile … Hillsborough County, Florida, Sheriff Chad Chronister, Trump’s pick to serve as the next DEA administrator, withdrew from consideration Tuesday. Read more →

That’s all from the Politics Desk for now. If you have feedback — likes or dislikes — email us at politicsnewsletter@nbcuni.com

And if you’re a fan, please share with everyone and anyone. They can sign up here.