Priebus: 'Trump Voters Are Not Republican Voters'

During this week’s broadcast of Fox News Channel’s “Sunday Night in America,” Fox News contributor Reince Priebus, a former Republican National Committee chairman and White House aide, said last week’s midterm election outcomes offered lessons. Priebus told host Trey Gowdy that Trump voters were not the same as Republican voters, meaning the party could not win midterm elections but could win presidential ones. “Welcome, Counselor. What happened Tuesday night, and what if anything could have prevented or mitigated it?” Gowdy asked. Priebus replied, “Well, you know what? There’s a lot to talk about. I’ll try to highlight a couple of quick things. Number one, two years you can go from a landslide to a mudslide, and you can go from a mudslide to a landslide in two years after that. I was chairman of the Wisconsin Party back in the day. We had nothing. We were destroyed. We came back four years later, we had everything. Same at the RNC, $26 million in debt. I took a second mortgage out on my house to make the first payroll, and we won the House, we won the Senate, we won the presidency. So what happened? Look, I think a couple of big lessons. Number one, Trump voters are not Republican voters. That’s number one, and we’ve become a midterm party that can’t win and a presidential party that can’t lose. And part of that is that.” “The second thing, when you dump $200 million to $250 million into Texas, what happened?” he continued. “What happened was everywhere outside of Texas, we were playing with even money. We had no cash advantage anywhere, and so those two things really made a huge difference. Last point on that question, Trey. You know, we have early vote bucket, Election Day bucket, and we study those two buckets every single day. On the early vote bucket, we were pretty close to 2022, and it turned out, like in a state like Wisconsin, if you looked at the total vote of 2026 and 2022, it was almost the same. Except Ron Johnson won in 2022, and we got crushed in 2026. Why? Because to my point, we are turning out voters that are not our voters. We might be turning out what we think are Trump voters, but they weren’t buying what we were selling.” Follow Jeff Poor on X @jeff_poor