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"There is no abandoning Trump and his imprint on the party. There are ways to adapt it and make our message more tenable to folks. But I don't think it is realistic to pretend he wasn't President for four years," one GOP House aide told CNN.

"I'm here tonight to stand with President Trump," Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said Thursday night on Fox News.

"The election results are out of control. It's like the whistle has blown, the game is over, and the players have gone home, but the referees are suddenly adding touchdowns to the other team's side of the scoreboard," tweeted Tommy Tuberville, who won a US Senate seat in Alabama on Tuesday.

Trump's narrow loss makes it harder for Republicans to completely walk away from a President whose unpredictability tormented them at times but whose loyal following boosted them in races across the country this week.

"I think what Trump's primary message was, the forgotten men and women, America first, in coal country or manufacturing, that is something that every elected official ought to take a look at," Sen. Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, told CNN. "He ran and said this is who I am. He is the same person today as he was when he came down that escalator," in making his announcement in June 2015 that he would run for president.

Trump's popularity may not have saved him in the end, but it did deliver wins for Republicans across the country. Democrats won a razor-thin presidential contest, but Republicans managed to win back a handful of seats in the House, and looked poised to maintain the Senate and make some inroads with minority communities that could make it much harder for the GOP moderates and Trump critics to dismiss the President's message, strategy and legacy outright. Instead of abandoning Trump's unorthodox policies on trade, tough line on immigration or direct focus on working-class voters, Republicans are already grappling with the reality that Trump has forever changed the party.

A Republican-led Senate and Democratic White House would provide Republicans an opportunity to work with Biden. But it also would give them a stopgap, a firewall and a way to dramatically contrast themselves with the Democrats' agenda. Leadership jockeying on Capitol Hill will consume the lame duck session, but Republicans will also have to decide how to confront Biden's presidency -- whether to embrace areas of bipartisanship or firmly hold the line against Biden implementing his vision for the country.

Left in Trump's wake are a handful of governors, congressional leaders and GOP senators who will spend the next weeks and months dissecting where the party and, depending on their aspirations, they themselves go next.

For Sen. Marco Rubio, a Republican from Florida who ran against Trump in the primary in 2016, the lessons of 2020 came early as he watched returns pouring in from his home in Miami-Dade County. A son of Cuban immigrants who once saw comprehensive immigration revisions as the path to expanding the GOP's reach, he watched as President-elect Biden significantly underperformed where Hillary Clinton had been just four years ago. Clinton had beat Trump by roughly 30 points in the heavily Latino county in 2016. In 2020, Biden was on a path to win by just 7 points. Trump, a President whose language about immigrants, obsession with a border wall and policies had been seen by pundits as setting the GOP back with Latino voters for decades, made inroads -- at least in some places. Two Democratic congresswomen in South Florida -- Donna Shalala and Debbie Muscarsel-Powell -- were also defeated by Republicans.

"We have spent many years in this country thinking ethnicity is the leading political identity of many Americans, and what we are learning is that their status as working-class Americas becomes their identity. That doesn't mean the other issues are irrelevant, but they go side by side," Rubio said.

If Republicans are to win the White House again, Rubio argues, the party should build on what Trump created with a multi-ethnic coalition and a focus on the economy that can appeal to the working class. Rubio says Republicans should also try to win back some of the suburban voters "who may be repelled by some of the harder edges of the messaging."

"That hunger and thirst for political leaders who focus on those issues is not going to change," Rubio said. "The question is whether someone not named Donald Trump is able to do what he has done."

Pushed on if he would run in 2024 for president, Rubio demurred: "I think I have learned over the years that sometimes you cannot decide whether you want to cross a bridge until you know how many bridges there are as your options. Obviously I have run for president before. I wouldn't rule it out in the future."

For some Republicans who have watched as the party has been overtaken by Trump over the last several years, Trump's loss comes with an opportunity -- a chance to turn the page and return to expanding the coalition of voters Republicans can get in an election.

"Dust off the old autopsy," former Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona, a Republican who retired from the Senate during Trump's presidency, told CNN in a extensive interview, referring to the Republican National Committee's 2013 report on what went wrong in the 2012 election and how to appeal to a broader swath of voters, especially minorities and women. "Anger and resentment are not a governing philosophy. Globalism is here to stay and we have to deal with it."

But even Flake acknowledges that Republicans have months and years of soul searching ahead.

"There is going to be a big segment that does think President Trump had the right message and he was flawed. You will have some like Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz try to pick up that mantle," Flake said, referring to senators from Arkansas and Texas. "But I just hope that Republicans as a whole realize that Trump is a dead end. There is no there there. You can only own the libs and get a certain percentage of the voters."

Some conservatives on Capitol Hill disagree.

"I am not that nuts about the tweets because you are always asking me to defend them, and I don't want to, but we needed someone like him because what most conservatives do share is a revulsion to the deep state, the swamp, and if anything resonated with people it was his message of draining the swamp," Johnson said.

For Republicans, the immediate work of defining their party without the Twitter-obsessed, plain-speaking commander in chief will be carried out by their congressional leaders.

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell retained his Senate seat handily Tuesday night in Kentucky and is widely expected to remain at the helm of the GOP conference in the US Senate. In his acceptance speech, McConnell didn't mention Trump specifically, but did forecast the importance of the working-class vote to Republicans.

"I look out for middle America," McConnell noted.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, meanwhile, used his news conference on Capitol Hill Wednesday to boast about Trump's successes for the party.

"President Trump had a very strong night last night. His vision for our country expanded our party," McCarthy touted. "His efforts in reaching out to every demographic has positively changed the future of the GOP."

Exactly what that future looks like, however, remains to be seen.

Read more:
Trump might have lost but his legacy lives on with congressional Republicans - CNN

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Editors note: This story contains explicit language.

A little over a week before Election Day, Tony Gonzales campaign got internal poll results that caught its attention.

The Republican candidate was up 5 percentage points in the 23rd Congressional District, the perennial battleground where U.S. Rep. Will Hurd, R-Helotes, is retiring. Gonzales team was feeling good about his chances, but a 5-point win or anything close to it would be significant in a district decided by much smaller margins for the past few election cycles.

That poll turned out to be pretty accurate. Gonzales defeated the Democratic nominee, Gina Ortiz Jones, by 4 percentage points after she finished just 926 votes behind Hurd two years ago.

It was one of many bright spots Tuesday for Republicans in Texas and an example of relatively reliable polling to boot.

Not every campaign was as fortunate, though. Democrats woke up Wednesday morning questioning long-held assumptions about the most consequential Texas election in a generation the polling that had let them down, the turnout increase that didnt seem as friendly to them as anticipated, the expectations that were raised sky-high.

After Texas Republicans were caught sleeping two years ago, they say it was Democrats who walked into a buzzsaw this time a more battle-ready, unified GOP.

I think they thoroughly underestimated the desire to fight and the sophistication of not just the candidates and the consulting class but also these groups who are committed to a conservative agenda, said Matt Brownfield, a GOP strategist who worked on multiple races in the fight for the state House majority. They just underestimated us tremendously.

The Texas Democratic Party spent the cycle touting Texas as the biggest battleground state, and while the state attracted battleground-level attention and investment, Democrats ended up with few wins to show for it. President Donald Trump won the state by 6 percentage points, narrower than his 2016 margin but wider than many polls had suggested. U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, easily dispatched a late Democratic spending surge and won reelection by 10 points. After the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee targeted 10 GOP-held U.S. House seats, Democrats were winning none of them as of Friday. And Democrats hopes of flipping the Texas House collapsed, with the balance of power largely unchanged heading into January.

On Tuesday afternoon, the state Democratic Party chair, Gilberto Hinojosa, issued a statement maintaining that the party called Texas the biggest battleground, not the biggest blue state.

We have tough questions to ask ourselves, Hinojosa said. There are significant challenges before us, and new solutions are required.

At the top of the ticket, Democrats had hoped for a much closer presidential race if not the state going blue in a presidential race for the first time since 1976. Bidens 6-point margin was especially disappointing given his striking underperformance along the border and particularly in South Texas.

That had ramifications down the ballot, which had races drawing money from across the nation. A national Democratic operative who worked on the battle for the Texas House said their sides strategy was predicated on a much stronger Biden performance statewide closer to Beto ORourkes 3-point deficit against U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz in 2018. The operative spoke on the condition of anonymity because they werent authorized to speak candidly about internal party strategies.

Like elsewhere in the country, Democrats were misled by polls in Texas.

While polls should be treated as a snapshot in time and not a prediction of the final outcome, many Democratic surveys even some that were conducted close to the election were far off. Less than two weeks before Election Day, a Democratic poll of the 3rd Congressional District found the Republican incumbent, Rep. Van Taylor of Plano, trailing by 2 points. He won Tuesday by 12.

Statewide, public polls were also more generous to Democrats, with the final RealClearPolitics polling average giving Trump only a 1-point edge in Texas.

Chris Wilson, a Republican pollster with wide experience in Texas, said polling in Texas may have failed to take into account the complexity of Hispanic voters, among other things.

In states like Texas, you need to really manage your sample well to make sure youre not just getting enough Hispanics, but getting enough of the right Hispanic subgroups by national origin and by socioeconomics, he said.

In the case of Gonzales, his pollster, Nicole McCleskey of Public Opinion Strategies, had been surveying the Hispanic-majority district since Hurds first race in 2014. She said that especially in the 23rd District, it is important not to consider Hispanic voters as a monolith and they can be very different in Bexar County versus the districts western rural expanse, for example.

It was not just bad polling fueling Democratic optimism. Many saw the massive number of people voting early as a sign of a blue wave rising.

Early voting turnout ended up at 9.7 million, more than the entire 2016 election. Voters with Republican primary history outnumbered those with Democratic primary history, though both sides were far more interested in the sizable group of new voters and which way they would break.

Derek Ryan, a Republican data analyst, said Texas had 2.9 million voters who registered after the 2018 election, and 1.6 million of them voted early. He had thought that if Republicans were lucky, those 1.6 million would break 60-40 for Democrats. On Thursday, though, he said it was clear that the split was far tighter.

The turnout was an especially satisfying development for Republicans who have long heard Democrats claim that Texas is not a red state but a nonvoting state.

Well, I think we fuckin blew that bullshit up yesterday when over 11 million people voted and they still lost and they lost everywhere, Dave Carney, Gov. Greg Abbotts top political strategist, told reporters Wednesday.

Republicans also argued Democrats were foolish to hold off on resuming door-knocking due to the coronavirus. While some Democrats dismissed that concern ahead of the election, others have openly grappled with it since Tuesday.

I cant help but imagine what we could have done if we were not restrained by the pandemic from knocking on doors, Beto ORourke wrote to supporters Wednesday in an email.

ORourke was prolific in the battle for the state House much to Republicans delight. Abbotts campaign ran highly targeted digital ads tying candidates to ORourkes positions, and the strategy was not without data to back it up ORourkes favorability rating was consistently underwater in statewide polling throughout the cycle.

When it came to issues, there was arguably none that Republicans bet bigger on than law enforcement. Abbott became obsessed with the defund the police movement after Austin cut its departments budget by a third, and Republicans throughout the ballot worked strenuously to tie their Democratic opponents to the cause which takes many forms even if they had not declared support for it.

A fierce national debate over criminal justice reform escalated this year after George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police, leading some advocates to call for shifts in police funding. Republicans campaigned heavily on the issue, saying it shows a lack of Democratic support for law enforcement.

"If we lose the argument on whether [a Democratic candidate] wants to defund the police, we still win, said Craig Murphy, a Republican consultant who was involved in the Texas House battle. Because if the issue is whether you support the police or not, then Im going with the Republican.

Reluctant to let the Republicans dictate the terms of the conversation, some Democratic candidates declined to push back on the police-related attacks in a meaningful way. One exception was Wendy Davis, the Democratic challenger to U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, R-Austin, who aired a direct-to-camera TV ad in which she said, We need criminal justice reform, but I dont support defunding the police. Still, Roy persisted with claims she wanted to defund the police, including in his final TV ad, and won by a better-than-expected 7 points.

Cornyn also seized on the issue in his campaigns TV ads, and a pro-Cornyn super PAC scrambled to shore him up in the final days by airing a commercial exclusively about law enforcement in mainly rural markets.

In his bid for a fourth term, Cornyn was determined to prevent a close race like the states junior senator, Cruz, faced against ORourke in 2018. That vigilance reassured Texas Republicans throughout the cycle, even as they wearily watched poll after poll come out showing Trump struggling in Texas.

Still, Cornyn ran into some late turbulence. His Democratic opponent, MJ Hegar, saw a fundraising boom after she won her July primary runoff, and once early voting began, a coalition of national Democratic super PACs came together to dump eight figures into the race.

Cornyn ultimately won by a wider margin than Trump.

Cornyns campaign knew he faced at least two challenges in the general election: low name ID and running with a president who was struggling in Texas. That is why he went on TV relatively early Aug. 14, over three weeks before Hegar did with positive ads targeted at a constituency that had soured on Trump: suburban women. The soft-focus commercials also provided an implicit stylistic contrast with the bombastic Trump, showing Cornyn wearing a mask the value of which Trump has fluctuated on and presenting him as a low-key, tactful statesman.

Asked after his victory speech if he felt he had to build an independent brand given Trumps perceived Texas troubles, Cornyn said he was proud to work with this president and reiterated they have had disagreements but that he prefers to deal with them privately.

While Cornyn brought relief to the GOP at the top of the ticket, the states Republicans had always had more work cut out for them farther down the ballot.

Fresh off flipping two U.S. House seats here in 2018, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee stormed into Texas early in the cycle, establishing an office in Austin and vowing to make the state the linchpin to the partys strategy to expand its House majority. The DCCC ultimately assembled a target list of 10 GOP-held districts across the state.

As of Thursday, Democrats were within 5 points in only two of those races. The closest is in the 24th District, where Democrat Candace Valenzuela has not conceded to Republican Beth Van Duyne, who leads by over a point.

I was disappointed that we didnt win some seats in Texas, Ill be very honest about that, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters Friday.

In a statement, a DCCC spokesperson, Avery Jaffe, highlighted how Democrats successfully defended the two Texas seats they picked up in 2018 and put the GOP on defense this cycle, spreading Republicans paper-thin by forcing them to spend millions on historically conservative seats.

At the end of the day, the margins in most of the DCCC-targeted districts were closer to those of Trump in each district four years ago versus ORourke two years ago. That spoke to a broader bet that Democrats had made down-ballot that ORourkes margin in legislative districts was something of a baseline heading into Tuesday.

These were all Republican districts, and they all ended up behaving like Republican districts, said Bob Salera, a spokesperson for the National Republican Congressional Committee.

Then there was the state House fight, where Democrats needed a net gain of nine seats to capture the majority and are staring down a net gain of zero.

Like the congressional races, Democrats relied on faulty polling for their optimism. In mid-August, Hinojosa, the state party chair, said internal polling showed Democrats leading in 18 out of 20 battleground state House races.

As of Friday, the party was on track to pick up only one seat, that of Rep. Sarah Davis, R-West University Place, and lose a seat, that of freshman Rep. Gina Calanni, D-Katy. A third contest the reelection campaign of Rep. Angie Chen Button, R-Richardson remained too close to call.

Austin Chambers, the head of the Republican State Leadership Committee, told reporters Wednesday that the group was absolutely overjoyed with the Texas results given that both sides spent more on the chamber than any other in the country.

Like the DCCC, the Texas House Democratic Campaign Committee was left Thursday touting its defense victories the reelection of 11 out of 12 freshmen and emphasizing the expensive battle they forced Republicans to fight. That shows they know its a competitive chamber and will continue to be one, said Andrew Reagan, the HDCCs executive director.

Reagan was not the only Democrat seeking to keep the tough election in perspective Thursday. In an interview, Monica Alcantara, chair of the Bexar County Democratic Party, noted that there was a time when the party would not even consider putting up a candidate in a place like state House District 121, where Rep. Steve Allison, R-San Antonio, won by 7 on Tuesday.

Its just we need more work to do, Alcantara said, but I think were heading in the right direction.

Read the rest here:
Texas Republicans were ready to fight back in 2020 elections - The Texas Tribune

How did they do it? And why were so many independent analysts so wrong? I put those questions to Parker Poling, the executive director of the National Republican Congressional Committee, the party's House campaign arm.

Cillizza: Every political handicapper predicted losses for House Republicans on Tuesday. That didn't happen. Were you surprised? Why or why not?

Poling: We were surprised but not shocked. Basing your informed opinions on public polls or data that is selectively shared with you is a fundamentally flawed way to handicap, but we'll see what accountability measures exist for that.

Clearly the Democrat conference is starting their own autopsy to try to figure out where their data operation went wrong. Our polling and modeled data of absentee and early vote returns said we realistically had a path to pick up seats. At our final staff meeting before the election, our consensus was that we would net +4 seats. Our data showed that we were within striking distance in nearly every competitive race, with most of them trending in our direction. The President closed strong in our battleground districts and our candidates had their own unique appeal that won late deciding voters.

Cillizza: Did you see a single message or issue break through with voters in swing districts? Was there an attack that particularly hurt Democrats?

Poling: If you put all of the messages into a single broad category, it would be the extreme leftward lurch of the Democrat Party.

That was messaged in different ways in different districts. In New York state, bail reform was extremely unpopular and meshed well with defund the police, so a public safety angle was the most effective. In some districts, it was "Medicare for All" and the loss of private health insurance. In a number of suburban districts, we talked about pocketbook issues like higher taxes under Biden. And in other districts, we focused on the extremism of the "Green New Deal." And in south Florida especially, it was socialism more broadly. All of those messages fit within the rubric of extremism.

Cillizza: President Trump was a major anchor for House Republicans in the suburbs in the 2018 midterms. Why wasn't he this time?

Poling: I disagree with the premise of your question.

Many of President Trump's voters (8.5 million, to be more exact) stayed home in 2018. Those are by and large votes for House Republicans as well, which would have more than kept us in the majority. Yes, base Democrats in the midterms were motivated by animus toward the President to turn out, but Democrat candidates ran and won because they had no voting record that was tied to Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and the far left of their party. Their candidates got to portray themselves as whatever they wanted and that helped them win independent and persuadable voters.

When the President's supporters didn't match base Democrats turnout and they won independents, it was easy to see how they won in both Trump territory and districts Hillary Clinton carried in 2016. They showed up again in 2020 and independents broke to our candidates when these Democrats exposed their ties to the extreme of their party.

Cillizza: Polling was, again, way off -- particularly at the House district level. Why? And how do you fix it?

Poling: Not all polling was wrong. There are polls either the NRCC, our candidates or allied groups like the Congressional Leadership Fund released publicly in every one of our pickup districts that showed where we would win.

I think there ought to be a real reckoning in the media and among the prognosticators about why they believed Democrat partisan polling more than Republican partisan polling. In general, most of our competitive races were within the margin of error. Democrats kept saying they were beating some of our incumbents, and our data was not showing that.

Cillizza: Finish this sentence: "The biggest lesson for House Republicans out of the 2020 election was ________." Now, explain.

Poling: "The biggest lesson for House Republicans out of the 2020 election was this is a center-right country."

The American people, and particularly swing voters, want to elect representatives who reflect the values this country was founded on. They will reject radical propositions like defunding the police and destroying the American economy. They want to safely reopen the country. Those are the values reflected by House Republicans and our candidates.

Read more here:
How House Republicans shocked the political world - CNN

Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, said that President Trump was wrong to say the election was rigged, corrupt or stolen and that doing so damages the cause of freedom here and around the world, weakens the institutions that lie at the foundation of the Republic and recklessly inflames destructive and dangerous passions.

The Republican Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, a state that could send Mr. Biden to the White House but where Mr. Trump has baselessly claimed there had been fraud, said, The presidents allegations of large-scale fraud and theft of the election are just not substantiated.

And Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, another Republican, wrote that there was no defense for Mr. Trumps comments undermining our democratic process.

A growing number of Republicans were speaking out against Mr. Trumps false allegations that the election had been rigged against him, especially after he delivered a rambling jeremiad filled with conspiracy theories in the White House briefing room on Thursday.

I saw the presidents speech last night, Mr. Toomey said Friday morning. It was very hard to watch.

A few hours later, Mr. Romney, a semi-frequent Trump critic, wrote on Twitter that while the president was within his rights to request recounts and to call out irregularities where evidence exists, his statements were reckless.

Some Trump allies did rally around the president. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina appeared on Fox News on Thursday to defend Mr. Trumps claims of fraud. I dont trust Philadelphia, he said, referring to the city where Mr. Biden has gotten more than 80 percent of the vote. He offered no evidence for his statement.

Senator Ted Cruz of Texas also appeared on the network and accused Democrats of trying to steal the election. He also offered no evidence to back his assertion.

Many prominent Republican lawmakers remained silent, declining to cross Mr. Trump over the results of an election that was slipping away from the incumbent.

At a news conference on Thursday night in Atlanta with Donald Trump Jr., in which Republican supporters chanted stop the steal, Representative Doug Collins, a Georgia congressman who just lost a bid for Senate, suggested without evidence that something was awry in the election. Transparency only seems to be good when the Democrats like the transparency, and the media are willing to go along with it, he said.

And Tommy Tuberville, a senator-elect from Alabama and a former Auburn University football coach, echoed the president on Twitter.

The election results are out of control, Mr. Tuberville wrote. Its like the whistle has blown, the game is over, and the players have gone home, but the referees are suddenly adding touchdowns to the other teams side of the scoreboard.

Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the Republican leader, at first sidestepped questions on Wednesday about whether he agreed with Mr. Trump that election officials should halt their tabulations.

But by Thursday evening, he grew more vocal, writing in a tweet: Republicans will not be silenced. We demand transparency. We demand accuracy. And we demand that the legal votes be protected.

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More Republicans assail Trumps false claims of election fraud, while others defend them. - The New York Times

President Trump won this election, Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California and the top Republican leader in the House, falsely told Laura Ingraham on Fox Thursday night.

Far from over. Republicans will not back down from this battle," McCarthy declared via Twitter on Friday.

Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and a close Trump ally and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, defended and even echoed Trumps unsupported claims that Democrats and their allies had rigged the election against the president.

Philadelphia elections are crooked as a snake, Graham told Fox News personality Sean Hannity. Youre talking about a lot of dead people voting. Youre talking about in Nevada a lot of people voting who are not legal residents." Graham offered no evidence to support those claims.

Graham, who just won his own reelection victory, also told Hannity that everything should be on the table when the host suggested that GOP-controlled state legislatures in Pennsylvania and elsewhere might invalidate the election results over corruption concerns.

Other prominent GOP officials raised their voices to refute directly the steady drumbeat of misinformation coming from Trump, his children, and his campaign.

For example, Senator Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri, pointed to Trumps contradictory calls to stop counting ballots in states where hes ahead and keep counting in states where hes behind.

You cant stop the count in one state and decide you want the count to continue in another state, Blunt told reporters. That might be how youd like to see the system work, but thats not how the system works.

And Senator Pat Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, perhaps the most critical battleground in the presidential race and a target of many of Trumps unfounded claims of malfeasance, called the presidents Thursday night speech very disturbing" in an interview Friday with CBS News.

Theres simply no evidence anyone has shown me of any widespread corruption or fraud," said Toomey, who has announced he wont seek reelection in 2022. The presidents speech last night was very disturbing to me because he made very, very serious allegations without any evidence to support it.

But most Republicans appear to be hewing to their well-worn habit of tiptoeing around the controversy at hand, expressing any disagreement with the president obliquely for example, by not even mentioning Trump in their responses.

Heres how this must work in our great country: Every legal vote should be counted. Any illegally-submitted ballots must not. All sides must get to observe the process. And the courts are here to apply the laws & resolve disputes," tweeted Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has otherwise declined to publicly address Trumps baseless claims of electoral wrongdoing. Thats how Americans' votes decide the result.

States have the authority to determine the specific rules of elections. Every valid vote under a states law should be counted. Allegations of irregularities can be adjudicated by the courts. We must all respect the outcome of elections," Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, said in a statement released Friday morning.

The continued reluctance of many Republican officials to renounce Trump more directly may reflect their view that even if he loses, the president will remain a powerful force in the Republican Party.

Trump performed much better than the polls and many pundits had predicted, garnering the second-largest share of the popular vote in history, after Biden. And he continues to command the loyalty of tens of millions of voters across the country.

Congressional Republicans also defied expectations, picking up seats in the House and very likely holding on to control of the Senate, helped in many cases by the surge of Trump voters to the polls.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican who just won a House race in Georgia and who has expressed support for the conspiracy theory QAnon, went after one of her future GOP colleagues on Twitter Friday for daring to even raise the prospect that Trump might lose.

The time to STAND UP for @realDonaldTrump is RIGHT NOW! Republicans cant back down. This loser mindset is how the Democrats win," she wrote, replying to a tweet from Representative Dan Crenshaw, a Republican from Texas.

"President Trump has fought for us, we have to fight for him. We wont forget. Trust me, she vowed.

Among those willing to condemn Trumps comments, many of the harshest rebukes came from a handful of regular Trump critics, including Mitt Romney, the Republican partys 2012 presidential nominee.

Romney, now a senator from Utah, said Trump was within his rights to request recounts and call for investigations where evidence of irregularities exist.

But Trump "is wrong to say the election was rigged, corrupt and stolen, Romney said on Twitter. Trumps claim damages the cause of freedom here and around the world ... and recklessly inflames destructive and dangerous passions, he said.

The presidents comments that theres some national conspiracy around this arent supported by any facts, added Governor Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, a Republican who did not vote for Trump in either 2016 or 2020. And theyre damaging to democracy. They cheapen all of those of us who serve in public life and who ran, and who were either elected or defeated based on the will of the people.

A sitting president undermining our political process & questioning the legality of the voices of countless Americans without evidence is not only dangerous & wrong, it undermines the very foundation this nation was built upon, Representative Will Hurd, a Texas Republican set to retire in January, tweeted.

Some Republicans seemed to be recalibrating their reactions as Trumps claims drew more and more scrutiny.

Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska, initially tweeted out a neutral statement Thursday about ignoring overheated rhetoric."

On Friday his office shared a more direct response. Voter fraud is a poison to self-government, so these are major allegations. If the Presidents legal team has real evidence, they need to present it immediately to both the public and the courts," Sasse said. "In the meantime, all legal votes need to be counted according to relevant state laws. This is our American system and it works.

Even Graham, who on Thursday night said he had given $500,000 to Trumps legal efforts, tempered his stance somewhat Friday.

President Trumps team is going to have a chance to make a case regarding voting irregularities, Graham said in a video message The Hill posted. They deserve a chance to make that case. Im going to stand with President Trump. If a Democrat were doing this, itd be cheered on.

This story includes material from the Associated Press.

Victoria McGrane can be reached at victoria.mcgrane@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @vgmac. David Abel can be reached at david.abel@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @davabel.

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Republicans face their biggest loyalty test of all - The Boston Globe