The midterms are going to be a shitshow for the right wing if Trump moves forward with his plan to create a MAGA-Patriot-Nationalist-White-Identity Party, whatever he wants to call it. This is a very rough analysis, but based on a benchmark of 25% to 30% of 2020 Republican voters being open to switching to a Trump-led third party, we can start to picture what 2022 is going to look like:
There are 34 seats up in 2022, 20 Republican and 14 Dem. My estimate – based off the 2010 Midterm turnout wherever possible, 2016 otherwise – is that if a third-party MAGA candidate runs in each, Republicans would lose every seat except Lisa Murkowski’s in Alaska, with 8 flipping to the Dems and 10 going to the MAGA Party. The only true tossup here is Kentucky, as Rand Paul would have still edged out his Dem opponent by about 4,000 votes if a quarter of his vote total in 2010 had gone to a Conservative third party candidate.
There are a lot of other factors to consider here – the candidates themselves, if the seat is open, which GOP incumbents would switch to the MAGA party and bet that their past voters would still stick with them, just to name a few – but hopefully this is a good starting point for looking at the impact of a right wing schism in the Senate. The bottom line is it’s really not good news for the GOP. I’ll leave it to someone smarter to look at how things would turn out in the House, because even though the easy answer of a similar outcome is probably the correct one too, it’s a lot more complicated due to the unknowns of redistricting.