In an era of politics as turbulent as ours, and for a nonmajor-election year, it’s difficult to denote any big political winners for 2023. It is, however, possible to identify some big losers. The following is a far from exhaustive — and entirely subjective — ranking of politicians who had a really bad year, often after high expectations. They are in reverse order of loserdom.
6.
Glenn Youngkin: The establishment darling who’s running out of time.
Youngkin ends 2023 as he began it, as the red-party governor of blue-state Virginia. But as chief executive of the only state that bars consecutive gubernatorial terms, the power is already ebbing out of him as he ends his second year in office, and his street cred was further damaged when his bid for a state legislative trifecta in November instead turned into a loss of a legislative chamber to Democrats.
This was more than a local setback, moreover. Youngkin had become the darling of the national Republican Establishment donor class, imagined by some as a last-minute Hail Mary presidential candidate in 2024 who could save the GOP from Trump. And the national significance of Youngkin’s legislative loss was magnified by his claim that he had found a magic message on abortion rights that could neutralize Democratic strength on this issue. Pretty clearly, he didn’t.
5.
Eric Adams: The incumbent who’s becoming a turkey.
Hizzoner doesn’t rank higher because we really don’t know where the federal investigation of his campaign’s ties to foreign donors might lead. But New Yorkers seem to think he’s in big trouble: A recent Marist poll showed 72 percent of respondents indicating his campaign did something wrong in its dealings with Turkey, with fully a third going so far as to believe that Adams himself broke the law.
Speaking of polls, the mayor’s job-approval rating in a new Quinnipiac survey fell to an alarming 28 percent, and the large city budget cuts he recently announced aren’t going to make him more popular. While he’s been a figure of ridicule for his strange utterances throughout his term in office, he’s come a long way down just in the last few weeks. As recently as the end of October, progressive critics of Adams fretted they might not find a viable primary challenger to him when he’s up for reelection in 2025. Now the big problem is making sure another big loser, Governor Andrew Cuomo, has a lot of company on the Democratic ballot with Adams if he chooses to run. The incumbent is in big and apparently escalating trouble.
4.
George Santos: The liar who got expelled.
The recently expelled former congressman and indicted fraudster would also rank higher on this list if his political demise and legal peril hadn’t been obvious before the beginning of the year. As it is, he may have bottomed out, and could even achieve a bit of a comeback if he snags a plea deal that minimizes time in the slammer, and/or capitalizes on some of his recent commercial ventures.
In any event, he may never exceed the infamy he earned when the House Ethics Committee report that sealed his congressional doom came out in November, concluding Santos had “sought to fraudulently exploit every aspect of his House candidacy for his own personal financial profit.”
3.
Bob Menendez: The Senate’s indictment king.
The senior senator from New Jersey really should have found a reason to conclude his half-century career as an elected official at the end of last year, when he could have gone into the history books as a veteran of two decades in Congress who was just criminally indicted for corruption once (escaping the hoosegow in 2017 after a mistrial and then a decision by federal prosecutors not to try him again. After all, nobody’s perfect.
Instead, Menendez faced two fresh indictments in 2023, the first for accepting (along with his wife) hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from business figures, and the second for acting as an unregistered agent for the government of Egypt. The accumulated evidence of cupidity (investigators found huge piles of cash and even gold bars in the Menendez home) was too much for the national and New Jersey Democrats who had backed him for many years. While vowing not to resign amid growing demands that he do just that, Menendez drew two powerful primary challengers for his previously assumed renomination in 2024, and his job approval rating quickly dropped to 8 percent. He’s done politically for sure this time.
2.
Ron DeSantis: From Trump slayer to also-ran.
The governor of Florida could yet challenge for the spot of biggest loser in 2024 if he finishes third in the January 15 Iowa Caucuses and is forced to drop out of the presidential race right then and there. Even so, his descent into loserdom throughout 2023 was remarkable. In early January of 2023, he was near an all-time high of over 30 percent in the national GOP presidential polling averages, and holding Donald Trump to under 50 percent of the vote. He was within seven points of Trump in the first public poll of Iowa, and actually led the former president by 12 points in a January poll of New Hampshire by UNH. He was even in a strong second place in South Carolina. His campaign and super-PAC were flush with money, and the latter was in the process of building a king-hell get-out-the-vote operation in the early caucus and primary states. Just as importantly, it seemed like every element of elite Republican circles that wasn’t already in Trump’s camp was either supporting or encouraging the Florida governor, whose boffo reelection performance the previous November still shone brightly in recent memories.
Since then, DeSantis has lost nearly two-thirds of his national support, isn’t leading Trump anywhere, is in fourth place (and in single digits) in New Hampshire, and is a weak third place in South Carolina. His campaign is all but out of money, and the wheels have fallen off his super-PAC, which has been shedding donors and top staff steadily. His strategy of out-flanking Trump on the right has signally failed to slow down the front-runner, and his much-claimed electability advantage over Trump has vanished. Elite support (at least outside Iowa) has mostly defected to Nikki Haley. I strongly suspect he wishes now he had given 2024 a pass; he’s in danger of becoming a political has-been at the age of 45.
1.
Kevin McCarthy: From Speaker to speechless.
Despite a lot of competition, there’s little doubt the biggest political loser of 2023 was former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
At this point in 2022, McCarthy was the GOP’s Speaker-designee for the 118th Congress, having flipped the chamber narrowly in November. He began 2023 with a historic struggle to claim the gavel he thought he had earned months earlier, taking 15 ballots and humiliating concessions to the obstructionists of the House Freedom Caucus. After less than 10 turbulent months on the job, beset by constant rebellions from his own ranks and a dismal inability to get any actual legislation to the president’s desk. After narrowly avoiding a government shutdown that would have been entirely blamed on House Republicans, McCarthy was ejected from the speakership, and his fall was triggered by a pip-squeak of a personal rival in Matt Gaetz.
After vainly waiting around like Napoleon on Elba, expecting a call to return to power, McCarthy suffered the additional pain of watching back-bench right-winger Mike Johnson eventually become his successor. Worse yet, House Republicans let Johnson do exactly what McCarthy did (cutting a deal to keep the government open with Democratic votes) and kept his gavel (at least for now), making it clearer than ever to the Californian that his rejection was personal as well as ideological. He subsequently resigned from Congress altogether. But even now his agony isn’t apparently over: His designated successor in Congress, former staffer Vince Fong, has now been struck from the ballot in the special election McCarthy’s resignation required on grounds that he had already filed for a state legislative race.
You have to wonder if McCarthy’s next step is to appear in used-car ads in Bakersfield, asking prospective customers: “Remember me?”
What a loser.
.
Dishonorable Mentions: Gavin Newsom and Tim Scott
Gavin Newsom’s name may surprise some readers, including those who (a) think the world of the California governor or (b) don’t think the world of him but have seen him on so many Future President of the United States lists that they figure he’s a permanent resident of the political stratosphere. I regard him as a borderline 2023 loser mostly because of the ground he has lost his year. His job approval rating fell underwater in one major poll; his state budget went from a nice surplus to a deep deficit; and he devolved from being a top Plan B presidential fallback candidate to debating an even bigger loser, Ron DeSantis. For dessert, he spent a good part of the year getting out of a trap he laid for himself with an incautious promise to appoint a Black woman to a U.S. Senate vacancy. Maybe he’s still a winner overall, but 2023 has not helped his reputation.
As for Tim Scott, he stands in for all the GOP candidates about whom you have wondered: “Why is this person running for president?” He never showed anything other than potential, never established a clear identity as a candidate, and repeatedly blew opportunities to break out of the pack in debates.
Scott isn’t squarely on the losers’ list since he might be getting something out of endorsing a rival and could even become Trump’s running mate. But whatever 2024 brings, 2023 has not been kind to him.
