In statewide off-year elections across the country on Tuesday night, Republicans saw significant losses while Democratic candidates exceeded expectations.

Both Gov. Ron DeSantis's (R-FL) and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley's campaigns quickly compared the 2023 elections to the similarly poor Republican performances in the 2022 midterm elections, after which former President Donald Trump was hit with much of the blame due to his endorsement of several primary candidates who won their primaries but lost in the general election.

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"In Florida, we have a culture of winning, leading, and delivering results. We showed that when we turned a swing state into a red state one year ago," DeSantis wrote in a post on Wednesday to X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

"Outside of a few states, Republicans have consistently underperformed over the past few election cycles," DeSantis noted. "Next November, with me as your nominee, we will defeat Joe Biden and END the culture of losing that has infected our party."

According to Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), who has issued his endorsement of DeSantis, "Tuesday night's election results [show] that America needs a strong leader and a bold agenda to believe in. Republicans need a standard-bearer who can look forward towards the future and who is 100% focused on delivering wins for the American people for the next eight years."

In a memo Wednesday morning, Haley's campaign similarly compared Tuesday's Republican failures to those of 2022. "The pattern continues one year later," her campaign wrote. Haley's memo called out Trump by name, calling the former president "a loser." But she also took a shot at Republican competitor DeSantis, laying out her better position against President Joe Biden in several swing states, according to recent New York Times/Siena College polling.

While many of the races Tuesday were local-level state legislatures and school boards, Trump did endorse Kentucky gubernatorial candidate Daniel Cameron, who defeated primary challenger Kelly Craft. Craft had received both DeSantis's support and the endorsement of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), but it still wasn't enough to overcome the Trump endorsement, which has been demonstrably powerful in Republican primary races.

"Trump delivered in large part the nomination to Cameron in the primary," Kentucky-based Republican strategist Scott Jennings said.

According to him, a Trump endorsement is "a two-edged sword." He explained, "It can help deliver you," but you have to accept that a group of voters may be turned off by the former president.

"Cameron was way down; Trump endorsement really made him surge," recalled Forward Party CEO Lindsey Williams Drath, who once worked on the Republican National Committee and under former Republican House Speaker John Boehner.

Jennings noted that "the least Trumpy guy on the ballot, Mike Adams, our secretary of state, stood up to Trump, stood up to the election deniers, [and] got the most votes." This, he said, shows "there's obviously a market for Republicans who are willing to move on here."

Trump was quick to defend himself as blame started being directed toward him. "Daniel Cameron lost because he couldn’t alleviate the stench of Mitch McConnell. I told him early that’s a big burden to overcome," the former president wrote on Truth Social.

"McConnell and Romney are Kryptonite for Republican Candidates," he claimed.

Trump also pointed to Gov. Tate Reeves's (R-MS) success in Mississippi's gubernatorial race, which he noted happened after his endorsement.

Jennings, however, argued that "There weren't any ads about Mitch McConnell in this race. There were only ads about Trump. Daniel Cameron is Trump's guy — not anyone else's."

"I can see why he'd want to deflect here, but that's not the way this race was defined," he continued.

Republican strategist Doug Heye suggested that attempts to pin GOP losses on Trump are overblown. "We've set up a construct in America where everything has to be viewed through the prism of either Donald Trump or Taylor Swift, and that's not reality," he said.

"A lot went into these races — abortion, local issues, incumbency, campaign/outside spending," he added.

Williams Drath agreed with this conclusion, particularly as it related to the Kentucky election. "Beshear hit him with an astounding ad featuring a young lady raped by her stepfather at age 12 and said that, under Cameron’s no exception policy, she would have been forced to keep her pregnancy," she explained, referring to a September Beshear ad that became a focal point of the gubernatorial race. "It was so powerful even Cameron said it caused him to re-think his no-exception policy."

Trump similarly blamed McConnell for Republican losses during the midterm elections in 2022, along with abortion.

Democratic candidates have also credited abortion with their significant off-year wins. The topic's importance was most obvious in Ohio, where the majority of voters chose to enshrine the right to an abortion into the state's constitution. Trump is tied it, given his nomination of three conservative Supreme Court justices who decided the ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization.

"He really is the author of and the finisher of the end of Roe v. Wade," said professor of political management at George Washington University, Matt Dallek, who argued Trump's tie to abortion is significant.

"I think when Trump says he's responsible for it, I think he's right," he said.

And his responsibility for the decision has proven to be a paradox, according to Dallek. For social conservatives, he said, overturning Roe is "his greatest achievement." But "it's an albatross, as well," since it has been such a motivating topic among Democratic and independent voters.

Jennings, though, didn't agree that Trump was all that tied abortion in voters' minds, particularly in Kentucky. "The issues were not terribly connected," he explained. Instead, he said, Kentucky's heartbeat abortion trigger law that took effect after the overturn of Roe and doesn't have exceptions for rape or incest was unpopular among voters.

Jennings noted that Beshear "successfully defined Cameron as being an extremist on this issue because he defended the law."

While Trump's association with abortion among voters is contested, strategists and political scientists appear to be mostly united in the belief that the former president is certainly owed some of the blame for Republican candidate losses.

"I think he bears a big chunk of the blame for the defeats," said Dallek, who also claimed Trump bore responsibility for the GOP's 2022 midterm losses. He further noted that many of these races were "otherwise winnable."

According to Jennings, "There's a cohort of voters all over the country who are deeply dissatisfied with Biden, deeply unhappy with his policies and the direction of the country." But regardless of this, he said, they are a group "who will keep voting Democrat until Donald Trump goes away."

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"They're very, very dissatisfied with the idea that Trump continues to have influence to the degree he does now," he added.

But, according to Williams Drath, the elections may not have been much of a referendum on Trump or Biden. "These were local and state elections, and the drag from both leading presidential contenders wasn’t really a factor," she said. "At the end of the day, voters were motivated yesterday by issues in their own backyards."