The GOP’s parade of horribles
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| In Rhode Island, our top terrible Republican is Floridian Vic Mellor. Proud MAGA, part of the January 6 storming of the US Capitol building and a REGISTERED AGENT of the Government of Cuba. Seriously. He's campaigning against US Rep. Seth Magaziner. |
Utterly lacking in charisma, Paxton is a flaccid campaigner
with a stunning history
of corruption whose greatest professional achievement may be staying out of
jail. With just weeks to go before the election, a series of embarrassing stories
has dogged
him, the latest of which is the emergence
of a video of him partying in Dubai with his mistress and a couple of
fugitives from American justice.
Paxton only defeated incumbent Sen. John Cornyn in the GOP
primary because of President Trump’s support — yet Trump can barely speak his
name without saying that Paxton is inarticulate, ugly, and a terrible dresser.
The answer to the obvious question — how could someone as
unappealing as Paxton get as far in politics as he has? — lies in the internal
dynamics of today’s Republican Party.
But the GOP’s problem goes far beyond Paxton. They are
confronting a political emergency in this year’s midterms, and doing it with an
absolutely stunning collection of lemons, lunkheads, and losers.
From a risky election to a potential catastrophe
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| Rhode Islanders protest against Mellor. Photo by Steve Ahlquist |
Needing a net gain of four seats to take control, Democrats
have to defend two seats in states Donald Trump won in 2024 (Michigan and
Georgia), plus another five seats Kamala Harris won by single digits.
Meanwhile, Republicans have to defend only one seat in a state Harris won
(Maine), and one in a state Trump won by double digits.
The opposition party always does well in midterms, but in
order to take the Senate, Democrats will have to nearly run the table, winning
every close race — an extremely tall order.
Yet today, it appears more likely than not that they will do
just that.
FiftyPlusOne
puts the odds of a Democratic takeover at 72 percent, while the Cook Political
Report rates six Republican-held seats as Toss-Ups and one (North Carolina)
as Likely Democratic; just one Democratic-held seat (Michigan) is in the
Toss-Up category.
The most important reason Republicans are in this position
is, of course, Donald Trump. But in race after race, Republicans would be in a
far better position if their candidates weren’t so poor.
Paxton is the most obvious, but it’s happening all over the country. A brief tour:
- North
Carolina: With Trump’s endorsement in hand, former RNC chair Michael
Whatley cleared the Senate primary field. But he has struggled to gain any
traction against former Gov. Roy Cooper, and Republicans have now
essentially given
up on him, pulling their money out of a state they haven’t lost in a
presidential race since 2008 to send it to candidates who might have a
chance.
- Kansas:
Facing a serious challenge for the first time in his career, Sen. Roger
Marshall is proving to be a hapless campaigner. Though Trump won the state
by 16 points two years ago, Republicans have had to rush
in with money to shore up Marshall, who has been unable to deal with
stories about him relentlessly
pursuing patients with overdue bills — 700 of whom he sued — when he
was a practicing doctor.
- Georgia:
When the cycle started, Sen. Jon Ossoff was supposed to be the most
vulnerable Democrat running. But Republican Mike Collins has proven to be
such a weak candidate that Republicans now consider the race a lost cause.
- Ohio:
The Republican Senate nominee in Ohio is Jon Husted, who, believe it or
not, is the incumbent. Haven’t heard of him? Neither has almost anyone in
Ohio, though now that Trump went on a long riff about Husted’s rockin’ bod
(“I
looked at his ass”), perhaps more voters will notice him.
- South
Carolina: When Trump appointed Darline Graham to fill the seat of her
late brother Lindsey, everyone assumed she’d glide to victory in this
deep-red state. Instead, she has proven to be an embarrassment as a
candidate. Asked a question about Taiwan in a primary debate, she
said “I’m not that informed on national security, but I do support the
military,” adding that “national security is not my thing.” Points for
candor, I guess, but polls
have shown her with a lead narrow enough that the party has had to divert
funds to help her.
- Michigan:
Former congressman Mike Rogers has run an uninspired campaign, unable to
separate himself from the president and leveling “Jerk Store”-quality
attacks on Abdul El-Sayed. While the much more dynamic El-Sayed has no
doubt been hurt by anti-Muslim bigotry, keeping the race close, Rogers has
also been harmed by the fact that he moved
to Florida after retiring from the House. Speaking of which:
- Florida:
Sen. Ashley Moody — who was appointed to the seat when Marco Rubio joined
the Trump administration — has been running a campaign that verges on
invisibility, to the point that members of her party are getting
increasingly concerned. Politico reporter Kimberly Leonard, who is based
in Florida, recently
said that Republicans in the state privately call it “a basement
campaign similar to Joe Biden’s” in 2020. “There’s a lot of frustration by
[Republican] elected officials throughout Florida that Senator Moody
hasn’t been more active on the campaign trail.”
That’s just the Senate candidates. Up and down the ballot,
the GOP has nominated crackpots and nitwits, none more colorful than Victor
Marx, their nominee for governor in Colorado.
Marx refuses
to say how many people he has killed (though he says his stepfather forced
him to commit his first murder at age 7), hunts demons, claims he can call in
US airstrikes, and boasts of being a seventh-degree black belt in a martial art
he invented. Normal stuff!
A longstanding problem gets worse
Both parties find themselves weighed down by problematic
candidates from time to time; “candidate quality” is a perennial challenge, and
something difficult to measure. Intelligence, eloquence, energy, a lack of
skeletons in the closet, natural magnetism — all combine to separate a good
candidate from a bad one. Some just have it, and some don’t.
Democrats have had their share of untalented politicians,
even some who managed to get their party’s presidential nomination. But they
tend to be of a particular type: smart, earnest wonks with a deep understanding
of government and policy, but with limited charisma. Think Michael Dukakis, Al
Gore, or John Kerry.
The profile of a bad Republican candidate, on the other
hand, is very different.
While the Democratic base has grown more liberal but also more
highly educated in the last couple of decades, the Republican base has
become more ideologically extreme but also more committed to a particular style
of politics: loud, angry, violent in its rhetoric, encased in a deranged media
bubble, and indulgent of almost any idea, no matter how ludicrous. Candidates
who embody that style then wind up winning primary campaigns, and many of them
have ugly ideas or are just outright buffoons — or both.
This has been true for some time, but the problem has grown
more acute in recent years — particularly after the Tea Party movement rose up
in the wake of Barack Obama’s election in 2008, and even more so eight years
later when Trump took over the party.
In modern Republican primaries, candidates compete to see
who can be the most extreme, not just ideologically but temperamentally as
well. Since Republicans have contempt for government, their primaries don’t
favor experienced candidates. Since the conservative movement is awash in
conspiracy theories, their primaries don’t weed out conspiracy theorists. And
since right-wing media is so central to Republican politics, those who appeal
to it are more likely to succeed — and those tend to be people who are
bombastic, dishonest, and crude.
In other words, GOP candidates compete to see who is the
most like Trump, even before his Eye of Sauron alights on their race. When it
does, he puts his thumb on the scale for whoever has demonstrated the most
abject loyalty to him — whether that person will make a good general election
candidate or not. That’s what he did with Ken Paxton, and what he’s done with
many other candidates.
We saw this four years ago, when Democrats managed a
surprisingly good midterm performance not only because of backlash to the
Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, but
because Trump’s influence produced some epically bad candidates. Herschel
Walker, Blake Masters, and Mehmet Oz all had Trump’s support, and all lost
winnable Senate races. Nevertheless, those were seats in swing states; this
year, bad Republican candidates could lose in heavily Republican states like
Texas and Kansas.
This is not a problem from which the GOP will free itself
once Trump leaves office in 2029. Even if he withdraws quietly to Mar-a-Lago
and stops promoting candidates loyal to him (which is highly unlikely), he has
given birth to a generation of Republican politicians who want to be like him,
or worse. And he has trained Republican voters to expect just that from their
candidates.
Right now it’s hard to imagine the GOP raising up candidates
with crossover appeal like Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush. And it’s going to
stay that way for some time to come.
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