A gratifying response to the absolute disaster last Tuesday has been the fact that Republicans in general have started a good-faith debate about what the hell happened and what we should do next. Oh yeah, there are some schmucks in there gloating, and a few grifters are trying to leverage the disaster to resurrect their garbage Bush-era brand of uniparty decline, but they don’t count. Mike Pence, for example, weighed in, but he weighs nothing — the guy couldn’t be more of a lightweight, and the notion that anyone cares what Mike Pence says, whose name isn’t Mike Pence, is positively hilarious.
We’re going to be hashing this out for a while. One of the things to consider among dozens of factors is the total failure of the kind of “normal” Republican that is supposedly the common-sense, adult-in-the-room alternative to those wacky MAGA guys who allegedly blow easy layup elections. Yet, if you look at who blew easy layup elections, and some not-so-easy layup elections this time, the real surprises came from those staid and steady Republicans that don’t upset the women or the horses. I mean, look at Mike Rogers. Is there a more mellow Republican than Mike Rogers? The guy makes Mitt Romney look like GG Allin. Trigger Warning: Do not look up GG Allin.
For example, take Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS) – I’d add “Please,” but the voters have already taken her, as in “out like the trash.” Again, we’re talking about Mississippi here. We’re talking about a Republican losing in Mississippi. How do you lose in Mississippi? Well, you run somebody like Cindy Hyde-Smith. She’s the most generic Republican imaginable. But she’s also a Republican who didn’t care. Now that’s not my assessment. That’s the assessment of Mississippi's heavily Republican, super-red voters who rejected her in favor of a Democrat. Pundit Will Chamberlain pointed out an amazing ad by her opponent that took her comment about high beef prices, in which she suggested that unhappy voters choose a different protein, and suggested they choose a different senator instead. Yes. Absolutely. How can she be so tone-deaf?
Oh, right. That’s how these hacks roll.
Hyde-Smith is one of those Republicans you could never imagine seeing in the drive- through line at McDonald’s or the checkout line at Kroger. She gives the impression that dealing with normal people, the ones who would have to vote for her, is a painful duty to be endured only during election season and then eschewed completely thereafter. She looks like she’d be much more at home in the country club, safely ensconced in her white-bread and pinot noir nirvana without having to encounter the rabble. And you know what? The rabble gets it. In normal times, they’ll put up with it if she votes right. These aren’t normal times. And the Senate wasn’t voting at all on things that we wanted, so you had a perfect storm of what the consultants would tell you is a perfect candidate.
Perfectly clueless.
And then there’s Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) in Kansas. The only thing he’s known for is being the guy to break his state’s century-long Republican winning streak. Oh no, he’s known for something else — he worked with Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) on behalf of big corporations to screw around with credit card fees so that they would eliminate the credit card points program so many of us rely on. Yeah, he decided to work with a major Democrat — who loved to call us Nazis — to make rich donors richer and take away one of the few perks we can rely on. And here’s something even more tone-deaf, if it’s possible. The guy was a senator from Kansas. He had a house in DC, which is understandable because he must spend a lot of time there, but he barely spent any time in Kansas. He spent his time at his house in Florida; his home in Kansas was a P.O. box. Now I love Florida. It’s a great state. I understand why people would want to be there. I don’t understand why a Kansas senator would live there. What the hell was he thinking? He was thinking he didn’t have to work. He was thinking he didn’t have to cater to those wheat-raising rubes. And now he’s going to have plenty of time to spend at his Florida house. Congrats!
And then there’s Sen. Darline Graham (R-SC). Of course, what happened there shows the power of fate — if Sen. Lindsey Graham hadn’t died, he probably would’ve kept his seat, but not for sure. Nothing can be sure. But what you can be sure of is that when somebody wants to be a senator and doesn’t know anything about anything, that could be a problem, particularly in a wave year. I’m sure she’s a very nice lady. But she was clearly in over her head, and while in a normal cycle, voters will figure that the other Republicans will carry her; when it’s a wave year, all those bets are off, and you’re evaluated by your own individual characteristics. And her individual characteristics came up lacking. Now, I'm not an expert on South Carolina politics, so I can’t tell you who would’ve been a better candidate, but one who knew what Taiwan is would have an edge.
Of course, being normal and competent doesn’t protect you. Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) was arguably the most normal and competent candidate running anywhere. She’s more moderate than I prefer, but she loved her state, did a great job for it, and chaired the Appropriations Committee, which is no small thing when it comes to bringing federal money home. The year was bad enough that the family reunion Romeo beat her. But at least she had a shot in a deep blue state — candidate quality matters, but it’s not necessarily determinative.
And then there’s Texas. You have a few people insisting that Texans should have nominated Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) and that would’ve been an easy victory. Those people are delusional, and you should not listen to them. Cornyn was exactly the kind of problem child who lost in other states — an imperious do-nothing who looked more comfortable clinking glasses with his rich donors than mingling with the rabble. He was achingly inauthentic when he’d stick on a Stetson for his once-every-six-year campaign of pretending to care about Texas, and he spent a fortune just to lose to Ken Paxton in the primaries, tying himself to Donald Trump. Every one of those ads would have become a James Talarico ad. But let’s not let Ken Paxton off the hook. He shouldn’t have run.
Yeah, he was a MAGA stalwart and would’ve always voted right. Yeah, he’d been elected three times. But he had baggage, some of it unfair, some of it fair. Texas Republicans picked the flawed guy who wasn’t going to sell us out on guns and amnesty; here’s a thought. Maybe we should’ve picked one who wasn’t flawed. We wouldn’t have won for sure. But maybe we would’ve put up more of a fight and not lost by 12.
By 12 in Texas.
Let that bang around in your head for a while. In any case, the arteriosclerosis of the red state Republican parties is a whole other column. But it’s an issue we must face. For too long, we were told we were a red state, and therefore we didn’t have to work. That's enough to get you by in most elections, but not this one. Now we’re facing Democrat senators in Iowa, Ohio, Kansas, Mississippi, Alaska, and Texas. But in states where we had a real organization, where they did the work of registering voters and reaching out to them, we survived. Advantage Florida and Ron DeSantis.
The bottom line is that candidate quality does matter, but candidate quality isn’t necessarily what a lot of pundits will tell you. Regular Republicans who are good enough in a good year are not good enough in a bad year. They took their voters and their reelection for granted, and the Democrats took their seats. That was on us. We can’t blame the voters — we can’t do the Seymour Skinner “No, it’s the children who are wrong” meme. What we’ve got to do is do better. And we’ve got two years to do it.
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