Shortly after it sank in for GOP Minority Leader Mitch McConnell that his midterm Senate majority dreams had died, he offered a blunt assessment.
“Now, hopefully, in the next cycle, we’ll have quality candidates everywhere and a better outcome,” McConnell said in mid-December, with an eye on 2024.
True, the GOP slate sucked. Also true, McConnell had a hand in cementing that slate of losers. While Donald Trump either handpicked or eagerly endorsed most of the cycle's biggest Senate losers—i.e., Adam Laxalt (NV), Blake Masters (AZ), Mehmet Oz (PA), Herschel Walker (GA)—McConnell also failed to recruit any reasonable candidates. His whiff on convincing New Hampshire's popular GOP governor Chris Sununu to run, for instance, completely ceded the race to incumbent Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan.
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McConnell also enthusiastically endorsed Walker as "the only one" who could unite the party and win the seat.
But hey, there's always next cycle, as McConnell noted, and it is honestly a brutal one for Democrats, who will be defending seats in red states (Montana, Ohio, and West Virginia) along with battleground states (Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin).
Still, McConnell is keenly aware that Republicans don't just have a Trump problem; they've got a MAGA problem.
“It’s going to be very important for leadership to try and get electable candidates the nomination,” Doug Heye, GOP strategist and former spokesman for the Republican National Committee, told The Washington Post. “The challenge is how much of that can you really direct from Washington? That’s a hard thing to do.”
Indeed. It's an especially tall order for McConnell, who simultaneously engenders deep hatred among MAGA types while also failing to impress sane-ish Republicans who actually want to get things done. Civiqs tracking puts McConnell's overall favorability rating at just 6%, with just 12% of GOP voters favoring him. That is just jaw-dropping, and essentially signals that no one likes McConnell—except perhaps the tiny percentage of Americans who have made bank off his tax cuts for the uber-wealthy. Pure speculation, of course, but not implausible.
Still, McConnell and his colleagues are vowing to take a more aggressive approach in GOP primaries this cycle.
“Republicans are sick of losing, and we’re going to do whatever it takes to win,” Senate campaign chief Steve Daines of Montana told Fox News last month. “We want to make sure we have candidates that can win general elections.”
McConnell's allies are also hoping against hope that other GOP groups might have the wherewithal to stand up to Trump and his endorsed given his abysmal track record. Indeed, McConnell's allies feel so confident about it that someone offered to be quoted anonymously.
“The view was Trump’s endorsement was so decisive you had to accept the impact of it,” the GOP operative said. “His impact is not the same as it once was.”
At this point, everything is still on the table. But one thing is clear, a bunch of MAGA Republicans are already expressing interest in running, with some potentially heart-wrenching outcomes for Republicans.
For instance, Rep. Matt Rosendale of Montana, a rightwinger who refused to vote for Kevin McCarthy as speaker, is eyeing a run against Democratic incumbent Sen. Jon Tester in Big Sky Country. Rosendale challenged Tester in 2018 and lost.
One way or the other, 2024 promises to be a wild ride. And the more MAGA dominant the field, the better for Democrats. Here's hoping McConnell demonstrates exactly as much leadership prowess as he did in the midterms.
Let’s get the band back together to deal one more blow to McConnell in 2024!
The Republican Party seems locked in a death spiral of unpopular anti-American rights policies. They seem to believe that the most important things to America are taking away people’s rights to choose what they do with their bodies and Hunter Biden’s junk. Kerry and Markos were right in their hypothesis about the midterms and they have predictions for the upcoming year and 2024.
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