Maybe they have even bigger problems
Philip Bump of the Washington Post has an interesting take on the failure of the Republicans to take the Senate in the midterms. It’s conventional wisdom, most recently pushed by Mitch McConnell, that it was all about those damned Trump endorsements and dizzy MAGA candidates. But what if that’s not all there was to it?
It is obviously true that candidates like Herschel Walker — he of the challenging Georgia situation — were not particularly strong on the stump. It is also true that there was a consistent pattern across Senate races in 2022: Incumbents won, and open seats in states that heavily preferred one candidate or the other in 2020 backed the Senate candidate from that party.
In the two swing-state contests without incumbents, Republicans won one and lost one. This pattern is hard to attribute strictly to candidate quality.
In Arizona, where Blake Masters lost by 5 points, and New Hampshire, where Don Bolduc lost by 9 points, the Republican candidates were taking on Democratic incumbents in states Joe Biden won in 2020. In every place where that combination was in play, the Republican challenger lost.
Remember, though, that New Hampshire also voted for Biden by more than 7 points in 2020. So Masters actually underperformed his party’s 2020 presidential outcome much worse than Bolduc did, since the shift in his race was 4.6 points more favorable to the Democrats than the 2020 presidential result, while the shift in Bolduc’s was 1.7 points.
Now compare Bolduc to Joe O’Dea, the Republican candidate who faced off against the Democratic candidate in Colorado. Over the summer, shortly before he was complaining about candidate quality, McConnell dubbed O’Dea the “perfect candidate” for the state. But O’Dea also lost — with his race shifting 1.1 points toward the Democrats relative to 2020.
In other words, O’Dea did about the same relative to the 2020 presidential results as Bolduc did. Despite his being “perfect” and Bolduc being an exemplar of the opposite.
There were 10 Senate races in states that backed Biden or Trump by less than 10 points. Four had Democratic incumbents who won, and four had Republican incumbents who won. In the other two races, in Pennsylvania and Ohio, the results in the Senate race ran to the left of the 2020 presidential results. But since Ohio is redder and the swing smaller, J.D. Vance won his election. Mehmet Oz, in Pennsylvania, lost.
Bump delves into some of the races in more detail and concludes that the CW just doesn’t explain everything:
At the end of the day, it’s understandable why McConnell would like to identify Trump-backed candidates as the party’s weak spot. It is certainly true that candidates like Walker didn’t do the party much good. But the party also had wins in places where they underperformed and losses where they overperformed. They had perfect candidates who did worse than Trump had in 2020.
The problem wasn’t only candidate quality.
He doesn’t offer an explanation but I think it’s pretty simple. The GOP brand is tarnished and where people aren’t completely turned off they are, at least, confused. It’s going to take more than getting rid of Trump to fix that.
It’s Happy Hollandaise time. If you’d like to throw something into the old Hullabaloo stocking it would be much appreciated —