Republicans have been riding high all summer, expressing a great deal of confidence in their ability to sweep back into power after the midterms this fall. But the last several weeks have given them a few reasons to scale back that optimism — and not just because of the legislative hot streak Joe Biden and the Democrats have enjoyed as of late.
Speaking at an event in Kentucky on Thursday, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell cast doubt on the prospect of Republicans retaking the upper chamber, suggesting that many of his party’s nominees may be too weak to win. “I think there’s probably a greater likelihood the House flips than the Senate. Senate races are just different,” he told attendees at a Northern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce luncheon. “Candidate quality has a lot to do with the outcome.”
He didn’t mention any of those candidates directly, but he almost certainly could have been talking about any of Donald Trump’s handpicked contenders, who earned the former president’s support seemingly for one of two reasons: He knows them from television, or they’re loyalists who have organized their campaigns almost entirely around his 2020 election lies. There’s a lot of crossover there, obviously, but the first camp includes Mehmet Oz, a former TV doctor who apparently believes raw asparagus belongs in a crudité, and Herschel Walker, the former football great whose own campaign staff reportedly regards him as a “pathological liar.” Dr. Oz, who may or may not even live full-time in the state he wants to represent in the Senate, is losing ground in Pennsylvania to John Fetterman, thanks in large part to the Democrat’s savvy media strategy and the clumsiness of Oz’s campaign. Walker isn’t far behind incumbent Raphael Warnock in the polls. Still, the former athlete’s campaign has been held back by scrutiny over his past, which includes disturbing allegations of domestic violence as well as incessant lying about his business career and the number of children he has. (Walker, for his part, has claimed he never denied having four kids and has rejected allegations of domestic violence.) Walker’s campaign is also plagued by his seeming inability to say anything coherent on the issues (e.g., his remarks about “China’s bad air” and his comments on how there should be a “department that can look at young men, that’s looking at women, that’s looking at their social media” to prevent mass shootings).
Then there’s the second camp of MAGA candidates, which includes the likes of Blake Masters, the Peter Thiel protégé who literally has the backing of some of the Internet’s most well-known white nationalists. (Masters has attempted to distance himself from this community.) One of several extremists on the ballot in Arizona, where election deniers Kari Lake and Mark Finchem are respectively running for governor and secretary of state, Masters is trailing Democrat Mark Kelly by eight points, according to a Fox News poll released this week.
None of this to say to say that these bumbling extremists can’t win; if a country is capable of electing Trump president, Georgia is certainly capable of electing a guy like Walker. But McConnell’s apparent sense that this batch of bozos might dash GOP dreams of a Senate majority may be well-founded, even if midterms tend to favor the party that doesn’t control the White House. “The way I look at it, if we held the election today, there’s a damn good chance we’d pick up a few seats,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said recently.
And it’s not just the Senate.
In Maryland, outgoing Republican Governor Larry Hogan has repeatedly trashed Dan Cox, the GOP nominee who could replace him. “He’s not, in my opinion, mentally stable,” Hogan said in a radio interview, describing Cox as a “QAnon whack job” who “wanted to hang my friend, Mike Pence” — a reference to the far-right Republican’s involvement in the Capitol insurrection. (Cox organized buses to DC on January 6 and called the former vice president a “traitor” but says he only attended the rally that preceded the riot.) Meanwhile, in Illinois, some Republican state leaders have been twisting themselves into pretzels in their effort to avoid expressing direct support for Darren Bailey, their party’s gubernatorial nominee who can’t seem to stop calling Chicago a “hell hole.” Illinois House Minority Leader Jim Durkin, who was hounded by reporters after failing to mention Bailey even once in a recent speech, has seemed reluctant to say the nominee’s name explicitly: “I support the ticket,” he told reporters this week. (He later issued a statement clarifying that he backs the “entire Republican slate: from Shannon Teresi for comptroller, to Darren Bailey for governor.”) Dan Brady, who is running as a Republican for Illinois secretary of state, was similarly cagey about the guy his party nominated to challenge J.B. Pritzker.
