So Michigan won’t participate in the Republican takeover of the Senate: Terri Lynn Land lost badly to Democrat Gary Peters, and the press called it seconds after the polls closed at 9:00 p.m. That’s no surprise, at least not to me. On paper, she looked good, as a two-term secretary of state. As an actual Senate candidate, she was a disaster. In 16 years of writing about politics and elections for National Review, she is the worst candidate I’ve covered. (I wrote about her campaign here.)

How bad was she? In recent days, she lost the endorsement of the Detroit News, whose editorial page routinely backs Republicans. In other words, she walked into a room of right-leaning editorialists — and performed so badly that they felt compelled to back her opponent. This takes a special kind of lousy.

The pundits are already saying that Republicans fielded a good group of Senate candidates in 2014. They may be right. But the GOP could have done better, at least in Michigan.