There are legitimate criticisms, but most of the case against him for Republicans' midterm disappointment is malicious and ill-conceived.
Election defeats naturally create circular firing squads, but the last few days have seen a more directed effort to put Minority Leader Mitch McConnell against a wall and shoot him at dawn.
The MAGA forces in the party, eager to deflect blame from Donald Trump for the failure to take the Senate, are pointing fingers at McConnell. Trump himself wrote on his Truth Social network, “It’s Mitch McConnell’s fault.” Meanwhile, there is agitation in the caucus to delay this week’s scheduled leadership vote in the hopes that some viable alternative to McConnell will emerge.
There are legitimate criticisms of McConnell, who retains the support of the lion’s share of his caucus, but most of the case against him is malicious and ill-conceived.
His critics complain about his spending choices in the election. The context here is a historic fundraising effort that, all told, poured roughly $360 million into the midterms. Even at that level of spending, choices have to be made. The main McConnell group, the Senate Leadership Fund (SLF), didn’t pony up for Blake Masters in Arizona and pulled out of New Hampshire, where it looked, briefly, as if Don Bolduc had a chance against Democrat incumbent Maggie Hassan.
These decisions are certainly defensible. The polling that had Bolduc close was wrong, and the SLF was correct to believe its own numbers that showed him further behind. He ended up losing by 9 points. If nearly $60 million of spending in Pennsylvania by the SLF and associated groups didn’t get Mehmet Oz over the top, no amount of resources was rescuing Bolduc — who was more associated with “stop the steal” and ran a lackluster campaign.
Masters was also a flawed candidate and is projected to lose. SLF tried to forge a deal with Masters sponsor Peter Thiel to spend on his campaign in the general election, but it fell through. Regardless, Thiel easily could have written a $15 million check for pro-Masters ads, and Trump could have lent him his email list or cut a check. And if Masters had truly been an inspiring figure, he could have raised more money on his own. None of those things happened, but Masters, eager to tell a MAGA audience what it wants to hear, blames only McConnell. It remains unlikely that Masters, who at this writing trails by five points, would have won with better funding for the same campaign.
The SLF and its allies had no compunction funding Trumpy candidates that they believed could win. Exhibit A is populist J. D. Vance, who was showered with $30 million to help get him over the top in Ohio. Indeed, the SLF did more to spend on MAGA candidates than Trump did. The former president is a prodigious fundraiser but spent a pittance on his own candidates and used Potemkin fundraising appeals to gull his supporters into thinking they were giving to, say, Blake Masters when most of the donations went to Trump’s operation. Yet the same people currently angry at McConnell have little to say about Trump’s failure to put his own money where his mouth was.
Another count against McConnell is that he spent $6 million on moderate Lisa Murkowski in Alaska, who is trying to fend off a challenge from another, more conservative Republican. We aren’t fans of Murkowski and would have preferred it if that money were spent elsewhere, but it is longstanding practice for congressional leadership to support its incumbents, and the $6 million wasn’t much money in the scheme of things.
Still another knock against McConnell is that he said after the primary season that candidate quality matters. This was a true statement, but it was a lapse into punditry and an implied criticism of the party’s choices at the outset of a campaign. It didn’t mention any candidate by name and made no difference in the outcome of the election, but this is a case where the famously discreet McConnell should have exercised a little more discretion.
Finally, McConnell vigorously opposed coming up with a party agenda prior to the election. This was indeed a mistake. It would have helped the GOP case against Biden on inflation, for instance, if it had consensus anti-inflationary items it could have promised to pass in the majority. (Rick Scott, unfortunately, tried to fill the agenda vacuum with a poorly thought out and inadequately vetted list of policies that provided easy targets for Biden and the Democrats.)
All this said, even by the harshest reasonable evaluation, McConnell’s midterm performance isn’t in the same universe as Donald Trump’s. The former president chose poor candidates based on their fealty to him and his fevered and destructive 2020 delusions, spent hardly anything, made himself the center of attention to the extent he could, and conducted himself with his characteristic selfishness and lack of judgment. For him to turn around and blame McConnell requires chutzpah even by his shameless standards.
There are also criticisms of how McConnell has handled his Senate responsibilities. There is no doubt that he wasn’t always as tactically sure-footed as usual in the battles about Biden’s spending over the last year, but he was very concerned about keeping Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema from potentially joining any move against the Senate filibuster. Democrats did not get the colossal spending that Joe Biden proposed, but they did end up getting some significant elements of his agenda passed. Still, McConnell is clearly the canniest Republican Senate leader in memory — tough-minded and pragmatic and almost always able to hold his troops together.
He isn’t a charismatic or inspirational figure, but that’s not his job. Anyone looking for those qualities in someone in his position knows nothing about the Senate, whose institutional culture always shapes its leaders. Senate leaders need to deeply understand the rules and nature of their institution and command support across their caucuses. There’s a reason that they are never bomb-throwers or merely representatives of factions.
Mitch McConnell, who won’t be the Senate leader forever, isn’t flawless. But Republicans could do worse, and if they were somehow to dump him in a stupid and chaotic coup, would.