Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell’s recent comments to NBC News that he will “actively look for quality candidates” for 2024 Senate races, as he did not do for the 2022 midterms, instead mostly deferring to Donald Trump in primary contests, have occasioned some distemper at National Review. Dan McLaughlin gives McConnell credit for his tactical acumen and for having correctly identified candidate quality as a key factor in Republicans’ Senate underperformance this year, yet nonetheless urges Mitch to stay out of 2024 primaries. “He is a poor judge of political talent: His picks were repeatedly rejected by primary voters during the Tea Party era, and he even talked Trump into backing electoral losers such as Luther Strange in Alabama,” Dan writes. Phil Klein concurs, taking the argument even further than Dan does. “McConnell is also not a good judge of candidate ‘quality,’ because he is motivated primarily by picking candidates who, were they to win, wouldn’t be much trouble in Washington,” he writes. Phil also cites the example of Strange, in addition to McConnell’s initially backing Charlie Crist over Marco Rubio in 2010.
McConnell is not perfect. He has made some mistakes in this area. Though the debacle of Alabama strikes me as sui generis and difficult to blame on any one person, it is safe to conclude now that Crist over Rubio, for example, was a poor choice. In 2022, though, the problem didn’t seem to be too much Mitch, but rather not enough. In the NBC story, McConnell says that he stayed out of every primary but two: Alabama and Missouri. Everywhere else, he believed that he simply lacked the wherewithal to push candidates who could prevail over those backed by Trump. Regardless of whether McConnell could have done more, the triumph of what Charlie Cooke has called “Tim Burton Republicans” over the much-loathed “Generic Republicans” is why Republicans are still impotently wailing in the Senate minority. In this cycle, as John McCormack has noted, voters in key states wanted a Republican Senate but declined to vote for the Republican candidates on offer. The problems with modern Republican primaries are bigger than Mitch McConnell.
It is instructive to consider what might be the ideal situation. That would be to achieve something like the synthesis of 2014 that arose out of merging the populist energy of the Tea Party years with the establishment/electability concerns to which they were often opposed. Populism isn’t always popular; “electable” candidates aren’t always elected. Together, however, they are electorally powerful. But 2014 didn’t happen by accident. Rubio–Crist was a welcome example of establishment failure. Recent cycles saw plenty of failures in the other direction. In 2010, Sharron Angle blew a chance to knock out Harry Reid in Nevada, and Christine O’Donnell blew a winnable Senate race in Delaware. In 2012, Richard Mourdock (Indiana) and Todd Akin (Missouri) became casualties in the “war on women.”
Republicans really ought to have had a majority by 2014; in that cycle, they acted like they wanted one. One step the National Republican Senatorial Committee took that year was to run a “candidate boot camp” in which office-seekers, among other things, “had to watch each other stumble, stammer, run from the cameras. They were drilled on policy, then had the cameras turned on them. They were briefed on common media mistakes, then had the camera turned on them. They were shown footage of Akin and Richard Mourdock making fools of themselves two years ago, then had the camera turned on them again.” To be clear: This is not a surefire approach.
Nor is it always a satisfactory one. Mike Castle, whom Christine O’Donnell defeated, might not have won in Delaware. And if he had, he would have undoubtedly frustrated Republicans. But would he have frustrated them more than Democrat Chris Coons has? Former South Carolina Republican senator Jim DeMint, who left the Senate to lead the Heritage Foundation and then left Heritage to serve as chairman of the Conservative Partnership Institute, once said, “I’d rather have 30 Marco Rubios in the Senate than 60 Arlen Specters.” Arlen Specter, the former Pennsylvania senator who switched parties from Republican to Democrat but lost to Republican Pat Toomey in 2010 anyway, was terrible; the Arlen Specters should be replaced wherever you can get away with it. But not every state or race has or can have a Marco Rubio. To pretend otherwise is a recipe for more of the sort of impotent minority wailing that DeMint’s logic, executed fully, would invite.
Nor should the results of the Republican primaries in the 2022 midterm cycle be seen as some sort of inviolable mandate. Forget even the fact that many of the candidates they produced lost in the general elections. It is incomplete to argue, as Michael Brendan Dougherty did earlier this month, that “whether a candidate can win a general election against a Democrat can’t be the only criterion for determining an ‘electable Republican.’ Whether he or she can win a Republican primary matters just as much.” In many of these primaries, the absence of a respectable alternative left the contest to an inferior, typically Trump-endorsed candidate by default. (Consider, as evidence, the retirements of such viable political figures as Rob Portman in Ohio and Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania, and the decisions of other viable Senate contenders — Doug Ducey in Arizona, Larry Hogan in Maryland, Chris Sununu in New Hampshire — not to run.) Without serious respectable competition, inferior candidates could motivate a sufficiently large plurality to prevail against a majority of a primary electorate that opposed them.
As Charlie responded to Michael, “most primary elections are internal polls of one faction within one jurisdiction.” It’s representative of nothing other than a moment of indecision and/or inaction that one faction saw fit to take advantage of. McConnell’s own words give evidence of how this happened in 2022. This was a collective political failure. As Charlie elaborates, “pointing out that primary voters have not been very good at this recently is not “getting democracy backwards” or demanding “that voters solve problems for politicians”; it’s demanding that, within the democratic process that is the primary, voters get better at solving problems for themselves.”
But that wasn’t true in every primary this cycle. Move outside of the Senate: In Georgia and Nebraska, Republican gubernatorial candidates prevailed against Trump-backed challengers. It was easier for Brian Kemp, a popular incumbent who is better at politics than you are. In Nebraska, though, ultimate victor Jim Pillen had to cultivate both the grassroots and the respectable elements of the state political establishment to secure his victory. But that wouldn’t have happened if he and others in the state hadn’t worked toward it as an end, as tautological as that may sound. Gubernatorial races and Senate races are different beasts, to be sure — the former by definition more state-based than the nationalized contests Senate races have become. But they offer lessons here regardless.
Among those lessons: that moving past Trump, increasing Republican electoral viability, and regaining lost political power are all valid, and connected, goals. Further: that these things will not happen automatically. Ergo: Someone must act on them. The ideal vehicle is a state Republican Party apparatus such as Georgia’s, with a competent, principled, and self-interested leader such as Brian Kemp. But Brian Kemps will not always be at the helm. So what do you do then?
Certainly “nothing” is the wrong answer. Both Dan and Phil urge Mitch to beg off because, if nothing else, his interventions would be counterproductive. “The visible backing of McConnell makes it easy to pillory perfectly good Republican candidates as tools of an ‘establishment’ that doesn’t actually run much these days,” Dan writes. Phil adds: “There is no greater gift that McConnell could give to an upstart populist Senate candidate than to hand-pick somebody of his own and allow that candidate to serve as an avatar for everything that people hate about Washington and national Republicans.” Maybe so. But that seems like a really stupid and self-destructive state of affairs, one that Democrats took cynical but successful advantage of in this midterm cycle by promoting the weakest Republican-primary candidates and then defeating them in general elections. This state of affairs is to a considerable extent responsible for the Republicans’ current minority status and for the impotent wailing about said status that serves many of its more irresponsible members just fine.
If McConnell is not the one to challenge this perverse dynamic, then who? It has to be someone. The alternative is not that nothing will happen if no one does; it’s that selfish, electorally destructive actors will continue to take advantage of primary idiosyncrasies to narrow-plurality their way to further irrelevance and loss. The attempt to game out what McConnell should do based on what the prospective reaction might be strikes me as the same sort of inactivity-inducing logic that would have, say, National Review decline to criticize Trump because doing so is “exactly what Trump wants.” It’s indicative of, and conducive to, the same paralysis in which “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity” — allowing the latter to prevail by default.
In the NBC interview, McConnell states that he believes Trump’s clout has been “diminished.” But further diminution won’t happen automatically. It has to be worked toward consciously, by those who seek it as an end. Whatever the issues with his plans, at least he’s doing something. If not Mitch, then who?