In its best form, the case for Mitch McConnell’s culpability for GOP losses is exceedingly weak.
Surprise, surprise, Chris Buskirk, publisher and editor of American Greatness, believes that the biggest takeaway from these past few election cycles should be that it’s time for Mitch McConnell to take his leave as head of the Republican caucus in the Senate. Naturally.
For Buskirk, the proof is in the pudding. Let’s start back in 2016. Buskirk writes that:
It is McConnell who has been the architect of Republican defeat in the Senate. Heading into the 2016 election, there were 54 Republican senators. After the election there were 52.
He stays intentionally vague for a reason. Republicans faced a tough map in 2016, playing defense in the competitive states of Florida, Georgia, Arizona, Missouri, Illinois, Alaska, Iowa, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and North Carolina with incumbents while also trying to hold on to an open seat in Indiana. Only two Democratic seats were up for grabs, in Colorado and Nevada. In the end, Republicans only lost in deep-blue Illinois and light-blue New Hampshire, where incumbent governor Maggie Hassan triumphed over Kelly Ayotte. The Republicans’ overperformance in Senate races is all the more impressive when you consider that it was a presidential election year in which the GOP nominee served as a drag on the ticket, losing the popular vote by two points. Buskirk also neglects to mention that Republicans improbably lost a special election in Alabama a year later when McConnell’s chosen candidate lost a primary to Donald Trump copycat Roy Moore.
That brings us to 2018, when Republicans faced a far more favorable map. Their pick-up opportunities included vulnerable incumbents in Florida, Indiana, Missouri, North Dakota, Montana, and, to a lesser extent, Michigan and Wisconsin. They capitalized in the first four of those. Unfortunately, a backlash to President Trump, whose approval/disapproval rating sat at -14 just before Election Day per Gallup, limited Republican gains. Republican incumbents were trying to hold on in Nevada and Texas, as well as seats that had opened up in Tennessee and Arizona as a result of the scorn that the president had heaped upon their holders. Democrats took Nevada and Arizona. For this latter loss, Buskirk blames McConnell:
McConnell backed the disastrous candidacy of Martha McSally for an open seat in Arizona. It was McConnell who picked her and crowded out other viable candidates. That year McSally lost by 2.4 percentage points to Kyrsten Sinema while, at the same time, Republican Doug Ducey cruised to a nearly 15-point win as Arizona’s governor.
Voters didn’t reject Republicans as such; they rejected McSally.
Granted, McSally proved to be a less-than-stellar candidate, but at the time she was a rising star in the party and the first female combat pilot in U.S. history. It’s also unclear who exactly these other viable candidates that Buskirk hints at were. The only other somewhat competitive candidates in the primary were Kelli Ward — who is right now devising new and exciting ways to lose elections for the GOP in Arizona — and Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who needed to be pardoned by Trump prior to the primary and lost a GOP primary for his old position in Maricopa County in 2020. The bigger problem for Republicans in Arizona wasn’t candidate quality at the Senate level, but suburban losses. That’s why the bleeding was not limited to McSally; Democrats also took five of the state’s nine congressional districts and a majority of the combined vote between them.
Buskirk also blames McConnell for McSally’s being selected to fill the seat left vacant by the late John McCain. She went on to lose again in 2020. There can be little doubt that he deserves some share of the blame for this miscalculation. But it’s no accident that Buskirk says nothing of Trump’s own loss in Arizona, which made him the first Republican to do so since Bob Dole in 1996, when Ross Perot garnered more than three times the number of votes that would have been necessary for Dole to close the gap between himself and Bill Clinton. Before that, Harry Truman was the last Democrat to claim victory there. That was in 1948. Clearly, the GOP’s sudden struggles in the GOP in the Grand Canyon State are not limited to Martha McSally.
Back to Buskirk’s allegations:
[McConnell] finished the job in 2020 with a loss in Colorado, an admittedly tough race on unfavorable terrain. But it was the run-off elections in Georgia that sealed the deal. There, McConnell selected Kelly Loeffler over elected Republicans like U.S. Representative Doug Collins for appointment to the seat held by Johnny Isakson, who resigned for health reasons. Why? McConnell never explained his rationale publicly but it wouldn’t be a stretch to think that he thought he was being clever and wagered that female candidates would get female votes that a male candidate wouldn’t get. Plus, Loeffler is very wealthy and pledged to put at least $20 million of her own money into the campaign.
How did McConnell’s 2D chess work out? Loeffler came in second in the three-way November race and came in second again in the run-off. Meaning she lost. And it looks like incumbent David Perdue will also lose and Democrats will have control of the Senate.
Yet again, the headwinds faced by Republicans this most recent cycle were primarily a consequence of their standard-bearer’s unpopularity. The Colorado seat held by Cory Gardner was, unfortunately, completely out of reach. President Trump has accelerated the state’s leftward drift; Consider how Mitt Romney lost it by a little over five points in 2012 while Trump lost it by over 13 in 2020. Gardner never stood a chance in that kind of environment, and his circumstances had nothing to do with strategic errors by Mitch McConnell. As for Georgia, God knows that I’m no fan of Kelly Loeffler, and I probably would have preferred to see Doug Collins as the pick as well. But is it Buskirk’s contention that the GOP lost not only the Loeffler seat, but David Perdue’s as well, due to her inadequacies? Would it not have been a surmountable problem in 2012, when Mitt Romney easily bested Barack Obama in the Peach State by nearly eight points? What about in 2014, when Perdue walked across the finish line with a similar margin of victory? The president had already turned Georgia purple and lost the state for himself with his behavior over the preceding four years; how does Buskirk think two months of deranged conspiracy theories in the run-up to January’s special election influenced things?
So Buskirk’s allegations of electoral failure are at best exaggerated and at worst intentionally misleading. His last problem with McConnell is his ideological orientation and governance:
At 78 years old, his [McConnell’s] policy priorities and his political instincts belong to another time. Republicans have a lot of work to do if they want to earn back the right to govern and if given that opportunity to use the power they are given to make life better for Americans.
When it suited him, McConnell was able to summon plenty of time and energy to pass tax cuts and bailouts for big corporations—which, incidentally, overwhelmingly support Democrats and their woke-agenda—but he could never seem to get around to passing legislation that would benefit the middle class. He was good at getting Trump’s judicial nominees confirmed, though with court-packing on Biden’s agenda it’s not clear how much that will matter. But doing that didn’t win any elections.
The idea that the tax-reform bill supported by President Trump only benefitted corporations is a Democratic talking point, and a false one at that. Most Americans across all income ranges received a tax cut, and measures such as doubling the child tax credit were aimed at aiding middle-class Americans in particular. Moreover, the Senate majority leader is not an a despot; he cannot simply enact whatever legislation he likes. His job is to get favorable legislation that he can through — legislation that can pass the House of Representatives and will be signed by the president. It seems odd that Buskirk blames McConnell alone for not delivering on Buskirk’s nebulous, unnamed priorities. Especially since it is President Trump who sabotaged the GOP’s effort to pass an immigration bill back in 2018.
On the judiciary, it is difficult to imagine a greater understatement of McConnell’s achievement. In 2016, he made a shrewd gamble by not so much as considering putting Merrick Garland on the Supreme Court in an election year. Then, he galvanized his caucus to confirm both Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett in extremely politically charged moments just before two elections in 2018 and 2020. And in the meantime, he kept district and appeals-court nominees on a conveyer belt running through the upper chamber. Finally, if Buskirk honestly believes that the Biden administration will be packing the courts after he came out against it on the campaign trail (after a shameful and prolonged period of hemming and hawing over the matter) and with a Senate split down the middle at 50–50, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell him.
If the GOP is to remain competitive, it must reverse the suburban losses of the past four years while holding on to some of the valuable gains that Republicans made with working-class whites, Latinos, and African Americans during the Trump era. That requires introspection on what parts of the party platform were working prior to 2016, and which needed revision. That also requires an honest inquiry into why the GOP went from unified control of the federal government to losing both houses of Congress as well as the White House. In its best form, the case for Mitch McConnell’s culpability for that is exceedingly weak. In the form of Buskirk’s column, it’s just loose straw blowing in the wind.