Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told NBC that Donald Trump’s place within the Republican Party has “diminished” and that he will now take it upon himself to be more aggressive come Senate primary season, promising that he will, “actively look for quality candidates” to push in the primaries.
Such an approach would backfire spectacularly.
As Dan McLaughlin has written at greater length, McConnell has his strengths and weaknesses — and picking candidates is not one of his strong suits.
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.
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 wants go-along-get-along types, the kind of spineless politicians who would vote for the monstrous $1.7 trillion omnibus or reckless $550 billion infrastructure package without raising a fuss.
The weaknesses of McConnell’s intervention were evident when he pushed Luther Strange as a replacement for Jeff Sessions in Alabama, allowing Roy Moore to win an anti-establishment campaign, and costing Republicans a Senate seat in one of the deepest red states in the country. He also infamously supported Charlie Crist in the race against Marco Rubio, and broadly opposed the Tea Party movement that delivered Republicans the majority in 2014.
If McConnell wanted more Trump-aligned populists to get nominated, the best thing he could do would be to promote their opponents.