Some thoughts on how much responsibility Republican primary voters bear for picking terrible candidates.
Michael and Charlie disagree on how much responsibility Republican primary voters bear for picking terrible candidates who evince too many of the worst and least-popular forms of Trumpism. Unsurprisingly, I lean more in Charlie’s direction here, but allow me to add a few additional thoughts. We should certainly all agree that the party’s leadership, if it expects the voters to make good choices, has an obligation to offer them to the voters, so that voters aren’t stuck with either (1) a single bad super-Trumpy candidate running against four non-insane opponents, or (2) a choice between a bad candidate who is too Trumpy and a milquetoast Lisa Murkowski type (the latter, I think, being Michael’s chief complaint). In a number of the Senate primaries where Trump’s influence was decisive, the voters were nowhere near making a choice in a divided field, so that when Trump made an endorsement, a decisive sliver of people who trusted him followed along, and somebody won with a third of the vote. Offer the voters better, clearer choices, and that doesn’t happen. By contrast, in Georgia, the same electorate that rejected Trump’s candidates for governor, attorney general, secretary of state, and insurance commissioner was not really offered a meaningful alternative to Herschel Walker.
Party leadership is also responsible for making the rules in the first place: whether to hold open or closed primaries or a convention, whether to have runoffs, etc. The idea of nominations reflecting the choice of the people is comparatively recent in the sweep of American history; it was once simply assumed that parties picked candidates, and then the voters had their say. Movement conservatives have tended to prefer more popular engagement in primaries because it helps loosen the reins of a party establishment that is often hostile to our agenda, but the downside is what we got in 2022.
But so long as candidates are chosen by popular primaries, yes, the primary voters absolutely bear a share of responsibility. And it seems to me that this is much more obviously the case this time around. For the most part, Republican primary voters did not pick candidates who took positions on political issues that were out of step with the general electorate, but reflected the preferences of the primary electorate; they chose bad people: weirdos, liars, conspiracy theorists, dilettantes, and lunatics. As judges of horseflesh, they failed. And that failure was partly a matter of being too trusting of intermediaries (particularly Trump) who recommended whom they should vote for, and partly a matter of being too unskeptical of why some primary candidates were lavishly supported by Democrats. That is not a matter of the voters simply exercising their preference for a particular platform. It is a failure of the very kind of common-sense judgment that is a central argument for democracy, juries, and other forms of ordinary-citizen participation in how we are governed.