Good morning and Happy Friday to you all — Jim Geraghty will be back on Monday, but I’m in the Jolt seat until then. On the menu today: A rebuke of the unmerry band of moaners attempting to blame Republicans’ disappointing midterm performance on Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell.
The Myth of ‘Minority Mitch’
On Monday, Republican Arizona Senate hopeful Blake Masters was feeling powerful. Although he was still behind incumbent Democrat Mark Kelly in the polls, he had closed the gap in recent days. Moreover, Republicans appeared to be poised for a big day, and Kari Lake, the state’s gubernatorial nominee, was ahead of her Democratic opponent, Katie Hobbs. The wave and Lake, he seemed to think, might carry him to victory.
So confident was Masters on Election Day Eve, he found the time to tell the Wall Street Journal all about how he would how he would use his new office in Washington to remake the Senate GOP.
“I certainly think we need new leadership,” said Masters when asked about McConnell, before going on to declare that McConnell “will not own me, McConnell doesn’t love me. And clearly, he had a chance to help. He didn’t do it.”
“He doesn’t want me in there, but he’s about to be stuck with me,” continued Masters.
It wasn’t the first time that Masters, who secured former president Donald Trump’s endorsement during the Republican primary, had expressed such sentiments. Four days earlier, he promised the Daily Mail that he’d be a “thorn” in McConnell’s side. A few months ago, he was insisting that he was “a much better candidate than Mitch McConnell gives me credit for” (he was trailing Kelly by more than ten points at the time) while publicly imploring McConnell to invest money in his race. A couple of months before that, Masters said McConnell was “not good” at “legislating” and expressed his preference that McConnell be replaced as leader.
But if McConnell is supplanted in the coming days — although that doesn’t seem especially likely — Blake Masters probably will play no role in such a coup; early on Friday morning, Cook Political Report’s Dave Wasserman projected that Masters had been defeated by Kelly, though votes are still being counted, and major news outlets have yet to call the race.
And this, you see, is all McConnell’s fault, according to Matt Gaetz and other like-minded pundits.
It’s apparently McConnell’s fault that Trump endorsed an unattractive general-election candidate in the Arizona primary. It’s McConnell’s fault that Masters made himself unattractive by embracing the lie that Trump won the 2020 election in order to secure the former president’s endorsement. It’s McConnell’s fault that Trump also endorsed J. D. Vance in Ohio (again, in no small part because he embraced the stolen-election lie), forcing McConnell’s super PAC to spend $32 million defending a seat in a state Trump won by eight. It’s McConnell’s fault that Trump was loath to spend any significant amount of the money he’s raised on the candidates he endorsed. It’s McConnell’s fault that Peter Thiel, Masters’s mentor and benefactor during his primary contest, declined to spend money on his general-election campaign until it was too late. It’s McConnell’s fault that Masters was unable to raise money from small-dollar donors himself. And it’s Mitch McConnell’s fault that Blake Masters is so unappealing as a candidate that he is currently running over 60,000 votes behind Lake, over 150,000 votes behind the Republican nominee for state treasurer, and almost 50,000 votes behind the Republican nominee for state attorney general.
Could McConnell have spent more money in Arizona? Absolutely. It is true that the Senate Leadership Fund, a McConnell-affiliated super PAC, decided not to expend its resources on Masters, though a sister PAC did spend around $13 million on Masters.
Circumstances around the country (that’s a euphemism for the nomination of subpar candidates in Arizona, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and Georgia) forced McConnell to make tough decisions, and it’s more than fair to question the decisions he made, including investing in Lisa Murkowski, who voted against confirming Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, and Joe O’Dea, who didn’t come anywhere close to winning in Colorado.
McConnell, even if he can be critiqued on strategic grounds, cannot in any reasonable way be expected to take the fall for the nomination of lackluster candidates across the country pushed by Donald Trump and Peter Thiel. Neither Trump nor Thiel showed a willingness to spend big on Masters in the general election; the former because he is hoarding money for his 2024 primary campaign against Ron DeSantis, and the latter because he apparently suffered from buyer’s remorse.
Moreover, the charge that McConnell was punishing Masters for his critiques of the longtime Republican leader — leveled by, among others, the Federalist‘s Tristan Justice — makes little sense. J. D. Vance also previously suggested that McConnell should be replaced, musing that “McConnell has clearly shown he’s a little, sometimes a little out of touch with where the base is,” and that it was “time we move beyond the very old leadership class that’s dominated the Republican Party for a long time.” Yet McConnell spent big to ensure that the GOP did not suffer an embarrassing upset defeat in Ohio.
Notably, commentators such as Justice are quick to criticize McConnell for not spending the money that McConnell raised the way that Justice would have spent it if he’d raised it, and are also quick to make excuses for Trump when the former president trashes the GOP’s candidates less than a month before Election Day. It’s almost like he reasons his way backward from what he wishes were true.
If Republicans are to improve upon their performance in 2022, they’ll need to first identify what the root of their problem is, and I’d submit that, his own mistakes aside, McConnell provided an accurate diagnosis in August: “Senate races are just different — they’re statewide, candidate quality has a lot to do with the outcome.”
ADDENDUM: Another day, another Dominic Pino article to recommend. Be sure to read his case for impeaching Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona in the latest issue of the magazine.