The GOP Establishment and Mitch McConnell blamed Donald Trump for losses during the midterms – but the facts tell a different story.
McConnell told reporters that the reason for the lack of a red wave in 2022 was “candidate quality.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Tuesday blamed the power former President Trump exerted in GOP primaries for the “candidate quality” issues his party struggled with in key races.
Speaking to reporters a week after Republicans lost the Senate runoff in Georgia, which expanded the Senate Democratic majority to 51 seats, McConnell said his party was hampered by weak candidates in several battleground states.
“I never said there was a red wave. I said we had a bunch of close races,” McConnell told reporters, citing the caution flags he raised in August when some Republicans were predicting big GOP gains in Congress.
“We ended up having a candidate quality [issue],” McConnell said. “Look at Arizona, look at New Hampshire and a challenging situation in Georgia as well.”
What McConnell didn’t say was how poorly his candidates performed.
All but one of his candidates lost by a larger margin than Trump-backed candidates.
And the McConnell recruits lost by larger margins in all but one case. https://t.co/Oq5fPARsAC
— Rich Baris “The People’s Pundit” (@Peoples_Pundit) December 21, 2022
In the elections since then, plenty of Establishment candidates lost Senate seats, including two each in Nevada, Arizona, and Georgia in 2020 and one in New Hampshire. The retort to this usually is that Trump being around caused those losses, which is strange because, in many cases, Trump did better than those candidates when he was on the ballot. Besides, if we go by who is in the White House or on top of the ticket, then George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney left the GOP worse off in the Senate than where Republicans are now.
Some of those Establishment losses (in Arizona and Georgia last time around) were candidates picked by Governor appointment, not by primary voters. In Colorado, delegates at a GOP convention squeezed candidates out of the primary ballot, leaving only two candidates, including Trump-bashing Joe O’Dea. He lost the general election by almost 15 points to Michael Bennett as opposed to a much smaller Republican loss in 2016 and a narrow 1.7-point loss in 2010 by Tea Party favorite Ken Buck who was of Bad Quality the establishment griped about back then.
McConnell’s favorability is also in the tank. According to Real Clear Politics, only 23.7% of Americans have a favorable view of McConnell.
RINOs are the problem in the GOP, not Trump.
