The Problem

Mitch McConnell's famous lamentation about "candidate quality” describes in two words the Republican failures of the past 20 years. Mitch would know. In 2022 his committees spent at least $80 million on TV celebrities, fighter pilots, retired generals, cocksure businessmen and championship athletes who didn’t quite work out as candidates.

Nothing new here. Since 2010, the GOP has squandered opportunities in at least 20 winnable US Senate races by allowing the nomination of candidates clearly incapable of winning a general election. The GOP House fared no better. In 2022 the Republicans gained, by most estimates, at least 13 seats through reapportionment in southern and western states. And won only seven. In the election cycles of 2018 and 2020, 120 races were rated slightly- to moderately-Democrat. The Republicans won four.

These are the types of races where Republicans routinely prevailed during the Reagan years. In 1988 Republicans held a 19-14 state Senate majority in Ohio, where the Democrats controlled redistricting. Three of five senate seats in Cuyahoga County (Cleveland!) were Republican.

So what happened? The Republicans got fat and lazy.

The 1990 census and subsequent reapportionment led to more favorable district maps in Republican-leaning states. At the same time there was a political sea change (that arguably began in 1966 with Nixon’s “southern strategy”) in which conservative southern Democrats switched en masse to the GOP, and the local officeholders followed suit. Then there was the Voting Rights Act, which forced states to create majority-black congressional districts, which of course had the effect of concentrating the Democrat vote and making the surrounding districts more GOP-friendly. This set the table for the 1994 Gingrich revolution, which wasn’t really a revolution but merely a beneficiary of these historic events.

No one understood that it might have been just dumb luck. Eventually Republicans forgot how to campaign because the need disappeared. Districts were safe. Money flowed because they were in the majority. And then, predictably, a counterproductive system of competing consultants, party regulars, staffers, single-issue “patriots for profit”, hangers-on, pollsters and "strategists" became the face of the modern Republican Party.

Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress and the various state legislatures increasingly relied upon the pooled fund-raising of their caucus committees and in doing so forgot how to raise money in their home counties and districts. Robocalling and social media supplanted telephones and precinct canvassing. (We’m reminded of the famously tech-savvy Republican congressman who was one of the first Twitter (now X) adopters – and lost his seat because his famously tech-savvy staff failed to get enough signatures to qualify for the ballot. This strikes us as a suitable metaphor of Republican failure.)

And along the way Republican infrastructure in the metropolitan areas was ignored. Because it wasn't needed. The downstate margin was enough to compensate. Until it wasn't.

And like the Roman Empire at its peak, the Republicans quarreled. First in 1999 emerged the Club for Growth, pledging to vanquish the RINOs (Republicans in Name Only). Then came the Tea Party with its demands to Stop the Spending. And then the MAGA crowd. In too many cases these groups elevated weak candidates who failed the matchup against clever Democrat opposition. Maybe these groups missed the memo: The idea is to win in November, not just in May.

Poor candidates. Short-sighted single-issue groups. Clueless party leadership. Sophomoric operatives. Big-city Democrat wastelands. A domineering consultant class. Flaccid campaigns. Is it any wonder why Republicans have lost so many competitive races? (A simple background check could have averted the expensive travesty of the Herschel Walker campaign.)

To see for yourself, visit a few Congressional candidates' websites and you'll notice about half of those sites lack a phone number. Think about it. A political campaign is at its core a recruiting business (for donors, helpers and voters) yet they’re leaving potential recruits with no place to call. Oh sure, there’s usually a data-collection page with a spot to leave a cell number and email address. Which is to say: don’t call us. We’ll call you.

Is there a way to fix this system? Not as long as Republican donors are willing to keep feeding it millions. Which reminds me of the newspaper cartoon of the guy tossing bills at a flat tire. The caption reads: “A liberal throwing money at the problem.” To fix the ailing GOP, one must first accept that money is neither the problem nor the solution.