GOP McLeadership — McConnell, McCarthy, McDaniel — failed the party, not Trump. By Steven Mosher.
The anti-MAGA media … are braying as loudly as they can that it’s all Trump’s fault Republicans did not win more races. …
Most of the Senate and House Republican campaigns were directed by operatives whose primary allegiance was to the McLeadership: Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, and Ronna Romney McDaniel.
Why is Mitch McConnell head of Republicans in the Senate when he is so unpopular with Republican voters?
How this works is straightforward. If you want campaign cash from the House and Senate PACs, controlled by McCarthy and McConnell, respectively, then you have to take advice from them on how to run your campaign. In some cases, you will even be asked to cede day-to-day control of your campaign to operatives from Washington, D.C. It is understood that, if elected, you will vote for your benefactors to continue as party leaders.
All such machinations occur behind the scenes, of course.
Did you ever see McConnell on the campaign trail in the last election cycle? Of course not. He is deeply unpopular with the Republican base, who understand that he represents the Wall Street wing of the Republican Party, is disdainful of much of the Party’s base, and has proved unable or unwilling to check the excesses of the Biden administration over the past two years.
Republican senatorial candidates in battleground states were often outspent five- or 10-to-1 by their Democrat opponents this election cycle. The disparities are staggering:
- New Hampshire: Republican Don Bolduc $2m versus Democrat Hassan $36m
- Arizona: Republican Blake Masters $9m versus Democrat Kelly $73m
- Georgia: Republican Herschel Walker $32m versus Democrat Warnock $76m
- Nevada: Republican Paul Laxalt $12m versus Democrat Cortes $47m
But McConnell has not only failed to support Republican candidates in key Senate races, he has actively worked against them. The clearest evidence of betrayal comes from Alaska, where the local Republican Party in 2021 censured Senator Lisa Murkowski and instead endorsed Kelly Tsibaka as their candidate.
Instead of respecting the will of the voters in Alaska, McConnell is supporting his longtime ally. He has given $9 million to Murkowski’s campaign, a huge amount of money for a state with a population of only 733,000. Had even a portion of this money been given to other Republican candidates in tight races, the Senate might now be securely in Republican hands.
But it gets worse. In the closing months of the campaign, McConnell took money previously committed to the campaigns of Masters and Bolduc and sent some to his hand-picked Senate candidate in Colorado, Joe O’Dea. That is to say, he sacrificed two MAGA candidates in close races to a self-declared Anti-Trump Republican Establishment candidate who had no chance of winning. …
Three cornered race:
[The left] fears the Donald Trump-led MAGA movement, which has brought millions of blue-collar workers of all races across party lines into the voting booths in the last three elections.
This, and only this, is the reason that there is so much orchestrated hate being directed at Trump by both Democrats and establishment Republicans.
They see him, quite rightly, as the primary threat to their continued uni-party rule. They see us, on the other hand, as rubes and hicks who can once again be easily manipulated once Trump is out of the picture.
No wonder the Dems were confident, going into the midterms.
