Why Do Republicans Keep Nominating Losers?

Sam Brown (R-NV)

Looking into 2024, one of the juicier plums for Republicans on the map is Nevada.  The slight shift red during the Trump years of Latino voters combined with the lower-than-usual college graduation rates (currently a key indicator of success for Democrats, Nevada has the lowest college graduation rate of any Biden state), its electorate (demographically) is trending red.  Which is why the Republican problems there for the Senate are so interesting.  A year after Adam Laxalt lost what most assumed a few weeks before the election was a sure thing victory in the state, Republicans cannot get a decent candidate to run against Sen. Jacky Rosen.  By most measures, Rosen, who has a less-established presence in politics than the state's senior senator (Catherine Cortez Masto), should be more vulnerable than Cortez Masto-she doesn't have nearly as many statewide victories as she does, and hasn't had as much national press.  But Republicans are panicked that former State Rep. Jim Marchant will win the nomination.  Marchant has already lost races for Congress and Secretary of State in the past four years, and his strong ties to the MAGA movement makes it likely that he'll come in very strong without an obvious option to replace him.  Sam Brown, a disabled Afghan War veteran is their preferred choice, but the Republicans' insistence on running Brown underscores something else-he's not a really good candidate either.

In 2023, we have now made it through almost eight years of the Republican Party essentially being the Trump Party, and that extends beyond the obvious implications for the former president and his political beliefs.  It also means that the party is frequently getting stuck with candidates in the mold of Donald Trump.  We talked about this yesterday, but Trump is not a traditional candidate, and he's not a candidate you normally find success with in major races (not just for president, but also statewide races like Governor or Senator).  Traditionally, you build a successful statewide campaign around previous experience in politics as a constitutional officer or congressman or state legislator.  Part of this is that you have an established brand with voters, but part of this is to gain experience campaigning.  You can prove on a smaller stage that you have what it takes to win on a larger stage.

But in the past few years, Republicans have abandoned that principle.  If you look at the closest races for the Senate in 2022 where the GOP didn't run an incumbent, they put up a failed gubernatorial candidate, an incoherent Heisman Trophy winner, a venture capitalist with horrible people skills, a disgraced talk show host, & a bestselling author with horrible fundraising instincts.  The only candidate in 2022 in a close race that the Republicans picked a traditional mold for was Rep. Ted Budd (who, it should be noted, won, as did the author though not without significant heavy-lifting from the NRSC).  The rest of these candidates lost, and they lost races that the Republican Party could've won with more moderate, traditional candidates.

This is a symptom almost exclusively of the Republican Party, it's worth noting.  Democrats in 2022 for their closest open seat races ran two lieutenant governors, a sitting congressman, and a former state Supreme Court justice.  They didn't all win (in fact only one did), but given the national environment, they all overperformed, and more importantly-they all were someone that the national party didn't have to bail out with fundraising cash or cover for bad campaign performances.  And this isn't an isolated event.  The Republican Party has struggled with candidate quality since the Tea Party movement emerged in 2010, and it's just getting worse, while the Democrats have not bet on an obvious loser in a major race in that time (granted, they did end up with some losers, but they were typically former governors or senators who went nowhere in red-trending states like Ted Strickland or Evan Bayh...they weren't unpolished candidates you knew would be duds to begin with).

2024 doesn't look like it's going to change that pattern.  You've got Nevada, where they're scared of Marchant and begging for Brown...but Brown lost a primary in 2022 for the Senate, and is not a good candidate either.  He's never held political office, his views on abortion & guns are out-of-step with Nevadans, and he largely reads as a MAGA candidate with less L's on his resumé compared to Marchant.  And he's not the only loser they're clamoring for.  With fears that Doug Mastriano (who got clobbered in 2022's governor's race) might be the nominee in Pennsylvania, they're pining for Dave McCormick...who lost to Dr. Oz in 2022.  There's a decent chance that they're about to pick Matt Rosendale to run in Montana, someone we already know Jon Tester can beat because he did so in 2018.  And in Arizona, there's a strong probability that the Republican nominee is Kari Lake, who has become a joke since she lost the governor's race last year claiming the campaign was rigged.  All of these candidates read as losers, and while previous statewide losers can win elections (John Thune, Susan Collins, Mazie Hirono, & Jeanne Shaheen are all proof of that), successful second acts don't look like this much of a loser at the race outset when they start the campaign.  Republicans have spent three cycles throwing away winnable races on lousy candidates who win by pledging loyalty to Trump...and at this point it seems like their bench is so dry in purple states that even the establishment is favoring the B-team.