Hyper-online red-pill Republicans are causing headaches for Mitch McConnell

Mitch McConnell may be retiring, but he’s hammering home the “candidate quality” argument one more time. Meanwhile, Republican candidates in races across the country are taking a turn for the weird, sharing AI-generated pictures and referring to the entire Democratic Party as “terrorist sympathizers”.

The Senate Republican leader sat down with Politico at the beginning of May and identified four races — Montana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Maryland — key to his party’s victory in the battle for control of the upper chamber in November. But his broader message was one of caution for Republicans in races up and down the ballot: the need for the party to select candidates who can stand up to scrutiny from the media and their Democratic opponents.

“It’s important to not get too excited, because it’s noteworthy that in the last cycle, not a single incumbent lost. So what’s the message? Candidate quality,” McConnell told the news outlet.

McConnell here is raising concerns he’s leveled before, particularly after his party’s drubbing in the 2022 midterms. That year, a wave of fringe candidates who surged to victory in Republican primaries around the country lost their respective general elections — including Tudor Dixon in Michigan, Kari Lake in Arizona, and Herschel Walker in Georgia, to name a few. Just one Republican eked out a significant victory, almost entirely off the back of Trump’s endorsement: JD Vance in Ohio.

And if Democrats were happy with their achieved goal of holding on to the Senate in 2022 thanks to “candidate quality”, they certainly have reasons to feel hopeful after this week.

First, there’s Bernie Moreno in Ohio. The second-time candidate dropped out of the Senate primary last time around to clear the field for Vance, his one-time rival, after Trump made his endorsement. Despite Republicans winning Ohio in the last three presidential election cycles, Moreno has trailed the incumbent Democratic senator, Sherrod Brown, in polling for months and has not seen a significant bump after being dragged across the finish line by Trump on the eve of the primary.

Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump, left, listens as Senate candidate Bernie Moreno speaks at a campaign rally March 16, 2024, in Vandalia, Ohio (AP)

Moreno seemingly plans to run a scorched-earth campaign against Brown (is there any other way to run a Trump-endorsed campaign?) In a press release on Wednesday, he referred to his opponent as “the most liberal member of the US Senate” (a charge Bernie Sanders might take issue with) and derided the entire Democratic Party as “the party of terrorist sympathizers”. He used the same language to refer to college students protesting the Israeli siege of Gaza on campuses across the country.

To a Twitter-pilled Republican operative, this may seem like an aggressive and effective line of attack. And it is the kind of attack that resonates in deep-red Trump country — but not necessarily the reddish-purple suburbs of Cleveland, Columbus and college towns across the Buckeye State. There, many suburban voters have a more nuanced view of the situation, not least because their own kids may be among the protesters.

Then there’s Nancy Mace in South Carolina. Facing another tough primary after she joined a group of far-right Republican rebels to oust Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House, Mace’s campaign staff is fully embracing the GOP’s weirder instincts. Just check out this uncanny-valley AI-drawn image of Donald Trump kissing a Black baby (while she looks on) that her campaign put on Twitter on Thursday:

“This is so creepy,” wrote one commenter.

It obviously remains to be seen if this embrace of unorthodox campaigning and red-pilled hyper-onlineism will hurt the party in November. But it certainly seems like McConnell, who is in his last year as leader of the Republican caucus, worries that this will be yet another cycle wherein his party comes up short.

McConnell’s top rival, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, has indicated his own confidence that Republicans were setting themselves up for failure again.

“When you’ve never run for office before and you run high up for the Senate — and particularly if you’ve been a business leader where everyone says yes to you — you’re a crappy candidate,” the Democratic leader told Politico. “It will get worse for them.”

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