With two new polls showing former President Donald Trump trailing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in hypothetical 2024 primary matchups, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is taking the gloves off, hoping to deliver a knockout punch to the former president’s dreams of the White House.
McConnell told reporters on Tuesday that Trump is to blame for the GOP’s underwhelming midterms performance, noting that “candidate quality” matters a lot in Senate elections, and that Trump endorsed a boatload of candidates who were weak and unappealing to voters.
Among those endorsements were Don Bolduc in New Hampshire, Blake Masters in Arizona, Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, and Herschel Walker in Georgia. The results were horrible, with Democrats not only not losing their majority in the Senate, but even gaining a seat.
“Looking back at ’22, some of you may recall, I never said there was a red wave,” McConnell said. “I said we had a bunch of close races and looking at each race separately, I wasn’t making that up. We had a bunch of close races. We ended up having a candidate quality [issue]. Anybody remember who mentioned that back in August? Look at Arizona, look at New Hampshire, and a challenging situation in Georgia as well.”
“We had an opportunity to re-learn – one more time – you have to have quality candidates to win competitive Senate races,” McConnell continued. “We went through this in 2010, 2012 – Christine O’Donnell, Sharon Angle, Todd Akin, Richard Mourdock – and unfortunately revisited that situation in 2022.”
“Our ability to control the primary outcome was quite limited in ’22 because of the support of the former president. Proved to be very decisive in these primaries.”
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6 Responses
Bad move. While having Trump on the ticket will prove fatal in 2024, having a ticket not supported by Trump will probably be fatal. Trump’s “base” (the MAGA faction, the ones the Democrats called a “basket of deplorables”) are critical for a Republican victory and won’t necessarily vote for a Republican other than Trump. Remember the Republicans lost three of the last four presidential elections, and the Bush managed to win only since the Democrats basically kicked the ball into their own goal in 2000 (by messing up voter education in Florida, and thru Ralph Nader running as a third party). The Republicans need to be very respectful of Trump, honor him as a source of wisdom and a senior statesman, and make sure he blesses the ticket, but isn’t on the ticket.
Old crow Mitch who can barely get two words out of his mouth hoping to deliver a knockout punch to Trump
Thanks for the good laugh!!!!
Is that what marble mouth tried to say
So easy for Mitch to blame losses on trump in swing states. Post covid, We will not win elections again if we don’t start mastering early mail in voting..!
akuperma: There’s no such thing as a republican who would vote for Trump who wouldn’t vote for the other options out there. But there are MANY people who would vote for one of the alternatives but would NOT vote Trump. The problem is that as far as Trump is concerned, if he’s not on the ticket, there’s no such thing as “Trump support.” They just need to make him irrelevant ASAP.
Trump got more votes this past election than any other Republican president. Know your facts. Know how many many ppl voted for Trump cuz he was a great president for this country.