Are Republicans Watching The Senate Slip Away?

Poor decisions and lousy candidates are threatening to upend the GOP’s plans for the Senate. Very sad.

How to lose the Senate: Elect Kari Lake! Image: Matt York/AP Photo

by Justin Rosario

There’s nothing I enjoy more than seeing Republicans shoot themselves in the foot. Or, in this case, the elbow. If you don’t already know where this is going, that will be a lot funnier in a minute, I promise.

Trump is starting to sag in the polls. You wouldn’t necessarily know that because the press has stopped blasting front-page headlines about who’s ahead every other day. To my absolute lack of surprise, the second Biden tied or passed Trump, the press apparently lost interest in the newsworthiness of polling.

It’s still too early to rely on polling (and polling has been really broken for several years) but you can look for trends and, right now, Trump is in trouble. A lot of trouble.

As for the House? That’s a lost cause for the GOP. Between their incompetence and extremism as well as losing several gerrymandered seats, it would take a miracle for them to hold onto their ever-shrinking majority. And that was before Democrats announced they were pointing a $186 million firehose at the House to wash away MAGA Mike Johnson’s Speakership.

But the Senate? The Senate was looking reasonably good as a flip for Republicans. With the Senate, they could block every single Biden judicial appointment. They could sit on their hands and do nothing productive. Hell, they could emulate the House and spend the next two years investigating made-up Biden crimes. Now that Mitch McConnell is stepping down as leader of the Senate GOP, his replacement is likely to be a MAGA nut. That means lots of chaos which is the lifeblood of the GOP.

That would require winning the Senate, though, and it looks like Republicans are watching the Senate slip away. Again.

Déjà vu all over again

In the past several years, Republicans have lost their shot at retaking the Senate because of deeply flawed candidates. Todd “Legitimate Rape” Akin. Christine “I’m not a witch” O’Donnell. Sharron “Second Amendment Remedies” Angle. Dr. Oz. Herschel Walker. These kooks and nitwits were picked by Republican primary voters because they were the meanest, loudest, angriest, or simply the most famous. They were terrible and cost Republicans control of the Senate more than once.

Did the GOP base learn its lesson? Not in the slightest. The deranged Kari Lake is on track to be the GOP’s candidate in Arizona. Arizona is quite purple and Republicans have just thrown away a potential pickup.

Montana was looking good. Tim Sheehy is a good-looking former Navy SEAL who says all the right MAGA things. Very macho. Loves God, guns, and girls and he hates libtards. He even took a bullet for his country, something he has bragged about repeatedly over the years. How manly!

But about that bullet wound…The Washington Post reports that Mr. Sheehy might have lied about how he got it:

It was one of several inconsistent accounts Sheehy has shared about being shot while deployed. And in October 2015, more than a year after he left active duty, he told a different story.

After a family visit to Montana’s Glacier National Park, he told a National Park Service ranger that he accidentally shot himself in the right arm that day when his Colt .45 revolver fell and discharged while he was loading his vehicle in the park, according to a record of the episode filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Montana.

The self-inflicted gunshot left a bullet lodged in Sheehy’s right forearm, according to the written description accompanying the federal citation that the ranger, a federal law enforcement officer, gave Sheehy for illegally discharging his weapon in a national park. The citation said the description was based on Sheehy’s telling of events.

So why did he lie? Because, according to Sheehy, he had fallen and injured himself, requiring a trip to the hospital. At the hospital, he told the staff he had a bullet in his arm which led to his conversation with the ranger. He was concerned this conversation would, in turn, trigger a military investigation as to how the bullet got there. 

The plot thickens. Also according to Sheehy, he was shot in Afghanistan in 2012 but he didn’t know if it was friendly fire or not so he never reported it. Thus, there is no record of the injury and he didn’t want to get his fellow soldiers in trouble. So he lied to the ranger about shooting himself in the park in 2015.

It’s all very convoluted and, for the record, Sheehy has switched between saying he was shot multiple times in Afghanistan and being shot just once. Maybe you can forget if you were shot ten or eleven times. But the difference between “one” and “more than-one?” Not unless the bullet is lodged in your brain and you now have trouble remembering the names of all of your children. Say, how is Donald Trump doing these days?

Sheehy was already facing a bit of an uphill climb running against an incumbent who remains relatively popular despite being a Democrat in a red state. But this? This is not going to go over well. No one likes stolen valor and if Sheehy has been lying about this for years? There’s going to be a lot of other stuff he’s lied about, too. There are seven months until the election, it’s going to come out. In the meantime, you can bet Democrats are going to hammer Sheehy over the head nonstop with his very unlikely story.

Republicans are, naturally, going to insist this is no big deal. But these are the same people who based their entire campaign against presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004 on the lie that he had not actually been wounded in battle. It’s a lot to hope for intellectual and moral integrity from Republican voters but that’s no reason not to remind them of what they used to consider a red line.

In the meantime, Republicans probably should have picked a better candidate. But they’re not very good at that anymore. Mostly because there are none.

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The rot goes all the way down

The problem for the Republican Party is that there are no more good Republicans left. A fish rots from the head down and, well, have you seen the head of the Republican Party lately? I wrote about this last year and we’re watching it play out in not exactly slow motion.

Mitch McConnell once complained about the quality of the candidates the GOP was fielding. He tried to blame Trump but, well, whose fault is that? McConnell had a chance to save his party but he took the coward’s path. He could have impeached Donald Trump and that would have been the end of his ability to run for office forever. McConnell,, however, spinelessly tried to let Democrats do all the hard work for him and now he’s paying the price yet again. Heartbreaking, truly.

There’s a sliver of hope that Larry Hogan, the former Republican governor, can pick up a seat in Maryland but Maryland has not had a Republican senator since 1987 and the state has been blue since 1988. Governors are one thing. Tipping the Senate to the GOP? That’s quite another. Larry Hogan is popular but not that popular.

On the other hand, Rick Scott of Florida is very unpopular in his home state. Even as an incumbent in a state trending red, he’s only 3-4 points up. With the recent nuclear bomb that just went off in Florida, Rick Scott has become extremely vulnerable.

So to summarize: Arizona - Gone. Ohio - steep uphill battle. Montana - slipping away. West Virginia - in the bag. Florida - snap! Maryland - I wouldn’t bet on a GOP miracle.

There is now a very real chance that Democrats do not just hold the Senate but pick up a seat. That makes the possibility of killing the filibuster far more likely and a fitting end cap to Mitch McConnell’s career of obstruction. We’re not there yet but Republicans are not really a party capable of course correcting at this point. All they can do is continue to double down on extremism in hopes of breaking the system before the system purges them forever. It's a race and we can clearly see what winning looks like now. Democrats just need to hold on as the GOP continues to rot away.

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