Who Should Lead the Senate GOP?

Washington, D.C. – Florida Sen. Rick Scott, outgoing chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee said Tuesday he would challenge Kentucky's Mitch McConnell for the post of minority leader in Wednesday's leadership elections.

It's important to note that, had Scott done a better job leading the NRSC, he and McConnell would be vying to see who had sufficient support among their collective GOP colleagues to be the new majority leader.

Republicans have been beating themselves up for nearly a week over the party's failure to produce “a red wave” in last week's election sufficient to produce majorities in both congressional chambers and gain more GOP governors spread out among the states.

No one has yet hit on the reasons the GOP's effort failed to meet expectations. That in turn has led to finger-pointing, with various factions of the party suggesting the blame belongs not to the party as a whole but to a particular faction led by a specific individual or individuals, none of whom can truly be said to be the cause of the Republicans' failure to sweep on Nov. 8.

Some of that is directed at McConnell who, critics say, spent too much time worrying about the reelection of the more liberal members of the Senate GOP conference while failing to put enough effort into securing wins in places where “more conservative” challengers were taking on seemingly entrenched incumbents.

This, in my judgment, is a self-serving explanation for what went wrong. McConnell was correct when he said in the spring that Republican efforts at candidate recruitment had fallen short in many states. First-time candidates for political office, even during a period of profound political upheaval producing potential realignments and upset wins as has happened over the last 20 years more often end up on the losing side in contests pitting them against statewide elected officials and others already in the Congress.

Back in 2021, when most people thinking about running for Senate in 2022 began to do so, it looked like most of the seats likely to flip were those held by Democrats. Retirements put seats in Ohio and Pennsylvania in play but, on paper, it looked like the GOP had more opportunities than the Democrats to win enough seats to make a majority.

The possibility of victory in those races was slowly winnowed down over the ensuing 18 months. Some people who might have been easy winners, like New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, opted not to run. In those states as well as others, the nominations eventually went to candidates who could frankly be called a mixed bag. Some adapted to the requirements of campaigning well while others floundered, making rookie mistakes like running ads better suited to locking down support in primaries as spots in the general election. Not exactly the best way to “grow the vote” and bring independent-minded voters and disaffected Democrats into your cap.

The pundit and consultant class also provided bad advice on strategy. It is not enough to simply be against something or someone, 99 times out of 100. You have to give voters a reason to vote “for you” and not just “against” the other guy. In turbulent times, and that's a label that certainly fits what America is going through right now, voters tend to stick with “The Devil They Know” rather than go with the alternative – which might be worse.

The way many of the 2022 Senate campaigns were managed, the Democrats were given an opening wide enough to drive a fleet of city buses through to make the claim the GOP alternatives available to the voters were worse. Many of the Republicans running for Senate in blue and purple states were given bad advice on how to respond, which often was to offer no response at all.

Instead, they were encouraged to keep the focus on Biden, the Democrats and the economy. Yet few if any offered concrete proposals to bring prices down, get energy production up or do something to stop the Fed from raising interest rates, perhaps by cutting back on government spending.

To put it in simpler terms, few people have any use for a plumber who can identify all the things that point to there being a leaking pipe somewhere in the house but who offer up no ideas on how to find it or, more importantly, how to fix it.

Some of these things might fairly be blamed on the NRSC. None of them can be blamed on McConnell, who's now facing challenges to his leadership for things that happened that were beyond his ability to control.

What he has proven he can control however is the Senate Republican Conference. Whether it was during his time as majority leader when he stood strong against attacks made on his decision not to hold hearings and advance the nomination of federal judge Merrick Garland, now the United States Attorney General, to fill the seat left vacant by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.

The repercussions of his decision, which Republicans at the time hailed as an act of bold leadership, are still being felt today – and in ways favorable to the policy agenda of some of those seeking to bring McConnell down.

As minority leader, the senior senator from Kentucky has managed to keep every member of his conference headed in the same general direction. This is not an easy thing to do when you have Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins and Mitt Romney sitting alongside Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Rand Paul. But he's done it well – so well in fact that the mainstream media has spent much of the last two years focused on whether Joe Manchin or Krysten Sinema would break ranks with the Democrats, not on which member of the GOP would be the 51^st vote for Biden's Build Back Better debacle.

McConnell deserves credit for that and more. He is perhaps, the most effective, most conservative GOP Senate leader of the last 75 years. Effectiveness and ideology do not go hand in hand, unfortunately, at least on the conservative side. Among liberals, that kind of single-mindedness and conformity is encouraged. It's made change harder but no less worth pursuing.

The principal complaint, aside from what's being alleged by the permanent malcontents who are never satisfied with anything and the various senators looking for status is that, as a politician of stature, McConnell doesn't fight enough. He doesn't take it to the Democrats enough and doesn't make Schumer fight to get what he wants.

Perhaps. Another way to look at it, however, is that he's a careful steward of the resources available to him who therefore picks his battles carefully. It's not, as Washington showed throughout the revolution, a sin to take the long view of the challenges ahead and reserve your troops and ammunition for the most important battles.

There are people in politics who spend their time always looking for the next hill to die on. They believe there's a kind of nobility, a purity in that. Nonsense. The objective in politics is to win as much as you can. The GOP did just that in 2022 – it won as much as it could, given the considerable strategic, tactical and logistical problems it faced. The failures to foresee any of those or to correct for them once uncovered should be blamed on those in charge of the elections, not those who tried to fix the problems once they were identified and got considerable grief for doing so. If McConnell belongs to either group, it's the latter. His colleagues should choose him to continue to lead.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.

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