Republican elites cannot fail, they can only be treated unfairly (by having the other party running campaigns against them)

In the wake of a disastrous midterm in which multiple of their kooky Senate candidates lost winnable races, Republican elites and top-level political reporters alike know who to blame: Democrats.

They called it the “Summer of Chaos.”

In 2021, as Democratic strategists brainstormed ways to defend their threadbare control of the Senate, they began an aggressive communications strategy with the goal of choosing their adversaries.

[…]

But Peters, the committee’s chairman, also authorized a bit of skulduggery. The emerging plan had two main components: deterring potentially strong Republicans from entering races against those “core four” Democratic incumbents, and “maximizing the chaos” within Republican primaries.

Now, first of all, even if these charges of “skullduggery” were true, I still don’t understand what I’m supposed to be upset about here. The goal of political campaigns is to win — if saying negative but true things about another party’s candidates makes them more likely to win their primaries, whose fault is that anyway?

But if you look at both New Hampshire and Arizona, even as Hounshell desperately tries to jam everything into a frame of Democratic dirty tricks, Democrats did…essentially nothing:

For Sununu, the Democrats’ potential leverage was his shifting position on abortion.

Running for governor in 2016, he had declared himself “pro-choice,” albeit with some caveats. About two-thirds of voters in New Hampshire say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, polls show.

In June 2021, however, pushed by conservative lawmakers, Sununu signed a budget bill that restricted abortion after 24 weeks of pregnancy with no exceptions for rape or incest. Sununu had little choice; vetoing the budget would have shut down the government while the pandemic was still raging. But in approving it, wrote James Pindell of The Boston Globe, the governor had just “touched one place that no Republican should ever go in New Hampshire.”

Democrats sensed an opportunity. They had picked up on gossip that some in Sununu’s inner circle were worried about the abortion attacks. True or not, they began ginning up news coverage on the topic.

“Targeting Sununu over abortion will be a key part of the Democrat’s playbook,” read one article in The Concord Monitor, referring to the incumbent senator up for re-election, Maggie Hassan. “It’s easy to imagine ads and commercials blasting Sununu over abortion flooding the TV and radio airwaves and on digital.”

Sununu was under heavy pressure to run from Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, who said he would make a “great candidate,” and from Senator Rick Scott, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. He appeared torn.

Then he stunned McConnell and his advisers in November 2021 by not only turning them down without notice, but also publicly attacking the job of senator as “sitting around having meeting after meeting, waiting for votes to maybe happen.”

“Unbelievable,” Josh Holmes, a political adviser to McConnell, tweeted in reaction.

Allies of Sununu say abortion had nothing to do with the decision. “This is not a guy who backs down from a fight,” said Dave Carney, a longtime New Hampshire Republican operative.

“I was going to run,” Sununu said later, during a forum at Rice University. But his conversations with senators — one told him he would get more vacation time, while another said he would no longer have to balance a budget — soured him on the idea. “They said all the wrong things.”

So, to review, 1)New Hampshire Republicans hindered Sununu by forcing him to sign an unpopular abortion ban and 2)a bunch of Republican senators told Sununu that senator was a shitty job. But the real reason he didn’t run is that…Democrats told some reporters that they would campaign against his unpopular abortion stance! Which, being not a total moron, he was perfectly aware of anyway! WHOA BOY I HAVE NEVER BEFORE SEEN SUCH MACHIAVELLIAN RATFUCKING IN MY LIFE POOR BABE IN THE WOODS CHRIS SUNUNU NEVER KNEW WHAT HIT HIM!

In the case of Ducey, Democrats somehow did even less:

But Republican leaders ignored Trump and kept recruiting Ducey aggressively. And though Ducey repeatedly said he was not interested, Democrats grew nervous in January 2022 when they caught wind from people in Arizona of fresh discussions between Ducey, McConnell and Scott.

Democrats tried to force those quiet conversations into the open by passing word of the talks to reporters in Washington, hoping that Trump would see the stories and tee off on Ducey. The Arizona governor, meanwhile, would get an inkling of what he could expect if he entered the primary.

At a rally in Arizona on Jan. 15, 2022, Trump duly obliged, trashing Ducey as “a terrible, terrible representative of your state.”

By then, Ducey had already made up his mind — but he left McConnell and Scott hanging for two more months. “If you’re going to run for public office, you have to really want the job,” he finally wrote in a letter to donors in March. “Right now I have the job I want.”

So, Ducey didn’t enter the primary because Trump predictably attacked him (and would inevitably endorse his opponent) because he wouldn’t lie about the 2020 election being stolen, and responsibility for this belongs to…Democrats? Because they talked to some reporters about it?

As they try to evade responsibility for Trump, Republican elites have basically constructed a narrative that if they don’t nominate a total psycho Democrats are obligated not to campaign against them, and 2)if they do nominate a total psycho it’s because Democrats secretly control the entire Republican primary process, including who decides to run in the first place. I’m not sure “Murc’s Law” even covers it — it’s multiple ridiculous ideas converging at once.

The real story here is that Trump’s Republican party makes it hard and unpleasant for Republicans who aren’t MAGA freaks — and why Democrats are supposed to be responsible for this I have no idea.