Peter Thiel brands US midterms a ‘depressing disaster’ for Republicans

Peter Thiel has made his first public comments on this year’s US midterms, declaring the results “a depressing disaster” after ploughing more than $30mn into Republican races.

In a speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute, Thiel blasted Republicans, including Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, for their poor performance in the election, in which they failed to take back the US Senate and picked up fewer seats than expected in the House of Representatives, defying predictions of a “red wave”.

“If we don’t do something different, we’re just going to be in this groundhog day where something like this is going to repeat in 2024, if not the rest of this decade,” he said in comments this week first reported by Puck News.

The billionaire venture capitalist pointed out that Republicans had not knocked out a single Democratic incumbent in the Senate. In the US House of Representatives, he said, 31 Democratic representatives had chosen to step down ahead of the election, yet Republicans won in just eight of those races.

Thiel said the dire showing was particularly painful, given that the underlying fundamentals all seemed to be in Republicans’ favour. “The economy was a disaster; the inflation out of control; the energy policy terrible,” Thiel said. And yet still, Republicans had not been able to pull off a red wave victory.

“If you can’t sort of win in that kind of a context, how are you ever going to win?” Thiel posited.

Thiel was one of the biggest GOP donors of the 2022 election cycle, investing $15mn in JD Vance’s Senate race in Ohio and $17.5mn in Blake Masters’ Senate race in Arizona.

While Vance won his race, Masters lost to Democratic incumbent Mark Kelly.

Thiel described Vance and Masters, who previously worked for him, as “two of my good friends” and said he had a ringside seat at their electoral races.

Among the factors that Thiel blamed for the Republicans’ underwhelming performance was the lack of a “detailed substantive agenda” — a problem for which he specifically blamed McConnell. Thiel had clashed with McConnell over who should foot the bill for Masters’ Senate race in the general election.

McConnell, Thiel alleged, had the “intuition that you shouldn’t talk about anything substantive at all”.