Kevin McCarthy, Of All People, Laments the GOP’s Bad Candidates

Kevin McCarthy—who has spent his young speakership empowering fringe nuts like Marjorie Taylor Greene and helping Fox News propagandist Tucker Carlson rewrite the history of January 6—apparently has stern message for the GOP donor class: that the party “lost the middle” in the 2022 midterms and that bad candidates cost him a bigger majority in the House. According to Axios, McCarthy and Representative Richard Hudson, the chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, told GOP lobbyists and donors at a Florida retreat last weekend that some of the party’s highest-profile candidates last cycle—including MAGA gubernatorial contenders Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania and Tudor Dixon in Michigan—weighed other candidates down, losing the party as many as eight seats in the lower chamber. 

The “top of the ticket mattered,” McCarthy and Hudson told the conservative bigwigs in a slideshow presentation at the Ritz-Carlton in Key Biscayne, Florida last weekend.

The message, of course, makes sense; if you have Mastriano, a conspiracy theory-spouting insurrectionist at the top of the ballot, that may indeed sour voters on the GOP candidates whose names appear below his. But McCarthy and Hudson are not the best choice in messengers: Both of them voted against certifying Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, and McCarthy more or less handed the reins to the most radical members of his caucus in order to secure the speaker’s gavel. For McCarthy, of all people, to chide Republicans about losing independents must take quite a bit of gall.

Of course, he’s not the only Republican leader to lament the party’s problems at the top of the ticket. You may recall Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell tempering expectations of a GOP takeover in the upper chamber, citing poor “candidate quality” in key races last year. “Hopefully, in the next cycle, we’ll have quality candidates everywhere and a better outcome,” McConnell said in December, after Herschel Walker and other dismal Republican candidates indeed lost their races. 

But top Republicans’ warnings about the dangerous weirdos holding them back continue to ring hollow, given their continued appeasement of the biggest dangerous weirdo of them all: Donald Trump, who has dragged his party down in three consecutive elections now and may be poised to do so in a fourth as he mounts another White House bid. McConnell has made clear he’d still support Trump if he becomes the GOP nominee, despite all his sparring with the former president—and not to mention Trump’s racist attacks on McConnell’s wife, former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao. “I think it’s going to be very, very competitive in these primaries and we’ll hope for the best,” McConnell told reporters this month. “And obviously, I’m going to support whoever the nominee ultimately is.” McCarthy, meanwhile, has maintained his position as Trump’s “My Kevin,” turning the House of Representatives into an apparatus for the MAGA faithful to fight Trump’s political battles and run cover for the former president. 

If leading Republicans were really serious about “candidate quality,” they could start there, with Trump. Until they do so, they’re sure to keep ending up with people like Mastriano and Dixon on their tickets: When you run a circus, you shouldn’t be surprised when the clowns show up.