Sen. John Cornyn, head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, issued the following statement after last night’s Senate defeats (via Politico):
We had many hard-fought races tonight and I’m proud to welcome several new Republicans to the Senate, particularly my fellow Texan Ted Cruz.
But it’s clear that with our losses in the Presidential race, and a number of key Senate races, we have a period of reflection and recalibration ahead for the Republican Party. While some will want to blame one wing of the party over the other, the reality is candidates from all corners of our GOP lost tonight. Clearly we have work to do in the weeks and months ahead.
Politico’s Alexander Burns adds:
The combination of Senate losses with Romney’s loss is part of what makes this election so difficult for Republicans to explain. If it had just been Romney who went down in defeat, well, that could be a problem with one candidate and one campaign. Similarly, if just one or two Republican primaries had produced weak nominees, those could have been flukes.
But we’re looking tonight at a national election in which the GOP failed to take advantage of enormous political opportunities on multiple levels, following a 2010 cycle in which Senate Republicans underperformed. Cornyn doesn’t say what exactly the work is that Republicans have to do in the “weeks and months ahead,” but much as Democrats concluded after 2004, it’s clear that something has to be done.
Something is obviously very wrong when the GOP lost ground in a year when Democrats were defending 23 seats and Republicans just 10. Cornyn and the NRSC will get the brunt of the blame, and they deserve some of it. They lost races that were close: George Allen in Virginia, Rick Berg in North Dakota, and Scott Brown in Massachusetts.
But some of the big losses were out of their control. After the blowback the NRSC received during the Tea Party wave in 2010, the committee stopped endorsing and openly funding primary candidates in open seats. That made it easier for an unfit candidate like Todd Akin to win the Republican nomination. There also wasn’t much the NRSC could have done about Richard Mourdock. While his poorly-worded comments about rape and abortion weren’t as outrageous as they were characterized in the media, they drew outsized attention because of the Akin controversy. And as for Olympia Snowe, the NRSC had no control over her retirement.
Still, there clearly needs to be a change, and Mike Allen reports on what that might look like:
Richard “Mourdock [in Indiana] and [Todd] Akin [in Missouri] join [Christine] O’Donnell, [Sharron] Angle, and [Ken] Buck as candidates that are embarrassingly not ready for the scrutiny of a Senate election. High-level operatives have already begun studying after-action reports to make a change in the business model to address this problem for next cycle.”
Most likely solution: Enlist conservative outside groups to try to steer electable candidates toward nomination.
Sort of like a shadow Republican Senatorial Committee. It would make it more difficult for an unprepared or unelectable candidate to win the nomination, without ruffling the grassroots.
Perhaps one lesson Republicans could learn is that if voters don't support a challenger the first time, they are unlikely to do so a second time, third time, etc. (read: Linda McMahon)
Ummm…..John Thune.
Actually, some of the losses were part of the Obama coattails- like Allen in Virginia and Scott Brown in Mass. Rick Berg is harder to explain. But clearly, the tea-party- as good as they have bee in many ways- have brought us terrible candidates like Christine O'Donnell (never won office before), Todd Akin (an obvious kook) who lucked out when two better candidates split the vote. There are some great tea-party cnadidates,like Rubio and Cruz, but there has to be a better supervision of the cnadidates.
There are many factors to this, but the main one that no one really wishes to say directly is that (very generally put) Democrats offer the masses sugar while the Republicans offer medicine for a sickness that people don't fully feel, yet. What would most want? The only solutions are to better educate, lower yourself to your opponents level (which brings other sickness to the country) and try to take control through chicanery and bad acts, or wait until the sickness shows more symptoms and hope enough people then start to recognize it and that it is not too late to cure it.
The only reason why we got Mourdock was because Richard Lugar had become the most worthless Republican to sit in the Senate. I would suggest that before you crucify the Tea Party movement too much for Indiana, you remember the reason why Lugar had to go in the first place because a guy who rubberstamped every aspect of Obama's agenda, and who was Obama's favorite Republican wasn't worth having another six years.
The solution is to institute a runoff in Republican primary elections. It has served Texas very well, it didn’t stop Cruz, it actually made him, and if Missouri had had one it would have stopped Akin.
A runoff makes it harder for the other party to interfere too.
First thing first. nWhat is as off today forward, the definition of a conservative? nWill chameleons be part of conservatives? nWill extreme positions be tolerated?
The National RINO Senile Committee had nothing to do with Ted Cruz winning, the Senate Conservatives built that victory. What Cornyn did build and why he is resigning is imbecilic choices like Boy George Has Been Allen.
Alana, Olympia Snowe's retirement shouldn't have been permitted to surprise the GOP on the national level the way it did. Most folks in Maine know why she is retiring — even *I* do — and because there is still some human decency in this world it isn't being discussed. n nBut the folks in DC ought to have known for some time that this was going to be the last term for "Olympia" — they should not have been surprised by her announcement and should have been thinking of someone other than her former staffer as a candidate, particularly someone who had failed in three attempts to win a US Rep seat and who appears to have never won an elective office on the state level either. n nThis is how the party system has broken down. What guys on a Maine lobsterboat know isn't getting to the GOP establishment folks because of the disconnect. And the seat is lost…