Bad GOP Candidates: A Lesson In Both Defeat And Dishonor

Churchill once observed that Chamberlain had the choice of war and dishonor, chose dishonor, and got a war anyway. Recent years have seen a certain kind of right-winger – most often members of the “influencer” class – suggest that the GOP had to choose between victory and honor.

Well, they chose “victory,” bore the dishonor, and lost anyway.

The defeat of gentlemanly Republicans in the 2008 and 2012 presidential contests, followed by Donald Trump’s victory in 2016, persuaded many of two things: that character no longer mattered to the American electorate, and that only a street brawler like Trump could win a tough race.

But they fundamentally misunderstood Trump’s appeal. The Donald had a unique, indomitable personality, apolitical cultural appeal, a willingness to break from conservative orthodoxy, and a revolting foil in the form of Hillary Clinton (and later Kamala Harris), all of which contributed to his success. Instead, they bizarrely chalked his triumph up to his mean tweets, personal baggage, and complete lack of self-control – and called for copycats to run for every position from dogcatcher to United States Senator. The results speak for themselves.

In 2022, the GOP wasted an opportunity to set itself up well for years to come. Joe Biden had already revealed himself to be an incompetent in decline, and the slate was chock full of winnable races.

Or, that is, races that were winnable until Republicans nominated various members of the Addams Family to represent them on the ticket. In Arizona, Senator Mark Kelly was running for his first full term and the governor’s race was open. Biden had won Grand Canyon State’s electoral votes two years earlier, but narrowly, and the electorate had long leaned red. By rights, the GOP ought to have won both contests.

Kari Lake and Blake Masters had other ideas.

The thesis behind Lake’s gubernatorial campaign had two pillars: one, that the 2020 election had been stolen, and two, that Arizona had for too long been bedeviled by so-called “McCain Republicans.” She felt so strongly about these convictions that she declared her opponent, the incumbent secretary of state, ought to be in jail and antagonized the traditional Republican voters who sent John McCain to the Senate six times.

“We don’t have any McCain Republicans in here, do we? Alright, get the hell out. . . . Boy, Arizona has delivered some losers, haven’t they?” mused Lake just four days before Arizonans went to the polls. One thing that could be said for the McCain Republicans? They won.

Masters fared even worse. An apparent lab-grown creation of Peter Thiel’s, he ran what was perhaps the most terminally online campaign of the cycle, if not the decade. Past writings revealed that he had quoted Hermann Goering while suggesting that the United States’ involvement in World War II had not been just. His campaign cut a bone-chilling ad of him talking about and then shooting a silenced pistol in the desert while repeatedly reminding viewers that it was “made in Germany.” Subtle, it was not.

Across the country, terrible candidates won primaries and then fell short in the general. Pennsylvania’s Doug Mastriano, himself a participant in the January 6 rally that preceded the Capitol riot, got his clock cleaned by Josh Shapiro. Herschel Walker wasted a prime opportunity to pick up a Senate seat in Georgia while Don Bolduc, the crackpot conspiracy theorist from New Hampshire, was easily dispatched by Senator Maggie Hassan after expending his energy campaigning against… Chris Sununu, the popular incumbent Republican governor whom he insisted was a “Chinese Communist sympathizer.” The guy belonged in a psychological, not a legislative institution.

Electorally, the consequences of nominating the dumb, shallow, scandal-scarred, and outright evil were devastating. Democrats held on to control of the Senate for two years and are better positioned to take it back this year than they otherwise would have been; a Democratic star was born in the form of Shapiro; and Lake used her loss as a launching pad to lose again two years later, this time to the execrable Ruben Gallego.

One might think Republicans would have learned their lesson, especially after 2024’s batch of much more mainstream candidates (Tim Sheehy, Bernie Moreno, Kelly Ayotte, etc.) delivered victories, while even those who didn’t ultimately succeed (Larry Hogan, Mike Rogers, and Eric Hovde) forced Democrats to devote significant resources to defeating them.

But no, the GOP played with fire yet again – and this time they didn’t just sustain a burn; they self-immolated completely

Texas’s Ken Paxton just delivered a Senate seat to James Talarico, a “trans the children, praise Jesus (they\them)” loon whose values are entirely incompatible with the Lone Star State. How could this be, you might ask? Well, during his tenure as the state’s chief law enforcement officer, Paxton was indicted for securities fraud, impeached over a scandal that saw him use his office to benefit a company that employed the woman he was cheating on his wife with, was divorced on biblical grounds, and forced the state to shell out $6.6 million in taxpayer funds to pay whistleblowers who sued the state over Paxton’s retaliation against them.

That’s how.

In Ohio, Vivek Ramaswamy just broke the GOP’s winning streak and handed the governor’s mansion over to Democrat Amy Acton. He has only himself to blame. The Trump Era has seen Ohio turn from purple to red, but Ramaswamy’s slick, effortlessly unlikable personality and exceedingly poor character – demonstrated again and again on the presidential campaign trail in 2024 – doomed him. Of particular disrepute was an ad denouncing Acton as a liar that featured her mother, the woman who fled the state with her husband after he was indicted for sexually abusing Acton as a child.

And in Georgia, the GOP barely even put up a fight. Six years after not one, but two hopelessly inept candidates gave away both Senate seats, and four years after Walker fell short, it nominated Mike Collins, perhaps its worst nominee yet, to take on the talented Jon Ossoff. The question, by the way, isn’t if any additional Nazi scandals have afflicted Collins’s campaign over the course of the construction of this sentence; it’s how many.

Much of politics comes down to fundamentals. Which party is in power? What’s the state of the economy? Is there a war being fought? Which Senate seats are up for grabs? In 2026, all of the answers to those cut against Republicans, but they only tell half the story.

The other, more controllable factor is candidate quality. Do they speak to the issues that matter to voters most? Are they relatable? Are they the kind of man or woman you would trust to watch your kids? What would they do with power?

Time and time again, the GOP nominates candidates for whom those answers are dispiriting and pay a dear price for doing so – and that’s how you lose not just Michigan and Maine, but Ohio, Texas, and Georgia, too. Maybe the choice all along wasn’t between victory and honor, but victory and honor, or defeat and dishonor.

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Isaac Schorr is a staff writer at Mediaite and a 2023–2024 Robert Novak Journalism Fellow at the Fund for American Studies.