Blake Masters Is What Went Wrong for Republicans in the Midterms

By Jack Butler

Wednesday, November 30, 2022

In the wake of an overall disappointing performance for Republicans in the 2022 midterms, the Republican National Committee is trying to figure out what went wrong and how to improve. Politico reports that Republican leaders “are moving to address broader concerns confronting the GOP in the wake of the midterms, when the party underperformed expectations in a political environment many felt was to their advantage.” Helping to conduct this review will be a select group of Republican-operator-adjacent types on what is to be called a “Republican Party Advisory Council.”

RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel described the effort in this way:

As we assess the midterms and plan for 2024, we are gathering a diverse range of respected leaders in our movement to join together and help chart a winning course in the years to come. I am thrilled that this talented group of Republicans will be shoulder to shoulder with us as we work to grow our party, hold Democrats accountable, and elect Republicans.

It’s not a bad idea, in theory. The advisory council will consist of, among others, several Republicans who won their races this year: Katie Britt, senator-elect from Alabama; and Monica De La Cruz and John James, who just won House races in Texas and Michigan, respectively.

More perplexing, however, is the inclusion of failed Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters. Masters, a cringeworthy contender whose reflexive self-adulation proved wildly out of whack with his political capabilities, cannot help Republicans “chart a winning course.” In politics, he is “talented” only at losing. He underperformed every other statewide Republican running in Arizona this year and failed to knock off vulnerable incumbent Democrat Mark Kelly despite the professed desire of Arizonans for a Republican senator. (A Peter Thiel protégé, Masters has, of course, tried to scapegoat others for his failure.) Throughout his campaign, Masters routinely denounced other Republican politicians as empty suits who couldn’t win and were thus inadequate to the moment. Having lost, Masters ought to hold himself to this standard.

Unless . . .

There is, actually, one good reason to keep Blake Masters around. If the RNC is attempting to ascertain how Republicans failed to meet expectations in this midterm cycle, they could do worse than to study the failure of Masters’s candidacy, with its off-putting aesthetic (some of the worst focus-group results of any Republican candidate ever, according to the head of a Mitch McConnell–aligned super PAC; lower favorability ratings than Roy Moore, according to an internal poll of the Arizona Senate race); its fealty to Donald Trump’s whims (and to a fund-raising model that helped Trump more than it helped him); and its futile invocation of the political fringes (favorably citing, among others, Sam Francis, the Unabomber, and Curtis Yarvin) as a source of electoral strength.

As a negative example, as a paragon of what not to do, he could prove mightily instructive. It’s not exactly mimesis, but hey: There are many ways to get from zero to one.