The Return of the Losers

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, May 23, 2023

 

There was a time within living memory when there were consequences associated with losing a high-stakes general election. Today, losing has been rechristened the true mark of authenticity. That condition is not exclusive to Republican politics, but it is certainly more pronounced among the GOP.

 

Electoral failure has been reconceptualized as an illegitimate expression of elite hostility toward Republican voters and their preferences. It’s a rationalization, but it’s apparently a compelling one for GOP voters. Moreover, it’s an incredible boon to their preferred losers. It should come as no surprise that the party’s has-beens are making the most of their good fortune.

 

“Big announcement tomorrow!” former Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake teased on Tuesday following the conclusion of a remarkably consistent string of unmitigated losses.

 

Lake narrowly lost her bid for Arizona’s governor’s mansion in 2022, ceding the executive branch in this once reliably red state to the Democratic Party. But she didn’t stop there. Lake insisted that her loss was not legitimate and devoted substantial resources to challenging the election results.

 

In December 2022, Lake filed a suit alleging that widespread and deliberate misconduct compromised ballot printers at key polling places in her state. The suit was thrown out. Lake appealed, but the Arizona supreme court declined to hear the case. That court did, however, send a lower court’s dismissal of Lake’s effort to challenge the signature-validation process for early ballots in Maricopa County back to the court. That claim was finally adjudicated this week, concluding with a Maricopa judge’s ruling that Lake had not sufficiently substantiated her claims. Some of her team’s allegations were so facially uncompelling that a judge imposed a fine on one of her attorneys for issuing false claims before the court.

 

All the while, Lake maintained a defensive crouch punctuated occasionally by paroxysms of gracelessness. Her crude campaign of Stacey Abrams–style election skepticism was typified by bargaining, emotional blackmail, and pitiful self-delusion. Oddly enough, this behavior seems to have endeared Lake to her core constituents.

 

Lake is poised to enter the race for U.S. Senate in Arizona, challenging independent senator Kirsten Sinema and the Democratic senatorial nominee in 2024. Preliminary polling suggests she is the prohibitive favorite to win her party’s nomination. But why? Save the outside chance that a few lucky breaks during next year’s campaign will vindicate Lake and, more important, her supporters’ capacity for rational judgment, what do her voters get from tempting fate so boldly?

 

Whatever Arizona’s Republican primary voters get from this exercise, it must be contagious. Pennsylvania’s Republican voters seem similarly afflicted.

 

State senator Doug Mastriano has dangled the tantalizing prospect of “crazy good news” before the Keystone State’s GOP ahead of next week, when it is believed that he will announce plans to run for the U.S. Senate seat occupied by incumbent senator Bob Casey. Mastriano lost his 2022 gubernatorial bid to Governor Josh Shapiro by 800,000 votes despite the environmental conditions favoring the GOP. He lost the collar counties around Philadelphia. He lost must-flip counties like Erie, which was key to Donald Trump’s surprising 2016 victory in the state. His presence at the top of the ticket contributed to Republican losses farther down the ballot, costing the GOP control of the Pennsylvania house. Mastriano’s loss shouldn’t have come as a surprise, however, because he ran as a loser.

 

Mastriano predicated his 2022 campaign on the presumption that the 2020 vote was rigged. His platform emphasized this grievance. On the trail, he promised to cancel state contracts with “compromised voting machine companies.” He campaigned alongside former Trump adviser and convicted felon Steve Bannon at what was billed as a “voter integrity conference” where attendees were asked to sign a petition that “would decertify Pennsylvania’s 2020 election results.” As governor, he pledged that he would appoint a “secretary of state who’s delegated from me the power to make the corrections to elections, the voting logs, and everything.” If elected, Mastriano promised to eliminate no-excuse voting by mail and to purge the voter rolls, forcing his state’s voters to re-register.

 

His obsessions were not shared by Pennsylvania’s voters. And although Mastriano did concede his undeniable loss, his supporters have spent the months since the election “flooding Pennsylvania courts with petitions seeking to force hand recounts” — costly efforts that have proven fruitless.

 

“If he runs, he has proven to be the most delusional person to run for office in the history of Pennsylvania,” one Allegheny County Republican Party chairman told Pennsylvania-based reporter Salena Zito. Perhaps Mastriano is deluded to believe that he can win a statewide election for U.S. Senate in a presidential year when he couldn’t carry the state in a midterm, but he’s not deluded to believe he can win another primary race. The survey data are sparse, but early polling suggests Mastriano enjoys the support of a substantial plurality of Pennsylvania Republicans.

 

Republican voters who care about winning statewide races shouldn’t look past the fact that the party’s losers are returning to imperil the GOP’s minuscule majority in the House of Representatives, too.

 

Not long after longtime Ohio representative Marcy Kaptur won reelection in 2022 with 57 percent of the vote in a district with a three-point GOP lean, her unsuccessful challenger, J. R. Majewski, declared his intention to challenge her again in 2024. Majewski’s self-described “ultra MAGA” campaign was marred by scandal. He spent much of the race on the defensive, defending his decision to participate in the January 6 protests at the Capitol and his promotion of slogans associated with the so-called QAnon conspiracy theory. Nor could Majewski satisfy his critics who uncovered evidence contradicting his claims to have served in combat in Afghanistan. “My campaign is not about my military veteran status,” was the candidate’s flaccid rebuttal to the allegations of stolen valor. Ohio’s ninth district may have the opportunity to relitigate these controversies and more next November.

 

In Washington State, MAGA enthusiast Joe Kent, who successfully primaried Tea Party–wave veteran congresswoman Jaime Herrera Beutler, has also declared his intention to throw his hat into the ring after ceding a GOP-held seat to Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez. Kent also spent the 2022 campaign reserving most of his enthusiasm not for the pocketbook issues at the forefront of voters’ minds but for allegations surrounding the supposed malfeasance that cost Donald Trump a second term in the White House. His suspicions likely informed Kent’s refusal to concede his unambiguous loss to his opponent for weeks after the votes were counted, though that behavior is unlikely to have pleased the voters of Washington’s third district.

 

Keen political observers might be able to spot the pattern of behavior that these losing candidates share. Adherence to the sprawling suite of allegations that constitute 2020 election skepticism is the price of admission for candidates who sought Donald Trump’s endorsement. But there is a tight correlation between those candidates who paid lip service to this narrative and those who lost their bids for open seats. There must be some validation that Republicans get from repeating this exercise in futility. Whatever it is, it’s not winning.