Regarding the "Blame McConnell" Spin

If you know my history, this one pains me to write. But it must be said because I think the GOP keeps breaking with reality and that’s why they just lost independent voters for the first time in a while and they need to return to reality with more truth, less Twitter performance.

I see a lot of Trump supporters blaming Mitch McConnell, the man who spent $400 million trying to win the Senate. These same people are very silent that Trump, who had $100 million, barely spent $15 million, and only at the very end in already saturated ad markets.

“But McConnell should have spent…” say the second guessers who had no skin in the game except worshiping at the altar of Trump, not thinking for themselves, but performing for their friends on social media who, like them, had no actual skin in the game.

McConnell has skin the game. He was saddled with weak candidates who won because Trump endorsed them. He stepped up and rallied a donor class that had been the butt of jokes of these candidates and they went to work to get them elected.

They barely lost Pennsylvania. They got Georgia into a runoff. They won Ohio. They reinforced North Carolina and Wisconsin.

While Rick Scott was pouring money into Colorado and New Hampshire, McConnell was playing strategically, and it worked to conserve money for key races.

“But Alaska!” scream the critics. Lisa Murkowski is not a Republican. The Republicans chased her out of the party. But she stayed loyal to the party in the Senate and routinely and reliably provided a vote for McConnell to obstruct the Democrats. She could have gone Manchin and betrayed her party as Manchin has betrayed his. She could have provided a key vote for Democrats and helped shape deals that would have hurt the GOP.

She stayed loyal. McConnell rewarded her with a big spend that still might not help her. But to criticize McConnell’s spend is to ignore how much Murkowski reliably helped her old GOP colleagues as a Senate independent.

McConnell deserves reasonable criticism. The amount he spent in Alaska is fair criticism. The amounts in states like Arizona and Nevada are fair criticisms. But attacking him for spending on Trump’s candidates when Trump didn’t even spend on his candidates is not reasonable criticism. Second-guessing all his spending without even noting Trump’s lack of spending is performative poo-flinging by the flying monkeys of Trumpland who let Trump’s words do their thinking for them as they bang away at keyboards.

“But McConnell is fine being minority leader.” That’s not rational. That is talking point performance where you’re regurgitating what performs well with Twitter bros who don’t really care about facts or reality any more than progressives do. The man can’t stockpile judges in the judiciary as a minority leader, and it is one of the few things he longs to do. And, by the way, you wouldn’t have gotten Dobbs without McConnell in the leader’s seat ushering through the judges of the man who criticized McConnell the whole time.