How to Lose an Election

There are some elections that it seems that you're just born to lose. No matter how strongly the public sentiment seems to be with you or how massively the polls suggest that you'll kick the other guy's ass, you'll somehow figure out a way to lose.

The Republicans did this with the Senate in 2010. The writing was so clearly on the wall that a number of Democratic incumbents up and quit, rather than face certain humiliation. It seemed almost impossible for the GOP to fuck up anything short of a outright takeover of the upper chamber.

But fuck it up they did. Full of hubris, ideological fervor and abject stupidity, Republican primary voters decided to take out respected incumbents in safe seats and nominate psychopaths, idiots and sundry other defectives instead. This is where people like Christine O'Donnell, Sharron Angle, Joe Miller and Ken Buck came from and not, as legend has it, a laboratory in Center Earth that specializes in creating unelectable candidates.

Miller and Buck were actually leading in the polls for most of their respective races. In such a situation, a sensible frontrunner will the do the sensible thing: shut the fuck and hug their lead all the way through election day. Tea Party candidates are singularly incapable of doing that. They mistake general elections for primaries and think that the wider electorate believes the same superstitious nonsense that Republican primary voters do. Those people seemingly had to explain all the goofy shit they believed, and they had to do it in the most inarticulate way possible. They saved the Democrats a lot of time, money and effort in opposition research because these people wouldn't shut up, insisting on saying increasingly crazy things.

So Harry Reid lived to lie another day. Clear pick-ups in Delaware and Colorado were thrown away. The funniest outcome of all was in Alaska. After the primary defeat by Miller, Senator Lisa Murkowski ran as a write-in candidate and won, the first person to pull that off in a Senate race in over half a century. This came with the added benefit of humiliating Sarah Palin in her own backyard.

So when you hear a Tea Partier bitch about Reid and the Senate Democrat majority, do me a favor - slap them on the side of the head and remind them that it's their fault. The GOP had a really good shot of winning control, but the Tea Party - for no other reason than they're the Tea Party - decided to sink that by nominating mutants for the most easily winnable seats.

And, of course, it's not like the Tea Party is famous for learning from their mistakes. After all, why do that when you can blame the media? So now they're poised to ruin another election and the Republican party seems incapable of doing anything about it.

On November 7, 2006, incumbent Richard Lugar was unopposed by any major party candidate as no Democrat filed for the May 2006 primary. He was re-elected to his sixth six-year term with 87.3% of the vote.

You know, there was a time when if, in your previous race, you ran unopposed and won nearly 90% of the vote, no sane party would bother you. There was almost a time when Dick Lugar was one of the most conservative Republicans in Washington. But neither is true any longer, so the Tea Party took out Lugar and gave the nomination to some guy named Richard Mourdock instead.

As I write this, Mourdock is tied with Democrat Joe Donnelly, which isn't a good place for an Indiana Republican to be two months before the election. It's even worse when you consider that Mourdock has already been elected statewide twice and nobody knows who Donnelly is. Mourdock might pull out the narrowest of wins, but my spidey sense tells me that he probably won't.

Then there's Maine, where Olympia Snowe was unbeatable. She regularly won with huge margins, some over 70%, and in her thirty-four years in Congress, no Democrat had come close to beating her in one of the most liberal states in America. But the Jim DeMints of the world so pissed her off that she dropped out of her reelection race at the last minute. This pretty much guarantees that Independent former governor Angus King will win the seat and caucus with the Democrats.

Now we have Missouri, which might be the single most spectacular Republican fuck-up of all. In the run-up to the Republican primary, polling showed that the Democratic incumbent, Claire McCaskill, wasn't just going to lose, she was going to lose to any of the Republicans in the primary. Hers was the single most endangered seat the Democrats had. I heard rumours that the national party was going to throw her over the side and write the seat off.

Todd Akin won the Republican nomination a couple of weeks ago and wasted no time in blowing himself up.



That went over about as well as you would expect it to.

I'm not pro-choice, I'm pro-abortion, but I'm going to be honest with you. Akin probably has the only intellectually respectable pro-life position you can hold. To suggest that you believe in the sanctity of life also suggests that there are no exceptions for abortion except possibly the life of the mother. Otherwise, you're saying that some lives are just a little more sanctified than others, which pretty much makes you pro-choice. Watching pro-lifers tie themselves into intellectual knots over this has been one of the great joys of my life.

Akin would have been fine if he just said "Look, I believe that all unborn life is sacred. While rape and incest are horrific crimes, I don't believe that abortion is the answer to either of them." I would have disagreed with him, but would concede that his is a legitimate point of view.

Instead, he started opining on "legitimate rape" (which never fails to set off alarm bells in the heads of most women voters) and going into some crazed theory of reproductive biology that I wouldn't be surprised to learn that he picked up from some demented Japanese cartoon.

Todd Akin is fucking dead, folks. Not only do I know it, but Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS and the National Republican Senatorial Committee know it, too. They just cut off his money. As a matter of fact, the NRSC wants Akin out of the race entirely by close of business tomorrow.

Beating Claire McCaskill was supposed to be the easiest thing in the world. Well, as of today, it ain't so easy anymore. If Akin stays in and runs without money, McCaskill will bury him alive. But if drops out, the GOP is going to have to build a campaign from the ground up with just over two months to go and manage to beat an incumbent who appears to have gotten a second wind, which is easier said than done. Oh, and there's no guarantee that the replacement candidate won't go on TV and have crazy shit pop out of his or her mouth.

Rove and the NRSC probably know something I also do. John McCain won a pretty shocking (and unappreciated) upset in Missouri four years ago. As a national bellweather state (Missouri had only gone the wrong way in one presidential election since Dwight Eisenhower was president,) and given the Obama landslide, McCain should have been crushed there. Instead, he won a very narrow victory.

While McCain's carrying of Missouri can be built upon, it is a very fragile thing. Because Obama lost there in 2008 and because McCaskill was considered dead on her feet before yesterday, the President abandoned Missouri months ago.

There might be reason for his campaign to revisit that decision.

First, the Akin fiasco - and when you get your money cut off within 24 hours, the term "fiasco" is rather mild - could damage the GOP brand in the presidential race there. If Claire McCaskill can rise from the dead at this late date, who's to say that she can't grow a set of coat-tails, too?

Second, while it's true that Mitt Romney condemned Akin's remarks in what is pretty strong language for Romney, there's another small problem for him. That is that Todd Akin's position on abortion is exactly the same as Paul Ryan's. The Obama campaign would be out of their friggin' minds if they didn't make huge ad buys in St. Louis and Kansas City listing all of the crazed abortion bills that Akin and Ryan voted together on. And God help everyone if there's videotape of Ryan uttering the phrase "legitimate rape" floating around out there.

If Romney-Ryan has to start fighting for Missouri, they're in bad trouble. That means that they'll have to spend time and money that can't be spent in Ohio, Virginia, Colorado, Nevada and Florida, where they're not doing as well as they should be. As of right now, I'd still give the state to Romney, but if he has another front opened up on him, I don't see how he survives it.

Am I holding the Republicans to  higher standard than I do anyone else? Sure, I do. To begin with, the GOP pretends to hold itself to a higher standard than they do anyone else. And, since almost the first day of the Obama Administration it shouldn't have been very hard for Republicans to win up and down the ballot. All they've had to do is smile, wave, kiss a baby, eat some pie, not get caught trying to suck-start another dude in airport bathroom and keep their fucking mouths shut.

You know why Ronald Reagan always pretended that he couldn't hear questions from reporters? Because he knew that an unforced error wouldn't help him, so he kept his fucking mouth shut. He also knew that when your opponents are less popular you than you are, you keep your fucking mouth shut.

In race after race after race, the GOP has screwed itself out healthy, majority-building victories because the Tea Party sucks at strategic planning and because their candidates just can't keep their fucking mouths shut.