Speaker 1: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is not happy with the quality of candidates that
Republicans have been offering up for the 2022 midterms. And this story really feeds into the
growing rift within the Republican Party as they try to figure out what direction they
want to go in with Donald Trump's political future being so uncertain at the moment.
McConnell is speaking to reporters and he sort of alluded to the fact that Republicans
really should be shoe ins, too, in both the House and the Senate. If you look at
historical precedent with we know the president who's in power tending to have a bad first
midterms and also the economic indicators that aren't really going Democrats way. But McConnell
points out that some of these races tend to be up to the personalities of the people running in
them. And he mentions, without saying specifically that a lot of these candidates are weak and
wacky. So here's what Mitch McConnell had to say. Speaker 4: I think there's probably a greater
likelihood the House follows the Senate. Senate races are just different. Their statewide
candidate quality has a lot to do with the outcome.
Speaker 1: So McConnell actually is quite right on this, which is not something that I often
say about him. But I do think that he's right on both fronts here. Like, for one, Republicans are
definitely more favored to win the House than they are the Senate. If you look at the FiveThirtyEight
odds, Republicans currently have a 78% chance at winning the lower chamber, but only a 37% chance
at flipping the upper chamber. And then yet people generally want rational, competent, intelligent,
sound minded people representing them, regardless of political affiliation. That's sort of like
the base level of things that people want in a candidate and in a House race. Maybe you can get
away with having a whack your candidate because there's not going to be all that much attention
paid to them. But in a Senate race that's going to get statewide attention, maybe even national media
coverage. So you can always get away with having a whack your candidate. And if you look around the
country, Republicans are not sending us their best, to paraphrase Donald Trump. In Georgia,
you have former football player Herschel Walker who often fails to make any sense at all.
And he hasn't really expressed that he knows anything about policy matters. In Pennsylvania,
you have Mehmet Oz, who is coming off as an elitist with $100 million and a carpetbagger from
New Jersey who just thinks that he's entitled to a Senate seat because he's been on television for
so long. In Ohio, you have J.D. Vance, who went from being a somewhat reasonable Republican who
wrote the Hillbilly Elegy to now being a full on Trumpist, who said that it's sometimes better for
people in abusive relationships to stay together rather than get divorced. And then in Wisconsin,
you have incumbent Ron Johnson, who often spreads disinformation about the 2020 election,
voter fraud and COVID vaccines. And Wisconsin is not a red state. It's a it's a blue state,
maybe a purple state, you could call it. So they're definitely far to the left of where Ron
Johnson is. So it's not surprising that he's also losing in the polls. But at this point, there's
no going back. Right. You're you're stuck with most of these candidates. Most of the primaries
have already happened at this point. There's about ten toss up races in the Senate this year.
And I do think that Democrats are poised to win much of them and hold on to their majority,
maybe even pick up a seat or two or three, which would be awesome, because then we could talk about
getting rid of the filibuster and pass more of our progressive wish list,
assuming we're able to also hold on to the House. But that's a conversation for another day.
But someone who did not like Mitch McConnell's statements were Fox News propagandist Sean
HANNITY. He said this about the statements. Speaker 2: Now these same Democrats are painting
Republican Senate candidates running in upcoming elections in midterms as cruel and out of touch.
Well, apparently, Senator Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is content to leave them out to
dry and fend for themselves. How about you get out there, Mitch, and fight for your team? What's your
agenda, Mitch? Or would you rather just sit by and watch helplessly as Democrats lie to your face,
pass another $500 billion green energy boondoggle next year?
Or is it maybe Mitch McConnell hates Donald Trump so much that he would probably rather
see Trump endorse candidates lose because he thinks that might hurt Donald Trump.
His time as a leader needs to come to an end. Speaker 1: And it is true that the NRC,
the National Republican Senatorial Committee, has already decided to pull back a lot of their TV ad
spending dollars because they're just giving up on certain races. They don't think that there's
any point spending any money because it's just going to be a waste. They might as well
consolidate that money and spend it in the places where they do have an actual shot at winning.
And they've already spent a lot of their money over the summer. Now they're having a tougher time
fundraising because the political winds seem to be going back in the Democratic direction. And so
Republicans are in chaos right now. They thought that they would have this big red wave, this
midterms, and now it's not looking so great. We're seeing people turn on one another. We're seeing
the rats leaving the ship. And as someone who is not on their side, I like to see it happening