The Republican Party is comfortable with losing

Mark Robinson and the GOP’s history of shrugging its way to defeat.

Good morning! It’s Monday, September 23, 2024. Election Day is 43 days away. The vice presidential debate is 8 days away.

It’s time to talk about Mark Robinson.

North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson in 2021. (Photo by Anthony Crider)

The first election I ever really covered was the 2012 Missouri Senate race.

Missouri had once been the country’s archetypal bellwether state, but the tides were shifting. The state was quickly trending red, and heading into the cycle, Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill was seen as the party’s most vulnerable incumbent. Until, that is, a series of events transpired that were then seen as improbable — at the time, I wrote that McCaskill had received a “miracle” — but have since become a familiar pattern in politics.

Less than two weeks after winning his August primary, McCaskill’s opponent — Republican congressman Todd Akin — committed a fatal gaffe, telling a local television station that victims of what he called “legitimate rape” rarely become pregnant, because (in his words) “the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

I covered the final debate between McCaskill and Akin, where she painted the race as “moderate versus extreme,” a preview of the next 12 years of Democratic messaging. (By happenstance, I was seated next to Akin’s mother during the debate. She sat with an enormous Bible on her lap and did not look up from it the entire time.) After the debate, I watched as the local press went into an uproar when Akin declined to take questions in the Spin Room, sending a spokesman in his stead.

Akin’s representative painted the congressman’s absence as a decision borne of confidence, but even to my 11-year-old eyes, the writing was plainly on the wall. Before his August comment, Akin had led every poll of the race since March. Afterwards, McCaskill took a decisive polling lead and never let go; she ended up winning the race by 15 points, even as Mitt Romney won Missouri by double digits the same day.

I’m bringing you all on this trip down memory lane because, after a controversy broke surrounding another Republican candidate on Friday — this time, North Carolina gubernatorial nominee Mark Robinson — there was an understandable impulse to blame the whole thing on Donald Trump. (CNN reported that Robinson, a Trump ally, made “dozens of disturbing comments” on a pornography website between 2008 and 2012, including posting lewd sexual messages and calling himself a “black NAZI.” Robinson was previously known for a long history of inflammatory comments.)

Columnists from the New York Times and Bloomberg pinned Robinson’s rise squarely to the MAGA movement; a Washington Post analyst declared that “Mark Robinson is a Trump problem of Trump’s own making.” The ex-president, the Post noted, has “directly and indirectly foisted damaging candidates on the GOP” for years.

But the Republican tradition of blowing perfectly winnable races pre-dates Trump, as the Akin contretemps reminds us. It actually pre-dates Akin as well: in the 2010 cycle, Republicans had prime opportunities to pick up Senate seats in Nevada and Delaware (with the former including the chance to oust Harry Reid, the GOP bête noire and then-Senate majority leader.) The party’s nominations of Sharron Angle, who seemingly endorsed armed revolution, and Christine O’Donnell, who was not a witch, put an end to that.

Then, the 2012 cycle brought Akin and Richard Mourdock, the (similarly unsuccessful) Republican Senate nominee in Indiana who made similarly controversial comments about rape. (“I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that’s something God intended to happen,” Mourdock said.)

So, no, Republicans opting to nominate extreme candidates in competitive races (in all four of the 2010 and 2012 examples, more moderate Republican options were available) is not a new, Trump-era phenomenon. GOP primary voters prized pugilistic rhetoric long before Trump took over the party (in fact, that’s a big part of why Trump was able to take over the party). But that doesn’t mean there isn’t anything about the GOP that has shifted since the 2010s.

In 2012, it took less than day for the party’s presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, to distance himself from Akin’s comments. His aides put out a statement the night the story broke; the next morning, Romney himself slammed Akin’s rhetoric as “insulting, inexcusable, and frankly, wrong.” Later that afternoon, the party’s vice presidential candidate, Paul Ryan, called Akin and urged him to drop out.

Flash forward to 2024, and Trump has yet to respond to the controversy engulfing Robinson, whom he has poured praise on in the past. On Saturday, he appeared in North Carolina for a rally and didn’t mention the ongoing firestorm. Far from calling on Robinson to withdraw, the GOP’s VP candidate, JD Vance, has defended the lieutenant governor. “Allegations aren’t necessarily reality,” Vance told an interviewer on Saturday. Asked if he believes Robinson’s denials, Vance replied: “I don’t not believe him.”

The main difference between the Republican Party of 2012 and today is not the willingness on the part of primary voters to nominate fringe, destined-to-lose candidates; that appetite has been there for more than a decade now. It’s the unwillingness on the part of Republican leaders to even try to exercise any discipline over these candidates, to condemn them, or try to push them out of a race for the good of the party.

As recently as 2016, when it was revealed that Donald Trump had joked about sexual assault on the “Access Hollywood” tape, scores of top Republicans abandoned him. In the 2024 cycle, when Trump was actually held liable for sexual abuse, Republican elites were unfazed. As recently as 2019, House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy removed then-GOP Rep. Steve King from committees after comments about white nationalism. Now, inflammatory right-wing members like Marjorie Taylor Greene are not only not punished by House leaders, but given prime committee slots. The GOP is now a party fully without guardrails.

On the state level, as well, many Republican state parties have atrophied into dysfunctional pro-Trump factions with fringe leaders, not exactly figures likely to intervene in primaries.

What is most striking about this laissez-faire strategy is how rarely it has succeeded — and how unbothered the party appears by the win-loss ratio. Paul Ryan tried to nudge Todd Akin out of the Missouri Senate race because he was worried Akin would lose the seat, which he did, in a landslide. Now, Robinson is all but certain to cost the GOP an incredibly winnable governorship in a purple (even slightly red-leaning) state. And Republican leaders appear perfectly content to sit by and watch, betraying a remarkably high degree of loss tolerance.

In the GOP’s recent history of nominating not-obviously-electable candidates in competitive races, the party has scored exactly one high-profile win — the presidency in 2016 (no small victory, to be sure) — and suffered many, many more avoidable losses. In the 2022 midterms, these fringe candidates almost uniformly crashed and burned in swing states, losing winnable governorships in Michigan and Pennsylvania and Senate seats in Arizona and Georgia, among others.

The resulting consequences for the party’s political power have not been minor. According to modeling by SplitTicket’s, candidate quality has won Democrats ten extra Senate seats in the last three cycles. In other words, the only thing that has stood between Republicans and winning a (near-filibuster-proof) Senate majority has been…themselves. This year, although the GOP is (finally) favored to retake the Senate, their majority will likely still be smaller than it could have been for this same reason.

As in 2022, when many of the losing Republicans were first-time candidates, Republicans have repeated the same strategy this cycle, putting forward Senate candidates in Arizona, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin who have never held elected office. All five states are expected to be highly competitive on the presidential level; in all five states, the Republican Senate candidates haven’t led in a single poll all cycle.

As I noted in August, this striking polling gap can largely be attributed to the fact that many of the blue candidates are “Generic Democrats” and many of the red candidates are, well, less typical contenders. The same story can be see in gubernatorial races like North Carolina’s, where Democrats are running Josh Stein, an understated two-term attorney general, against the inflammatory Robinson. A key lesson of this cycle, if the polling comes to fruition, is that American voters throng to these moderate, generic-seeming candidates, and are repelled by fringe alternatives.

Although Trump — because of his unique celebrity, long-known persona, and well of passionate support — is sometimes able to confound this dynamic, the preference for moderation can still be seen in favorability ratings on the presidential level, as I wrote about last week. In an NBC poll this weekend, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz boasted +6 and +7 favorability ratings, respectively. Donald Trump and JD Vance both sat at -13. Project 2025, which Democrats have successfully made into an avatar of Republican extremism, has a favorability of -53.

Nate Silver has noted this was “Trump’s election to lose”; indeed, as in 2022, many of the fundamentals of the cycle (an unpopular incumbent, unpopular economy, etc) favor Republicans. But the GOP is continually its own worst enemy — even if Trump squeaks by once again, it is likely that Mark Robinson and many of Trump’s other acolytes will fail, squandering winnable races in a favorable cycle because of a primary base that doesn’t seem to have learned this lesson and a leadership unwilling (or unable) to teach them. (“Generic Republicans,” like Brian Kemp, are also electoral weapons when they get nominated. They just don’t get nominated very often.)

The Democratic Party is not without its faults, but in this respect, the two parties couldn’t be more different. On the presidential level, the party’s leadership executed a swift ouster of its losing candidate, Joe Biden, earlier this year, something the Republican leadership could never muster. (The thought of George W. Bush and Mike Johnson uniting, like Obama and Pelosi, to overturn the will of GOP primary voters and oust Trump is laughable.) Downballot, while Mitch McConnell muses about “candidate quality,” the Democratic Party’s voters and leaders actually put those words into action, centering electability in their nominating processes.¹

Even this is not an entirely new phenomenon, although — again — it is one that Trump has supercharged. In the 1960s and 70s, both parties suffered landslide defeats: Republicans with Barry Goldwater in 1964 and Democrats with George McGovern in 1972. (The two presidential nominees won 52 and 17 electoral votes, respectively.) The 1972 loss led Democrats to pivot to the moderate southerner, Jimmy Carter, in the next election, and then on to and Clinton and Obama and Biden. Political scientist Seth Masket has written that the defeat hangs over many Democrats to this day, a perpetual warning each election cycle.

On the other hand, Goldwater, in defeat, became a martyr to many Republicans; his loss paved the way for the Reagan Revolution, led by his most famous surrogate. Instead of presaging a move to the center, “Goldwater’s monumental loss marked the beginning of a shift to the Right” on the part of the Republican Party, as a Heritage Foundation report has put it.

Similarly, in and around 2020, both parties were overtaken by ideologies that have proven to be electoral poison — various “woke” policies for Democrats, and election denialism for Republicans. In this cycle, the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, is anxiously working to exorcise the ghosts of her party’s (and her own) leftward shift in 2019-20. Republicans, meanwhile, have re-nominated the leader of their own 2020-21 point of vulnerability, the “Stop the Steal” movement, and he has only gone further with his rhetoric in that area.

Previous parties have nominated flawed candidates, but at least they tried to correct for their mistakes. Even the Republicans of the last decade, after the Akin cycle, performed an autopsy when they lost; today’s Republicans are more likely to exhume the dead.

While Democrats are highly loss-averse, Republicans frequently court defeat if it means maintaining ideological (or at least rhetorical) purity. That is how you end up with a party of Kamala Harris and Josh Stein on one hand, and Donald Trump and Mark Robinson on the other — one party that consistently punches above its weight, especially if you consider its deficits in the Senate and Electoral College, and another with a years-long talent for turning potential wins into losses.

Donald Trump promised that, under his leadership, Republicans would be “tired of winning.” Instead, they have grown shockingly comfortable with losing.

1. Notably, Democrats often even work to center electability (or its inverse) in the other party’s nominating process, often meddling in rival primaries in a way Republicans have rarely been organized enough to do to Democrats (or in a a way Democrats have not proven gullible enough to fall for).

To bring things full circle, it was Claire McCaskill who was a trailblazer with this strategy in 2012, boosting Akin in the Republican primary. Meanwhile, this year, Democrats likely would have done the same to Robinson, except he was already polling so well in his primary that they didn’t need to.