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Any list of the worst candidates running for office in 2026 would have to start with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Utterly lacking in charisma, Paxton is a flaccid campaigner with a stunning history of corruption whose greatest professional achievement may be staying out of jail. With just weeks to go before the election, a series of embarrassing stories has dogged him, the latest of which is the emergence of a video of him partying in Dubai with his mistress and a couple of fugitives from American justice.
Paxton only defeated incumbent Sen. John Cornyn in the GOP primary because of President Trump’s support — yet Trump can barely speak his name without saying that Paxton is inarticulate, ugly, and a terrible dresser.
The answer to the obvious question — how could someone as unappealing as Paxton get as far in politics as he has? — lies in the internal dynamics of today’s Republican Party.
But the GOP’s problem goes far beyond Paxton. They are confronting a political emergency in this year’s midterms, and doing it with an absolutely stunning collection of lemons, lunkheads, and losers.
From a risky election to a potential catastrophe
At the start of 2026, the idea that Democrats would have had even the tiniest chance of taking back the Senate in the midterm elections was almost absurd.
Needing a net gain of four seats to take control, Democrats have to defend two seats in states Donald Trump won in 2024 (Michigan and Georgia), plus another five seats Kamala Harris won by single digits. Meanwhile, Republicans have to defend only one seat in a state Harris won (Maine), and one in a state Trump won by double digits.
The opposition party always does well in midterms, but in order to take the Senate, Democrats will have to nearly run the table, winning every close race — an extremely tall order.
Yet today, it appears more likely than not that they will do just that.
FiftyPlusOne puts the odds of a Democratic takeover at 72 percent, while the Cook Political Report rates six Republican-held seats as Toss-Ups and one (North Carolina) as Likely Democratic; just one Democratic-held seat (Michigan) is in the Toss-Up category.
The most important reason Republicans are in this position is, of course, Donald Trump. But in race after race, Republicans would be in a far better position if their candidates weren’t so poor.
Paxton is the most obvious, but it’s happening all over the country. A brief tour:
North Carolina: With Trump’s endorsement in hand, former RNC chair Michael Whatley cleared the Senate primary field. But he has struggled to gain any traction against former Gov. Roy Cooper, and Republicans have now essentially given up on him, pulling their money out of a state they haven’t lost in a presidential race since 2008 to send it to candidates who might have a chance.
Kansas: Facing a serious challenge for the first time in his career, Sen. Roger Marshall is proving to be a hapless campaigner. Though Trump won the state by 16 points two years ago, Republicans have had to rush in with money to shore up Marshall, who has been unable to deal with stories about him relentlessly pursuing patients with overdue bills — 700 of whom he sued — when he was a practicing doctor.
Georgia: When the cycle started, Sen. Jon Ossoff was supposed to be the most vulnerable Democrat running. But Republican Mike Collins has proven to be such a weak candidate that Republicans now consider the race a lost cause.
Ohio: The Republican Senate nominee in Ohio is Jon Husted, who, believe it or not, is the incumbent. Haven’t heard of him? Neither has almost anyone in Ohio, though now that Trump went on a long riff about Husted’s rockin’ bod (“I looked at his ass”), perhaps more voters will notice him.
South Carolina: When Trump appointed Darline Graham to fill the seat of her late brother Lindsey, everyone assumed she’d glide to victory in this deep-red state. Instead, she has proven to be an embarrassment as a candidate. Asked a question about Taiwan in a primary debate, she said “I’m not that informed on national security, but I do support the military,” adding that “national security is not my thing.” Points for candor, I guess, but polls have shown her with a lead narrow enough that the party has had to divert funds to help her.
Michigan: Former congressman Mike Rogers has run an uninspired campaign, unable to separate himself from the president and leveling “Jerk Store”-quality attacks on Abdul El-Sayed. While the much more dynamic El-Sayed has no doubt been hurt by anti-Muslim bigotry, keeping the race close, Rogers has also been harmed by the fact that he moved to Florida after retiring from the House. Speaking of which:
Florida: Sen. Ashley Moody — who was appointed to the seat when Marco Rubio joined the Trump administration — has been running a campaign that verges on invisibility, to the point that members of her party are getting increasingly concerned. Politico reporter Kimberly Leonard, who is based in Florida, recently said that Republicans in the state privately call it “a basement campaign similar to Joe Biden’s” in 2020. “There’s a lot of frustration by [Republican] elected officials throughout Florida that Senator Moody hasn’t been more active on the campaign trail.”
That’s just the Senate candidates. Up and down the ballot, the GOP has nominated crackpots and nitwits, none more colorful than Victor Marx, their nominee for governor in Colorado.
Marx refuses to say how many people he has killed (though he says his stepfather forced him to commit his first murder at age 7), hunts demons, claims he can call in US airstrikes, and boasts of being a seventh-degree black belt in a martial art he invented. Normal stuff!
A longstanding problem gets worse
Both parties find themselves weighed down by problematic candidates from time to time; “candidate quality” is a perennial challenge, and something difficult to measure. Intelligence, eloquence, energy, a lack of skeletons in the closet, natural magnetism — all combine to separate a good candidate from a bad one. Some just have it, and some don’t.
Democrats have had their share of untalented politicians, even some who managed to get their party’s presidential nomination. But they tend to be of a particular type: smart, earnest wonks with a deep understanding of government and policy, but with limited charisma. Think Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, or John Kerry.
The profile of a bad Republican candidate, on the other hand, is very different.
While the Democratic base has grown more liberal but also more highly educated in the last couple of decades, the Republican base has become more ideologically extreme but also more committed to a particular style of politics: loud, angry, violent in its rhetoric, encased in a deranged media bubble, and indulgent of almost any idea, no matter how ludicrous. Candidates who embody that style then wind up winning primary campaigns, and many of them have ugly ideas or are just outright buffoons — or both.
This has been true for some time, but the problem has grown more acute in recent years — particularly after the Tea Party movement rose up in the wake of Barack Obama’s election in 2008, and even more so eight years later when Trump took over the party.
In modern Republican primaries, candidates compete to see who can be the most extreme, not just ideologically but temperamentally as well. Since Republicans have contempt for government, their primaries don’t favor experienced candidates. Since the conservative movement is awash in conspiracy theories, their primaries don’t weed out conspiracy theorists. And since right-wing media is so central to Republican politics, those who appeal to it are more likely to succeed — and those tend to be people who are bombastic, dishonest, and crude.
In other words, GOP candidates compete to see who is the most like Trump, even before his Eye of Sauron alights on their race. When it does, he puts his thumb on the scale for whoever has demonstrated the most abject loyalty to him — whether that person will make a good general election candidate or not. That’s what he did with Ken Paxton, and what he’s done with many other candidates.
We saw this four years ago, when Democrats managed a surprisingly good midterm performance not only because of backlash to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, but because Trump’s influence produced some epically bad candidates. Herschel Walker, Blake Masters, and Mehmet Oz all had Trump’s support, and all lost winnable Senate races. Nevertheless, those were seats in swing states; this year, bad Republican candidates could lose in heavily Republican states like Texas and Kansas.
This is not a problem from which the GOP will free itself once Trump leaves office in 2029. Even if he withdraws quietly to Mar-a-Lago and stops promoting candidates loyal to him (which is highly unlikely), he has given birth to a generation of Republican politicians who want to be like him, or worse. And he has trained Republican voters to expect just that from their candidates.
Right now it’s hard to imagine the GOP raising up candidates with crossover appeal like Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush. And it’s going to stay that way for some time to come.
That’s it for now
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Thanks for reading.
And these are the face of white “superiority”!
While dishonesty has become political common usage, these Republicans are bad at even that.