U.S. Senate Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday blamed the power wielded by former President Donald Trump in the Republican primaries for the «quality of candidates» problems his party struggled with in the midterm congressional elections.
Speaking to reporters a week after Republicans lost the Senate runoff in Georgia, which expanded the Senate’s Democratic majority to 51 seats, McConnell has said his party was hampered by «weak candidates» in several of the states where the races were held.
«We ended up having a (problem) of candidate quality (…) Look at Arizona, look at New Hampshire and also a challenging situation in Georgia,» the Republican minority leader in the Senate has reiterated, mentioning states in which Republican candidates were chosen by Trump, as collected by ‘The Hill’.
«Our ability to control the results of the primaries was quite limited because the support of the former president turned out to be very decisive in these primaries, so, in my opinion, something better should have been done with the cards that were dealt,» he said about the result in the Upper House.
The Republican Party opted in its primaries to vote for candidates who had Trump’s support, such as Herschel Walker, who lost last week to Senator Raphael Warnock in Georgia.
«Hopefully, in the next cycle, we’ll have quality candidates across the board and a better outcome,» the GOP politician has said.
Meanwhile, McConnell has said that he never predicted the «red wave» that some of his colleagues predicted, in allusions to the forecast that the Republicans would obtain a great victory in the midterm elections, according to the newspaper.
In addition, the Senate minority leader has argued that some Republicans have forgotten «the lessons of the 2010 and 2012 elections», when the Republican Party lost good opportunities to win races in states like Delaware, Indiana and Missouri because extremist or controversial Republican candidates won the primaries of those years.
«I think we had the opportunity to relearn once again that you have to have quality candidates to win competitive Senate races (…) We went through this in 2010 and 2012,» he remarked.
