Mitch McConnell spent 41 years building the most powerful Republican machine in the Senate..he blocked nominees.. killed legislation.. outlasted six presidents.. and bent the entire GOP caucus to his will for four decades.. (Andy Barr won)

X.com ^ | 5/19/2026 | 🇺🇸 Thomas A. Whitaker @WhitakerTA

[ransomnote]

🇺🇸 Thomas A. Whitaker
@WhitakerTA_
·
15h
🚨 Do you understand what quietly happened in Kentucky tonight..

Mitch McConnell spent 41 years building the most powerful Republican machine in the Senate..

he blocked nominees.. killed legislation.. outlasted six presidents.. and bent the entire GOP caucus to his will for four decades..

and the moment he stepped back..

Trump walked in on May 1st.. endorsed Andy Barr.. offered the only real rival an ambassadorship.. and the rival dropped out the same week..

> Cameron — the man who was supposed to carry McConnell's network forward — entered with a polling lead.. raised money.. had the name recognition.. had the Christian conservative base..

> Barr had none of that early.. until Trump made one phone call and one diplomatic offer..

> Cameron finished at 30%.. Barr won with 60%..

> the seat McConnell held since 1984 flipped to a Trump loyalist in a single primary night..

> the first open Kentucky Senate seat in 42 years.. decided by an endorsement and an ambassadorship..

every single establishment figure watching this tonight told their donors "the McConnell network is durable".. every single one assumed the old machine had enough infrastructure to survive his retirement..

it didn't survive a single election cycle..

not a scandal.. not a Democrat.. not a generational shift..

one endorsement.. one ambassadorship offer.. and 41 years of political infrastructure collapsed in an evening..

the quiet part nobody is saying out loud.. Trump didn't just win a primary tonight.. he erased the last internal friction point inside the Senate Republican caucus without a single floor vote..

it's only getting quieter from here..

I'll keep you updated. Turn on notifications. 🚨

[arthurus]

AND the 16th AND the 19th !

[Albion Wilde]

You have followed these behavioral abberations of the GOP for a long time. Your post contains multiple deft insights about the Republicans’ shamefully exasperating and ultimately sinful-by-omission lack of strategy. I think you should research carefully, go with a good agent and editor, and turn your thoughts on this into a book.

[Reily]

Give the states their proper role & you might get the 16th repealed!

Forget the 19th! Not going to happen even under the best of circumstances.

[Governor Dinwiddie]

#44: "Genius move by Trump"

Now President Trump needs to get rid of Thune. I suspect if he gets Patel on the case, he'll
uncover some CCTV from the Minneapolis airport of Thune's white wingtips tapping away
to beat the meat band.

[gopno1]

I actually laughed out loud at the phrase “senile Thad Cochran” for a solid three minutes.

[arthurus]

19th.. Understood, but that one is the one that assures the progress to socialism. My wife argued with me about that 25 years ago and finally convinced me that women want different things from men. They want protection for themselves and their children. As marriage becomes something for the history books women are mofe avid for protection for themselves and for the government to make everyone “be nice.” I had always thought of the 17th as being the fatal error of our history but the 19th is ultimately worse. All three together and we can only hope to put off the total managerial state for a while.

[Reily]

Thatcher her existence shows that’s not a absolute!

[arthurus]

Of course it is not absolute. But it is the general trend. It is obvious in the news daily. So called Gen Z women have in the main abjured having live children and vote Left for new privileges , calling them “rights.” They use the state and the courts to cow men and judges and legislators bow to their demand for “services” to replace the husbands they are unable or unwilling to attract.

[Biblebelter]

China Mitch was a TRUE BLUE REPUBLICAN.

His legacy?

All those TRUE BLUE REPUBLICAN snakes still holding fort in that SNAKE PIT of the United Elites Senate.

Mitch has GROOMED well.

I read Tiny Tim Scott called The Don begging him not to endorse Paxton.

China Mitch may be on his way out the door, but his “legacy” lives on.

[Reily]

Agree!
But I’m not going to tilt at windmills - repeal the 19th and ignore other doable reforms!

Another point I will bring up. We live in a very “feminized” society now. I think its a natural outgrowth of living in “relatively good times”. You can just slide through life, someone else - the government will take care of you. Just look for one entertainment experience after another - pass the chips and beer. I know a lot of men who substitute feeling for thinking. They emote they don’t reason. They don’t know the difference and they don’t know they do it. Thomas Sowell points this out all the time. He blames our intellectually bereft and corrupt K12 system. I agree! You see that here on FR.

[Republican Wildcat]

Cameron has already lost a statewide race in Kentucky (for governor in 2023), so I’m not sure it would have been a good idea to run him again under any circumstances.

Given that he was running against a very popular incumbent with a nearly 70% approval rating and who had many times the campaign cash, how does that make any sense? Hardly a walk in the park if not impossible to defeat an incumbent with popularity that high. He had also won statewide office prior to that, and would have certainly won in a landslide had he run for re-election as Attorney General instead of making the run for governor.

[Republican Wildcat]

Chrisine O’Donnell raised tens of millions of dollars and could have ran one of the best media campaigns of any candidate in the country - especially given she was in the tiny state of Delaware. Instead, she ran poorly produced ads looking like they were filmed in her basement and made on Windows Media Player, and started off with the infamous “I’m not a witch” ad - whatever very slim chance she had was gone from the start.

Todd Akin was the Democrats’ hand-picked candidate. Claire McCaskill herself ran ads to help him win the GOP primary. Money will spent on her part. He was a joke - and McConnell had nothing to do with personality and awful verbal gaffes.

Mourdock was fully and heavily supported through that entire general election by all GOP campaign committees and organizations - don’t know where you are coming up with the claim he was not.

Although there are conspiracy theories that may or may not have merit that they were connected somehow, the PAC running those ads against Chris McDaniel were not McConnell’s PAC.

Roy Moore was a horrifically poor candidate even without those allegations - there was zero reason to remove the incumbent Senator in that primary. He had been voting with us every single vote and supporting President Trump’s agenda and Trump endorsed him whole heartedly. Roy Moore didn’t even take the race seriously himself - going out of state to attend a ball game to weekend prior to the election. That’s ridiculous.

The base didn’t appear to be supportive of Bolduc in the NH election as he was raising no money. McConnell only controls where his PAC spends money - he has no control over whether the party base contributes money to individual candidates. “McConnell refused to fund” - he can’t, and doesn’t “fund” any candidate. However, the claim is not correct - McConnell’s own PAC spent many millions of dollars on this NH race in support of Bolduc: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/17/politics/senate-republican-super-pac-ad-spending/index.html But for McConnell’s PAC and NRSC support, Bolduc would have had little to no support given how poorly funded of a campaign he ran himself.

Same story with Blake Masters - it is not within McConnell’s power to fund or defund any candidate - so he has no ability “refused” to fund. If he had no funding, that was his own lack of grassroots support. However, it is also true as it was in the above race that McConnell’s PAC did spend in support Masters (though pulled out in late September), and certainly the NRSC spent heavily on Masters. https://www.breitbart.com/midterm-election/2022/10/07/blake-masters-receives-seven-figure-investment-rick-scotts-nrsc/

Bad candidates that have no support from the grassroots and unable to raise the funds to run their own campaigns are going to be at a disadvantage. PAC money is supposed to be supplemental support - not the core of support. You can only blame McConnell or the establishment for so much - but they are not hypnotists controlling the base to refuse to fund candidates to give them a fighting chance.

[Republican Wildcat]

If you think it is a minor issue that those numerous 5-4 conservative decisions we got over the last 10 years were not instead 5-4 to give the Left victories on many key issues, there’s nothing that can be said to you - you are simply outside of reality.

[Political Junkie Too]

O'Donnell was actively undermined by the state GOP. The state reported that she had unpaid liens on her property, and that caused the GOP establishment to not support her. She said that was not true and that she was fully paid up. It didn't matter, she had no infrastructure after that and was forced to self-campaign.

After she lost, it was reported that the lien was a data error in the state systems and was "fixed." O'Donnell's campaign manager believed at the time that it was an inside-job by the GOP to frag O'Donnell because she beat Mike Castle in the primary.

Mourdock was distanced by other Republicans after his rape comment. I don't think they stood by him all the way through the campaign.

Akin was the hand-picked candidate, but the GOP could have still put up a fight, but they didn't.

The point is that McConnell didn't really try. Now we see the Democrats actively defending a Nazi-sympathizer while Republicans like Cornyn, Tillis, and Cassidy are still playing by the loser GOP rules.

-PJ

[Republican Wildcat]

That other issue was used during the primary and it obviously didn’t work as she won - and probably because of them - Castle had zero reason to get that personal and it caused a massive backlash - I remember O’Donnell herself commenting “people are struggling and they feel like he is attacking them.” But regardless, O’Donnell had many millions of dollars and she could have hired the finest media company on the planet to run a state of the art media campaign with full market saturation, and certainly not that “I’m not a witch” absurd ad. She chose to run a pathetically poor general election campaign - no reason she had to. She had more than adequate resources a lot of candidates could only dream of having.

Mourdock’s comment was radioactive...no one made him have that verbal gaffe. It was over at that point...”standing by him” would have only fanned the flames. Certainly Akin’s were much worse - and they were used nationwide to attack *all* Republicans as supporting rape. McConnell did nothing to cause them to self destruct like that - they did that on their own.

The record on his support of other candidates is clear - sometimes spending enormous on them but you still said he “didn’t try.” Your claims for why he supposedly didn’t support certain candidates in some cases was not correct as the record shows his PAC spent enormous sums on some of the specific candidates you claimed weren’t supported. Also similar candidates like JD Vance were heavily supported as well - looks like about $30 million was spent to help JD Vance in that Senate race in 2022. But again, McConnell’s PAC is not in charge of funding any candidate - it is only supplemental support. You claimed he “funded” or “didn’t fund” candidates - he doesn’t do that.

I remember similar comments made before. I recall a specific poster named saying “not one penny was spent by the establishment to support Ken Buck” in his Senate race in Colorado in 2010. You look it up - and Karl Rove’s Super PAC “Crossroads GPS” alone spent nearly $10 million to support him, let alone the millions spent by the NRSC on top of that. Yet it was still said he had no establishment support. It is just a default statement no matter what actually happened - then if I point this out, it is said I am carrying the water for the GOPe by merely stating these facts. Someone argued until they were blue in the face no ads were being run to support Hershel Walker in Georgia - I pulled up the specific spending records reported to the FCC, and also pulled up the logs showing what networks the ads were running on, but also specifically the programs they were running on and the specific times they had already run - they still insisted no ads were being purchase or run, even with absolute proof presented.

[Political Junkie Too]

I think that Mourdock's comment was survivable, it's just that the GOP at the time was afraid of its own shadow and fearful of exercising power when they had it.

Mourdock's comment was made in the wake of two other prior comments that froze the GOP in a panic.

1. Foster Friess, the major donor to the 2012 Rick Santorum campaign said in February, "Back in my day, they used Bayer aspirin for contraceptives. The gals put it between their knees, and it wasn't that costly."

2. Todd Akin said in August that pregnancy from rape was "rare" because in cases of "legitimate rape," a woman's body could biologically prevent pregnancy. That was strike two.

3. Richard Mourdock said in October "I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen." Strike three.

We know that the Democrats are masters at "pouncing" on any Republican comments, even going so far as to twisting what they say to turn it into a gaffe (like they do with President Trump).

It worked in 2012 with Romney as the head of the Republicans squishes, but it doesn't work so well today.

-PJ