Kansas hadn't sent a Democrat to the Senate in a century. On November 3rd, Sen. Roger Marshall lost his seat and the streak died with it. Mississippi — deep red, reliable, boring Mississippi — watched Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith go down too. Two states that should have been on autopilot. Two Republican incumbents who ran like it was 2004.
Kurt Schlichter's Townhall column calls it what it was: "the absolute disaster last Tuesday."
The body count is staggering. Iowa, Ohio, Kansas, Mississippi, Alaska, Texas — all flipped or lost. Sen. Susan Collins in Maine, gone, though that one at least had geography working against her. Sen. Darline Graham in South Carolina, the appointed successor to the late Lindsey Graham, couldn't hold the seat. In Texas, the Republican candidate lost by 12 points. Twelve. In Texas.
Schlichter's argument isn't subtle, and it doesn't need to be. The candidates who lost weren't underfunded or unlucky. They were managed by the same consultant class that's been losing winnable races for a decade — the same strategists who think "electability" means running candidates with the charisma of a dentist's office pamphlet and the policy positions of a 2012 focus group. Former Vice President Mike Pence's wing of the party, the polite-loss caucus, produced exactly the results you'd expect when you run zombie campaigns against energized Democrats.
The column names names. Former Sen. John Cornyn's political orbit in Texas. The establishment machinery that backed candidates who couldn't articulate a single reason voters should care. The consultant fees kept flowing. The results didn't.
Schlichter points to Florida as the counter-model. Gov. Ron DeSantis built an actual organization. He fought cultural battles in public, took the hits, and came out stronger. The GOP seats in Florida held. The ones managed by Washington consultants didn't. Pundit Will Chamberlain made the same observation — the candidates who ran as fighters kept their jobs, and the ones who ran as résumés lost theirs.
The establishment's rebuttal writes itself: Trump was the drag, not the candidates. Except the candidates who ran closest to Trump's playbook — direct communication, clear policy fights, refusing to apologize for conservative positions — outperformed the ones who kept him at arm's length. The drag wasn't at the top of the ticket. It was in the consultant meetings where someone decided that Kansas and Mississippi didn't need real campaigns because they were "safe."
A century-long winning streak in Kansas. Gone. Not because the state turned blue overnight, but because somebody in a suit decided Roger Marshall could coast on the letter next to his name. The consultants who made that call are already pitching their services for 2028.
Twelve points in Texas. The invoice is probably already in the mail.