"If we don’t change The Swamp is going to swamp us."

Kurt Schlichter writes at Town Hall,

We got lazy after we vanquished Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit and installed what has turned out to be the most conservative president since St. Ronald. We had the House, and we had the Senate, so we relaxed. Sure, we’ve gotten some great things done, but every step has been a battle thanks to the enraged Dems, their lying media pals, and that cheesy bunch of Never Trump weasels who are motivated by rage at how we dissed them and their Conservative, Inc., cronies. The enemy is creating a sense of permanent chaos, and they intend to present themselves as a return to normality. “Vote for us liberals and everything goes back to normal,” they’ll lie. They’ll actually amp up the insanity with impeachment shenanigans and obstruction, and they’ll probably bumble their way into provoking a short and hilarious civil war.

...We’re talking about us now. Let’s talk about what we did wrong. Let’s talk about what we need to change, because if we don’t change The Swamp is going to swamp us. Our opponents are motivated. They are organizing. They are targeting the weakest Republicans, and in Virginia and Alabama they snatched seats we should have kept or taken.

...We need to figure out who is the most conservative candidate who can win, and back him/her – that’s the old Buckley rule.

...In Virginia, the Democrats nearly took the legislature by identifying vulnerable seats, sneaking in with money, tech, and logistics, and pushing turn-out of motivated pinkos. They caught us napping. That’s their plan in 2018 too – but now we know the score. We need to identify our vulnerabilities and start building our defenses – and we can also to identify their vulnerabilities so we can snatch some Democrat seats in Trump country.

...We owed Roy Moore nothing – he owed us loyalty, which he failed to show when he refused to drop out and make way for an undamaged candidate.

...Weird candidates lose. The claims of illegality against him are shaky, but based on his own admissions, the best case was this guy scammed on high school girls in his thirties. Okay, legal or not, that’s going to turn people off. And it did –Republican turn out tanked because when your argument is, “Well, my creeping on teens was technically legal,” you’re going to lose votes.

Oh, and it’s not just that he was a Class A Strange-o. Let’s not forget his awful campaign. While the Democrats were crunching numbers and working the data, Roy was disappearing for days at a time and then riding to the polls on Sassy the Wonder Horse. Perhaps more GOP voters would have turned out for someone who neither checked out the local cheerleader action nor shopped at Elmer Gantry’s Big Warehouse of Redneck Stereotypes.

Yeah, Moore was still better than that baby-killing advocate Doug Jones, but Luther Strange would have won. Mo Brooks would have won. Sassy the Wonder Horse would have won. Moore lost. We need to stop nominating losers.

We have a lot of Senate races coming up. I like some of the more conservative folks – Dr. Kelli Ward in Arizona, Austin Petersen in Missouri. But here’s the thing – if they, fairly or not, allow themselves to be marginalized such as they are less likely win the general than their GOP primary opponents, I’ll toss them over. Nothing personal, just business. It’s their job to win, and we don’t owe any politicians loyalty to back them if they can’t complete that basic task. This is a performance-based endeavor and even though we like them, if they aren’t the ones most likely to win then they need to go. This is about winning. Period.

The lessons are clear. We need to understand that our enemy is serious, motivated and intent on finding and exploiting the weaknesses in our candidates. We need to be ruthless in deciding who is most likely to win, even if it means backing someone who is 80% with us instead of 90%. It means being coldly rational instead of over-heatedly emotional.

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