Extremism and bad candidates cost the GOP the Senate before. What does the party do now?

The questions for the GOP establishment are whether it wants these conspiracy theories to infect its ranks even more than they already have and — if it doesn’t — whether it actually has the will to stop it.

Several purveyors of the stolen-election claim have announced campaigns in high-profile Senate races in recent weeks. Among them are former Ohio state treasurer Josh Mandel and Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks — both of whom featured that claim as part of their campaign launches — and scandal-plagued former Missouri governor Eric Greitens. Rep. Jody Hice (Ga.) also announced a primary challenge to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) in a more symbolic race for Trump allies, given Raffensperger’s repeated repudiations of Trump’s claims.

Brooks was one of the foremost House architects of the effort to challenge the electoral college votes before the Capitol riot, with that effort eventually earning the support of several GOP senators such as Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Ted Cruz (R-Tex.). He said upon the announcement of his campaign that, in the 2020 election, “America suffered the worst voter fraud and election theft in history.”

Greitens has focused his launch this week more on his support for Trump’s agenda than alleged 2020 fraud, but he too has in the past given voice to multiple conspiracy theories about the election and the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

Greitens represents a particularly problematic potential GOP nominee for the Senate, given his resignation as governor less than three years ago. He made that decision in the face of allegations that he improperly used a charity donor list — which led to criminal charges that were later dismissed — and allegations of sexual misconduct. The Republican-controlled legislature threatened to impeach him, and among those calling for his exit was then-state Attorney General Hawley.

Hawley stood by that call this week, and Greitens on Wednesday got even more of a taste of the kind of establishment-oriented resistance he might confront.

Hewitt compared Greitens’s candidacy to that of former Missouri congressman Todd Akin, whose comment about “legitimate rape” helped hand a Senate seat to Democrats a decade ago. “I’m afraid Todd Akin got killed over ‘legitimate rape,’ ” Hewitt said. “And in this Missouri report, you were accused by a witness of ‘half rape.’ What are you going to do when the ads attack you of ‘half rape?’ ”

The Akin parallel is actually a good one to the current moment — but perhaps less for the reasons Hewitt enunciated. Back then, the opposition of the GOP establishment was a less a scarlet letter than a badge of honor in Republican primaries. The National Republican Senatorial Committee sought to intervene in several Senate races, only to see the GOP base almost reflexively go in the opposite direction — with its critics often playing up the opposition from the party.

And that almost definitely cost the GOP Senate seats — if not the majority. The potential nominees who might have more appeal to the broader electorate lost, and the seats went to Democrats in states including Colorado, Delaware, Indiana, Missouri and Nevada. It’s not clear that the preferred GOP nominees would have won each seat, but the winners were ill-equipped even in some conservative-leaning states. The national GOP soon took a publicly hands-off approach to primaries.

The situation is somewhat different now. All the states in which the candidates mentioned at the top are running are pretty solidly red, with Missouri and Ohio in particular trending that way. Given history suggests 2022 is likely to be a good year for Republicans, the GOP could just as well let things play out and not bother with trying to determine who might inhabit its Senate ranks in the near future — either because it fears trying or because it truly doesn’t care and a vote is a vote.

But even aside from whether the likes of Greitens, Mandel and Brooks can win is how much Republicans decide their potential victories are worth trying to prevent in the name of other, less extreme, less Trump-ian nominees. That will be as telling as anything when it comes to what course today’s GOP intends and hopes to chart moving forward. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) voted against convicting Trump in his impeachment trial, but only for procedural reasons and even as he rebuked the efforts to claim widespread voter fraud and Trump’s role in the Capitol riot. He’s now confronted with welcoming potential GOP senators who went even further than Cruz and Hawley.

And as the races a decade ago showed, even the states conservatives expect to win might not be so simple with the wrong nominee, and in a 50-50 Senate, every seat counts.