Post Politics Now: Democrats pick Jeffries as leader; House votes to avert rail strike
Blake Masters. GOP Senate candidates underperformed their party’s Election Day showing in crucial races in Arizona, Georgia, New Hampshire, Ohio and arguably Nevada and Pennsylvania, too — but not all by the same amount. The Arizona Senate candidate performed worse than everyone else in his state — including Kari Lake and the GOP’s election-denying secretary of state candidate, Mark Finchem. Masters’s 4.9-point loss to Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) was slightly larger than Finchem’s 4.8-point loss, and it was the largest of six statewide GOP candidates. …
Kristina Karamo. Michigan is the other big swing state in which the GOP nominated extremists and bad candidates for many big statewide offices — and paid the price. And the worst performer was its secretary of state candidate. Karamo … lost to the incumbent Democrat by 14 points. That’s the largest loss among the most prominent election deniers running for secretary of state, who themselves had a brutal election. …
Doug Mastriano. Despite Mehmet Oz losing the state’s Senate race by five points, Mastriano lost by more than 15. He raised very little money and made almost no effort to moderate his positions on things like election denial and abortion. …
Sarah Palin. The former GOP vice-presidential nominee lost both a special election in August and now a general election to Democrat Mary Peltola, despite coming from a state that favored Donald Trump in 2020 by 10 points. And Palin managed to lose the second time around by an even larger margin: nearly 10 full points. Adding insult to injury: The data suggest that the other Republican, Nick Begich, might well have won the seat in August if Palin weren’t in the race. …
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.). She’s the only candidate on this list who actually won. But there is no universe in which it should even have been close. She comes from a district that favored Trump by more than eight points, yet she leads by less than 0.2 percentage points in the latest results.
