GOP has yet to solve its Herschel Walker problem

For a nonnegligible minority of Americans, the biggest political story of the moment isn’t who won last week’s runoff in Georgia. It’s the supposed conspiracy to suppress the truth about corrupt business dealings by President Joe Biden’s son Hunter.

The crusade against the younger Biden is easy to dismiss as yet another trumped-up narrative designed to keep Fox News viewers engaged. But the continued obsession with fringe theories and paranoid claims helps explain why Republicans have wound up with so many embarrassing and unsuccessful candidates, culminating in the defeat Tuesday of Senate hopeful Herschel Walker in his attempt to unseat Democrat Raphael Warnock.

While former President Donald Trump has made the bad-candidate problem worse — he did, after all, personally recruit Walker, and he frequently tried to boost the nomination chances of candidates who ran poorly in November — the underlying supply-side and demand-side problems were there before Trump, and they aren’t going away even if the former president finally does.

And that predicament is making it harder for Republicans to govern effectively when they do win.

Let’s start with the candidate supply.

Want to run for office as a Republican? You won’t need to know much about public policy. You will, however, need to keep up with an amazingly complex and convoluted series of phony scandals and events that dominate media popular with Republican voters, from (nonexistent) election fraud to the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, which House Republicans are promising to make the centerpiece of the next Congress.

You wouldn’t have to believe this garbage. But you need to be pretty conversant in a range of farcical narratives if you are going to be courting Republican donors, activists and even governing professionals.

If, on the other hand, you are interested in making conservative public policy, you’re pretty much out of luck in elective office, especially at the national level. You would be better off seeking a key executive branch job under a Republican president — or, even better, positioning yourself for a career on the federal bench, where Republican judges have had enormous influence on policy from immigration to health care to gun policy.

Given this state of affairs, it is not surprising that Republicans are facing a shrinking supply of quality candidates. The current dynamics attract fewer people interested in policy and more who hope to get booked on Fox News or on one of its even less reputable alternatives. Not all policy specialists are great candidates, but few conspiracy theorists have much appeal beyond the most loyal Republican voters.

And then there is the demand side. Very simply: The most loyal Republican voters really do like a lot of the weakest general election candidates.

In doing so, they’re echoing what several generations of GOP leaders have taught their rank-and-file voters: that conservatives are constantly being betrayed by a liberal Republican party establishment.

There was a time up through the 1950s when both political parties had liberal and conservative wings. But liberal Republicans haven’t had much pull within the party for about 50 years, and these days virtually every Republican politician holds a fairly narrow range of conservative policy positions.

Nevertheless, constant repetition of this notion of betrayal has convinced many Republican voters to support candidates who pledge to confront the ostensible liberal Republican establishment, to the point that they consider nominating terrible candidates to be a virtue.

All partisans tend to be skeptical of negative reports about their party’s candidates — but Republican voters deep within the party’s information bubble seem to have come to view media reports revealing a candidate’s incompetence or personal misbehavior as evidence that the candidate must be doing something right. Otherwise, why would the media attack them?

That way of thinking helped Trump seize the presidential nomination in 2016, and it brought nominations this year to Walker and several other candidates with troubling resumes and minimal qualifications.

Of course, problematic candidates sometimes get elected. And some of them eventually become pragmatic, effective legislators. But more often, they just repeat the tropes that got them nominated. They focus on what plays well in Republican media and rail against whatever they can frame as the “establishment” that is supposedly selling out the party and conservatives.

That makes it harder for Republicans to actually get much done when they do win. It’s why, for example, Republicans never did come up with a conservative alternative to the Affordable Care Act and eventually gave up trying. And the failure to make major policy gains makes it even less likely that competent legislators will run the next time.

None of this developed overnight, and even if the GOP collectively chooses to address it, it will take a long time to fix. But these tendencies are costing Republicans dearly at the ballot box.

And when they do win, they are less and less equipped to actually govern.