One of the many ways Republicans sabotage each other is by blasting candidates in primary races for allegedly lacking experience and qualifications. While Democrats often settle on one candidate early in the primary race — unlike us with our emphasis on treating people as individuals, Democrats are much easier to herd and control top down with groupthink — we have these long, bruising primaries where we demolish each other over every tiny imagined flaw, draining funds and leaving little for the general election contest.
I believe most primary elections aren’t held until very close to the general election so us individualistic Republicans can spend most of the race beating each other up instead of the Democratic candidates.
The reality is inexperienced candidates can make great leaders. Six U.S. presidents never served in office before becoming president, including Donald Trump. Many people consider Trump the greatest president ever. Herbert Hoover had even less experience. A mining engineer, his only previous political experience was serving as secretary of commerce under Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge.
Dwight Eisenhower commanded Allied Forces as a five-star general during World War II. Ulysses Grant led the Union Armies to victory over the Confederacy. William Howard Taft came from the legal field and served as secretary of war under Theodore Roosevelt. Zachary Taylor served as an Army general during the Mexican-American War and the War of 1812. Of those, only Hoover is included in multiple rankings as one of the worst presidents in history.
What do most of these former presidents have in common? They got elected due to their star quality as military leaders. With Democrats cheating to steal elections, Republicans need every advantage they can get. Trump was elected due to his star quality. By the time Barack Obama became president, I predicted we’d never see another Republican president again unless we ran a celebrity, and thankfully Trump showed up.
In Arizona, Kari Lake is facing criticism in the primary for lacking qualifications, since she spent her entire career in broadcast media. But she’s a “Trump in heels,” as the left has labeled her. Her star power gives her an advantage; she’s leading her primary opponent Sheriff Mark Lamb by an astounding 29 points in a recent Rasmussen Reports survey. Lake is hyper smart and runs circles around the mainstream reporters during press conferences and other events. Having covered politics for almost 30 years in the media, she is arguably more qualified than someone who served in elected office for a handful of years.
Would these armchair critics say that a brilliant person who spent their life in politics, but never held office, was not qualified?
Other candidates around the country who faced similar criticism include Herschel Walker and Dr. Mehmet Oz. Everyone knows they lost their U.S. Senate races due to the cheating, not because they were really bad candidates. A Rasmussen Reports exit polltaken after the 2022 election found that Lake really won the Arizona gubernatorial race by eight points. Even mainstream pollshad her ahead by a few points immediately before the election. Fox 10/InsiderAdvantage showed her ahead by three points, and the progressive pollster Data for Progress had her up four points.
According to a study, inexperienced contenders won more than 50% of Republican primaries in open-seat races in 2016. Out of nine Senate races in 2020 where a newcomer won, five were won by candidates with no electoral experience.
The main complaints are that the candidate has never served in office or doesn’t have large-scale management experience. Armchair critics love to use the latter when their preferred candidate does have that experience. Their preferred candidate could be a complete train wreck with far more negatives — huge sex scandals, no history of elected office either, criminal background, history of flip-flopping, RINO tendencies, etc. — but they brush them off and pretend the only issue that matters between the candidates is management experience.
Republicans have developed a bad habit of repeating MSM talking points about our own candidates. We’ve expanded our venture into using Alinsky tactics against the left to using them on our own.
Republican armchair critics fall into the trap of lumping in great candidates with candidates who really should not be running for office. For example, a little known candidate with no experience, no money and no connections has no business running for U.S. Senate. They have no chance and may be only selfishly doing it to increase their name recognition so they can run for office again.
In contrast, one of the worst liabilities of candidates with significant experience is they become part of the swamp, or RINOs. They know too many people in office, consider them friends, and gain benefits from them or can be blackmailed by them, so they compromise their positions.
Meanwhile, the left is aggressively getting people into political positions who are clearly unqualified, but placed there as a reward for their money. Biden promised when running for president that he wouldn’t do that. But according to The Hill, the Campaign Legal Center found that “all but one of the noncareer ambassadors President Biden has appointed are political contributors, many of whom evidently lack the qualifications required by federal law.”
His 55 appointees contributed more than $22.5 million to Democratic committees, averaging $400,000 each. Many of them were “bundlers,” fundraisers who collected donations from others and delivered them to Biden’s campaign.
If an impressive candidate such as Lake, Walker or Oz is lacking in experience, they can make up for it by surrounding themselves with quality staffers.
Perhaps an aspect of the Buckley rule applies here. The late great William F. Buckley Jr. once said to support “the rightwardmost viable candidate.” Notice he didn’t say the most qualified candidate.
Part of the solution should be moving up primary elections. The presidential primaries are held as early as January; there’s no reason why the rest of a state’s primary races can’t be changed too. Stop the fake criticism, it makes us look as bad as the left.