Burgat is director of the legislative affairs program and an assistant professor at George Washington University's Graduate School of Political Management.
A few short months ago, Republicans were rightfully confident they’d take back the House and Senate. They had both history and politics on their side. There was an aging, unpopular president who Republicans said needed to be investigated, a potential recession on the horizon, and a host of Senate elections in states where the GOP should have a clear partisan advantage.
And yet, even as independents are breaking toward Republicans in the final weeks, most election prognosticators have Democrats holding onto the upper chamber. Why?
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell offered a pretty convincing explanation in August: objectively bad candidates.
McConnell wasn’t talking about his party’s nominees’ stances on the issues; the candidates all have pretty standard Republican positions. What he meant was that too many GOP candidates — particularly for the Senate — were so electorally and morally loathsome that they would have to win in spite of who they are, not because of it.
The most glaring example of this problem is Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker.
Walker said he doesn’t support abortion in any situation. Unfortunately for him, an old girlfriend came forward to credibly accuse him of paying for their abortion. Just as unfortunate, after Walker claimed he didn’t know who this woman could be, she revealed that she was actually the mother of one of his four children, which prompted Walker to still claim for more than a day that he still didn’t know who this woman was. The whole episode underscored Walker’s penchant for lying.
But Walker isn’t the GOP’s only problem. Senate candidates in Ohio, Arizona and Pennsylvania have all jeopardized what should be a banner year for Republicans.
Unless you’re McConnell, that shouldn’t matter too much to you. What should matter, I think, is how predictable it has become that members of a political party will circle the partisan wagons behind a candidate they all know isn’t morally worthy of the seat.
Republicans will admit it privately, but publicly they all support tarnished candidates no matter how indefensible his or her actions or statements.
We saw it back in 2018 with Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, when he was credibly accused of child molestation. And, of course, in 2016 with Donald Trump (you pick the transgression). Candidates are exposed for something that should disqualify them, and parties just rally behind them, work to minimize the fallout, and try to convince voters it isn't true or doesn’t matter despite how disingenuous they look in doing so.
Why are parties and their leaders so willing to contort themselves into convoluted, unintelligible defenses that run diametrically opposed to their party’s message? Why are they so unwilling to admit that some candidates' character deficiencies simply don’t deserve the party’s support, no matter if it costs them a vital seat?
The overriding answer is depressingly simple: Parties are confident partisanship will win out. In their eyes, there’s no credible threat of mass voter defection. They don’t fear that you — or really enough of you — will have a red line on candidate quality that you won’t cross when it comes down to it. And they definitely don’t worry about you crossing party lines and voting against them.
Sure, some of you may sit out, unable or unwilling to support a certain candidate because of their moral transgressions. This was the case with Cal Cunningham, the North Carolina Democrat who lost a very winnable Senate race largely because of an exposed text message affair. But in general, the parties — particularly the Republicans — have decided that the vast majority of us will plug our nose and vote for a knowingly unworthy candidate rather than ever cast a ballot for the other side.
Political scientists call this “negative partisanship” — a phenomenon where many of us are motivated more by preventing the other party from winning than we are in support of our preferred candidate. Your grandma just called it “cutting off your nose despite your face.”
For parties and their aligned media outlets, the devil they know — their partisan candidate — is better than the devil from the other team. At least their devil will vote with them once in office. And they’re convinced you’ll similarly motivate your reasoning. Parties know if they give you the right talking points and have their surrogates spout them enough times — even if those talking points change day to day — you’ll convince yourself that the candidate isn’t really that bad ... that any stories saying so is just another political hit job ... that the other side has just as many skeletons in its closet. Probably a combination of all three.
When parties and leaders choose political expediency over character, they are showing us they don’t really believe candidates matter. They can put any candidate up for any race — warts and all — and so long as they have the right letter next to their name, they will prevail and the party will be better off. They’re betting it’s all about the party label and the individuals are interchangeable.
Sometimes they lose that bet — like with Moore — but more often they’re proven right. Although voters may have to grit their teeth on some candidates, more often than not, voter partisan loyalties are more determinative than any character litmus tests.
Would voters and parties prefer upstanding, experienced, well-spoken, scandal-free candidates? Of course. Good candidates make everyone’s job easier. They don’t distract from the party’s goal to speak with one voice and don’t force their teammates to constantly defend their copartisan’s indefensible actions. But parties have proven time and again that character is not a job requirement.
The real irony is, in a lot of these cases, these seats are both incredibly important and incredibly winnable if not for these bad candidates. In other words, the party can lose so many of these seats — and majority control of Congress with them — only if they put up such objectionable nominees.
Perhaps the most revealing takeaway here, though, isn’t that Republicans may not win enough seats despite an extremely favorable political climate. Rather, it’s that these races — despite poor candidate quality — are still as close as they are.
Think about it this way: Herschel Walker has had literally months of stories catching him in the most hypocritical lies imaginable on one of his party’s most sacred campaign tenets — pro-life policies. His race is still rated as a tossup.
How we respond to clearly undeserving candidates has huge implications on the next slate of candidates and, ultimately, the quality of our legislature itself. Every time we are blindly led by our partisanship, it makes it just a little bit easier for the party to convince us to not believe our eyes and ears. Our unquestioned partisanship emboldens them. Plus, it does nothing to deter unprincipled, unethical candidates from entering the political arena in the first place. The definitions of acceptable candidate and elected official get stretched just a little bit further.
Perhaps just as important, there can’t be asymmetric enforcement of character litmus tests between parties. If one party ignores and defends its offenders while the other shuns them — as Democrats did with sitting lawmakers Al Franken and Katie Hill — there is effectively no incentive for either to play by the same rules. Voters and parties won’t continue to do the right thing if it only hurts their side.
Elections at any level, but particularly for the highest offices in the land, are fundamentally about character. The candidate’s character, yes, but also about our own. When we continue to back candidates we know aren’t worthy of the position they seek — no matter if they win — it says more about us than it does about them.
Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner speaks to voters at a town hall at the Elks Lodge 188 on June 7, 2026, in Portland, Maine.
McConnell and Platner both feel entitled
The two men could not be more different. One, a Republican, octogenarian, seven-term Southern senator, the other a progressive, millennial Maine oysterman who’s never spent a day in elected office.
But Mitch McConnell, the senior senator from Kentucky who’s been MIA for the past few weeks and Graham Platner, the Maine Senate candidate who’s facing calls to drop out of his race against Sen. Susan Collins, apparently do have something in common: an outsized sense of entitlement.
McConnell, who is 84 and not running for reelection, has been hospitalized for three weeks, and yet we still don’t fully know what he was admitted for or what his condition is. Per CNN, “his office has not disclosed a medical reason for the hospitalization or provided specifics on his health status beyond saying last week that he ‘continues to improve’ and ‘is working closely with his staff on Kentucky and Senate matters.’ ”
While several legislators have said they’ve talked to him and insist he sounds strong, others have said they are completely in the dark. One MAGA influencer, Laura Loomer, posted ”High level source close to the White House tells me ‘Mitch McConnell is officially brain dead. He’s not coming back.’ ”
Meanwhile, up in Maine, Platner has been artfully dodging calls from his own party to drop out of his race after several allegations of misconduct from women, including a sexual assault allegation from a former girlfriend, came to light. While Platner, who has managed to survive a Nazi-tattoo scandal, a sexting scandal, and several old tweets scandals, denies the allegations, he has not quit.
High-profile Democrats including Sens. Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer, the latter of whom had unsuccessfully hand-selected Maine Gov. Janet Mills to face Collins instead of Platner, have urged Platner to drop out, while other Dems have accused him of trying to influence the picking of his replacement.
Maine Democratic Party Executive Director Devon Murphy-Anderson released a statement Tuesday, which said in part:
“Unfortunately, Graham Platner’s team has repeatedly reached out to us in an attempt to put their thumb on the scale of what this process looks like. We have repeatedly reiterated to Graham Platner’s team that they have no role in determining our next Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate nor in determining what this process looks like.”
Both incidents show a deep lack of accountability to voters, who in one case deserve to know whether their senator is capable of performing his duties, and in another deserve a candidate who isn’t being accused of crimes, bigotry and deception.
The offensive and odious entitlement of both McConnell and Platner stands out not because it is particularly unique among today’s political class. Tom Kean, the New Jersey GOP congressman, missed more than 100 votes, only sharing after a three-month mystery absence that he was dealing with depression.
Former President Joe Biden’s Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin failed to disclose a hospitalization for prostate cancer surgery, flouting the established rules for Cabinet members and senior U.S. officials.
From Biden’s insistence on running for reelection despite his obvious cognitive and political weaknesses to Trump’s brazen flouting of laws and norms, few politicians seem to appreciate that their public service job comes with responsibilities to constituents, including transparency and honesty.
But both parties increasingly justify the chicanery, because the stakes of winning elections and keeping power are simply too high. But that’s no excuse. If we’ve learned anything over the past decade, it’s that character and accountability do, in fact, matter. And when we, the voters, stop caring about it, well, so do they.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.