Say Anything Blog

Because Republicans apparently couldn’t find a candidate to run against him.

Combining this rather ludicrous bit of incompetence with what seems like a near party-wide reluctance from Republicans to take a hard line on issues important to their conservative base (fiscal issues, illegal immigration, etc.) makes it seem like the GOP doesn’t want to take the majority back from the Democrats.

Arkansas Democrat Mark Pryor ’s bid for a second Senate term soared from highly likely to virtually certain Monday, when no Republican challenger met the state’s congressional filing deadline at noon central time.

CQ Politics has changed its rating on Pryor’s race to Safe Democratic from Democrat Favored, reflecting the fact that he is the first Senate incumbent running this year to officially draw no major-party opponent.

It was likely that this rating change would have been made even if the GOP had fielded a candidate. Republicans’ hopes for seriously competing faded after Asa Hutchinson, a former House member and former high-ranking official at the federal Department of Homeland Security, declined a Senate bid. Then former Gov. Mike Huckabee stuck to his pledge not to run for the Senate this year, even though he dropped his presidential campaign last week after Arizona Sen. John McCain won enough delegates to clinch the Republican nomination.

Pryor may have been in a pretty good position to be re-elected, but even so he was a first-term Senator running in a state that twice voted for President Bush.  There’s no excuse for not at least mounting a challenge so that he’d have to justify his record in the Senate.

With former Speaker Denny Haster’s seat going to a far-left liberal, and with the GOP’s nation-wide ballot being topped off with a candidate (John McCain) no Republicans seem to be really enthusiastic about, it seems as though Republicans are set up for a blood bath come November.

I just don’t see this election season ending well for Republicans, and they’ll have no one but themselves to blame for it.