It’s Just a “Candidate Quality” Problem

“Donald Trump’s candidates keep delivering… for Democrats. Republicans didn’t learn their lesson in 2022 as MAGA mini-mes could once again cost the party winnable races.” — Vanity Fair, 9/30/24

As a party, we have to apologize for how things are going. We’re just having a minor “candidate quality” problem, but things should be back to normal once we’ve fixed this glitch.

There’s nothing wrong overall. Our party is healthy and strong. We just accidentally ran extremely low-quality candidates up and down the ballot. Whoops.

Our policies are not out of step with the American public. At least, not if we deny any association with the nine-hundred-page authoritarian manual that outlines them exactly. The only problem is our candidates, many of whom are running campaigns entirely staffed by the writers of said manual. It’s a bummer, but it doesn’t represent us.

This is to say that we are proud of the extremely vague platform that our party embraces whenever we’re invited to MSNBC. It’s unfortunate that our low-quality candidates have adopted that same party platform in an extremely unlikeable way. For example, we intended to never expand upon the term “pro-family,” certainly not in forty-seven podcast clips disparaging childless women. That was never our intention, but this cycle, yes, the candidate quality is low.

Would it be humiliating to lose Senate races in places like Ohio and Florida? Yes, but only for the candidates. That’s their issue; it’s their fault for being so low-quality.

Yes, we heard about the guy in North Carolina. And the lady in Arizona. And the vice presidential pick. And, of course, the presidential pick too. And then there’s Ted Cruz.

Yikes. Who picked these candidates? Maybe we can get some new voters? Our consultants are extremely well-paid. It can’t be their fault.

We’re the Grand Old Party! The party of Abraham Lincoln! The party of Ronald Reagan! We can’t be tamed! Semper Fidelis! Which I guess we need to stop saying since some of our low-quality candidates have come under fire for lying about our opponents’ military service.

Look, we know this isn’t a new problem. Our candidate quality was low last time around too. In fact, it’s sort of humiliating that the other party controls the Senate when there are many, many, many more red states. But fear not: we’re going to rectify our candidate-quality problem as soon as we can. It should be as simple as untangling iPhone headphones. Or as complicated as untangling iPhone headphones. Piece of cake.

Where does our candidate-quality problem come from? Well, there’s just one frustrating matter we haven’t dealt with yet, which is that when the current head of our party endorses a candidate—regardless of how many times that candidate has denied the Holocaust—the candidate wins the primary. So we end up with these super low-quality candidates, which isn’t our fault. And it’s not a death knell for our party. A few of our consultants are working on a PowerPoint on how to fix this.

We apologize, and we will work to rectify our candidate quality in the future, but for this time around, may we recommend turning off breaking-news alerts until after the election? We don’t really know what else is out there, and journalists seem annoyingly committed to doing their jobs. We don’t worry about it, and neither should they.