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As part of the process of becoming an independent country, Botswana held its first election under universal suffrage in 1965. The Bechuanaland Democratic Party, led by Seretse Khama, won a gigantic landslide, with more than 80 percent of the vote. Khama later sat for an interview with the British press. When asked if he’d have preferred a smaller margin of victory, he agreed: “I think it’s healthy to have an opposition which is effective, because it keeps the government on its toes.”
Khama turned out to be an exceptionally gifted statesman, and today we see the wisdom of his statement in conservative states all across America. Thanks to Republican gerrymandering and the clustering of right-wing voters in certain states and regions, a huge fraction of Republican politicians have never had to seriously contest a general election. As long as they can appear sufficiently deranged in the primary, they win the general election without having to lift a finger.
But perhaps not in 2026! Donald Trump’s epic car crash of a presidency has tanked his approval rating down to the low 30s, with no sign of the collapse slowing. And some of the biggest harms from his blinkered policy have particularly devastated rural areas that usually elect Republicans in a landslide. Farm states have been battered by Trump tariffs, soaring costs for diesel fuel (used in harvesting equipment), and the Medicaid cuts that have caused rural hospitals to shutter.
As a result, formerly safe Republican districts are up for grabs. And these Republicans, like some flightless island birds facing imported rats and snakes, are flapping around in a panic, untested in one of the most basic tenets of politics: winning over a broad cross section of voters.
Safe-seat Republicans tend to be bad at campaigning: out of touch, clumsy, and intolerant of criticism.
One sign of Republican laziness is they don’t bother to vet their candidates. Kansas has a live race for U.S. Senate, where incumbent Roger Marshall is facing the Democratic challenger Adam Hamilton, a local megachurch pastor. No Democrat has won a Senate seat in Kansas since 1932, the height of the Great Depression.
Sarah Kliff at The New York Times upended the race in early September with a bombshell report about Marshall’s prior career as an obstetrician, finding him to be a truly rapacious debt collector. He charged a whopping (and possibly illegal) 18 percent interest on unpaid bills, sued 700 of his former clients, and got 81 of them arrested. Marshall got bank accounts garnished over as little as $129, while some patients ended up in jail for a time.
A political party in healthy fighting trim will, as a matter of course, examine its candidates to see if they were in the habit of getting new mothers repeatedly arrested over a $3,600 bill for an emergency C-section. There are 340 million Americans and just 100 Senate seats; you would think that it’s easy enough to make sure your candidate has kept his nose reasonably clean. Republicans just didn’t bother.
Vetting wasn’t in evidence in the Nebraska Senate race either, where incumbent Republican Pete Ricketts is facing independent Dan Osborn. Ricketts is reeling from an attack ad slamming him over his bizarre 2022 decision to vote to pardon a man who pled guilty to raping a woman in front of her children back in 1993. Why do that?
There is a similar story in Texas, where Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton is facing down Democrat James Talarico—notably, another religious man, this time a seminarian. The difference is that it has been public knowledge for years that Paxton is a hyper-corrupt scumbag. Among many, many other things, he straight-up stole some guy’s $1,000 Mont Blanc pen, he just barely fended off federal prosecution for securities fraud, he was impeached by the majority-Republican Texas House of Representatives (though he was acquitted by the Senate), and he personally arranged a sweetheart plea bargain with an admitted child sex abuser named Adam Hoffman. The San Antonio Current reports Paxton has done that plea bargain routine on several other occasions.
When asked in a public interview about the Hoffman plea deal, Paxton considered this an acceptable answer: “The criticism has been that I let a child predator out after one day. Well, guess what? They served 60 days.” That’s not even true; Hoffman served 29. But even if it were, is a two-month sentence for child sexual abuse supposed to make people feel good about Paxton’s judgment?
The wild thing is that Republicans already had an incumbent Texas senator, utterly loyal to his party, without any of this baggage: John Cornyn. But Paxton, with the backing of Donald Trump, successfully defeated Cornyn in the primary this year. MAGA die-hards evidently want the most repulsive freak possible in every elected position, and they might just pay for that moral degeneracy by losing a Senate seat.
Safe-seat Republicans also tend to be bad at campaigning: out of touch, clumsy, and intolerant of criticism. In Kansas, rather than attempting to change the subject, Marshall responded to the Times’ report by defensively doubling down, insisting falsely that doctors are always using debt collectors and describing it as “common business practices” at a recent debate at the state fair, where he was repeatedly booed amid cries of “Shame on you!” Marshall even sent Hamilton a cease and desist letter for alleged defamation—thereby keeping the story in the news and making Marshall appear to have a guilty conscience. Hit dogs holler, as the saying goes.
Safe-seat Republicans also tend to be simply careless. Consider Iowa, where GOP Rep. Ashley Hinson is facing Democrat Josh Turek for the open Senate seat. Trump’s war in Iran is even more heinously unpopular in Iowa than it is in the rest of the country, as the skyrocketing price of diesel has gravely fouled up the harvest season in a state already reeling from Trump’s trade wars. Yet Hinson voted no fewer than six times to keep the war going, most recently in mid-September, only to reverse course and call for the war to be “brought to a successful and immediate end” on September 21. How that is to be accomplished, she did not say; in fact, unlike two of her Iowa colleagues, she voted against a war powers resolution that would have cut off funding for the war.
Any fool could see by mid-March at the latest that this war was going to be a historic disaster, and that has only become more obvious. It just does not naturally occur to Republicans like Hinson that they might need to consider the wishes of their electorate when casting votes.
Similarly, Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-FL)—representing a district that is 74 percent Hispanic—speaking out against ICE detentions that “have gone too far” when she voted for the Laken Riley Act that facilitated the mass deportation regime and the Big Beautiful Bill that funded it has a “too little, too late” quality.
In a way, Donald Trump is also facing his own first political fight. Hitherto his celebrity and devil’s luck had always helped him wriggle out of scandal after scandal that would have ended the careers of any other politician. But there may be limits even for him. James Comey cannot reopen the Strait of Hormuz with a letter; the Supreme Court cannot decree that the price of diesel go back down below $4. It’s as if Trump is part of some biblical parable about the dangers of mad kings—temporarily spared from consequence through divine intervention so his downfall could be even more instructive. If so, Republicans, like the disobedient golden calf–worshipping Israelites of old, will deserve what is coming to them.
