Dan Cox Created a Republican Bloodbath

A bad candidate running a bad campaign sunk a lot of boats, and Dan Cox dragged down the entire Republican ticket.

Interesting story from the New York Times today about the draft that Donald Trump had on the Congressional ticket:

Donald J. Trump’s announcement on Tuesday that he would run for president in 2024 came at an especially awkward time for Republicans. They were supposed to dominate the midterm elections — but fell well short.

Mr. Trump appears to be a significant reason for that showing, based on an analysis of the results by House district.

His preferred candidates underperformed last week, helping Democrats hold the Senate and helping keep the race for House control close. (Republicans, who had been heavy favorites, are expected to prevail narrowly as mail ballots continue to be counted in California.)

Overall, his preferred primary candidates underperformed other G.O.P. candidates by about five percentage points.

It’s not a completely perfect study, but it is interesting to consider how an overwhelmingly negative personality on the minds of voters.

That brings us, naturally, to Dan Cox.

When we last look last week at numbers, we noted just how hard Cox was beaten across Maryland and how he underperformed Republicans across the state. As more votes have been counted, more and more Republicans are getting dragged down by Cox’s underperformance.

As of this afternoon, here are just a few of the changes that we have seen from the day after the election until now.

The last column on each side is what I call the “Cox Drag.” It’s the delta between the candidate percentage after Election Day and the current ballot count consisting primarily of voters casting ballots for Democrats.

A similar Cox Drag was seen at the Congressional Level

Comparatively, the absentee drag in 2018 was a maximum of -0.7%, meaning that the negative impact of absentee ballots was anywhere from five to to nine times as large with Dan Cox at the top of the ticket in 2022 compared to Larry Hogan in 2018.

Dan Cox was a bad candidate who ran a bad campaign. Here’s a small number of candidates who were torpedoed and lost because of the drag at the top of the ticket.

• Neil Parrott, CD-6

• Stacie MacDonald, SD-30

• Sid Saab, SD-33

• Brenda Thiam, HD-2B

• Ashley Areas, HD-12A

• Deb Rey, HD-29B

• Jessica Haire, Anne Arundel County Executive

• Mark Lynch, Calvert Register of Wills

• Noel Smith, AA Council 6

• Mike Pantelides, AA Council 6

• Terry Gillleland, AA Clerk

• Tony Chmelik, Frederick County At Large

• Phil Dacey, Frederick Council At Large

• John Distel, Frederick Council 1

• Amy Nickerson, Kent Clerk

• Susan Pritchett, Kent Orphans Court

• David Montgomery, Talbot Council At Large

And those are just candidates with leads after election day who got caught up in the Cox Drag. That doesn’t count other candidates who saw a lower number of Republican voters show up to the polls on election day and otherwise stood a chance of success. Nor does it count candidates currently leading, such as Mike Hough in Frederick County, who could still fall behind the Democratic candidate.

People, myself included, warned people that Dan Cox was the death of the Republican Party. We warned them that nominating Cox was an extinction-level event. And now, the price for their negligence is becoming more and more evident.