PHOENIX, ARIZONA – Fox News host Laura Ingraham said at Turning Point USA that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was one of the main factors that led Republicans losing the Senate and called on the GOP to stop criticizing party nominees before elections.
“I’m not going to name names of who, you know, the type of people who kind of trash our candidates, a few months before the elections,” Ingraham said Saturday night, before coughing, “McConnell.”
She then impersonated McConnell, saying, “ah c’mon Laura, that’s not fair. I’m very conservative.”
“You ever get the sense that the old turtles, the old dinosaurs in the GOP … think about what they did in these midterms. You hear about well, ‘the Senate leadership spent all this money, they spent tens of millions of dollars.’ Think about the other stuff they did. You know, they mucked around in New Hampshire supporting the candidate that was not, obviously, going to be the nominee. Bolduc,” Ingraham said.
“The powers that be did not like Blake Masters… They obviously hated Herschel Walker,” she added. “Imagine if we backed our people like they back their people.”
Daily Caller
Masters, who was running for Senate in Arizona, pinned blame on McConnell for allocating funding to Alaska in order to defeat another Republican instead of spending more money in the tight Arizona race.
“The people who control the purse strings, Senate Leadership Fund, Mitch McConnell — McConnell decided to spend millions of dollars attacking a fellow Republican in Alaska instead of helping me defeat Senator Mark Kelly,” Masters said. “Had he chosen to spend money in Arizona, this race would be over, we’d be celebrating a Senate Majority right now.” (RELATED: Blake Masters: Mitch McConnell ‘Doesn’t Deserve’ Leadership Post)
McConnell expressed private concerns about Walker’s candidacy early in the campaign, before endorsing him a week before the election.
After the midterms, McConnell blamed former President Donald Trump’s unwise endorsements in key states as the reason for Senate defeat.
“Our ability to control the primary outcome was quite limited in ’22 because the support of the former president proved to be very decisive in these primaries. So my view was do the best you can with the cards you’re dealt. Now, hopefully, in the next cycle we’ll have quality candidates everywhere and a better outcome,” McConnell said.
Ingraham described the support Democrats had behind victorious Pennsylvania Senate candidate John Fetterman as “party unity,” and that McConnell disparaged Republican candidates by implication when he questioned their “quality.”
“We’re criticizing the people that have the courage and the guts to put their name and their reputation and everything they have, lay it all there? You know how hard it is to run for Senate? It’s not pleasant,” she said.
“I should hope that our Senate minority leader gets his act together and stops the nonsense, because I’m sick of it. I’m sick of it,” she added.
McConnell’s office did not immediately respond to an inquiry from the Daily Caller.