Jonathan Chait: “Republicans are certainly wise to try harder next time to nominate candidates who live in the state they are running to represent, are not violent criminals, have avoided publicly calling for the overthrow of the government, and so on. That said, this advice is so blindingly obvious that one wonders why it became a question at all and why it took a cycle of election defeats for this lesson to set in.”

“The answer is that the candidate-quality problem is merely the byproduct of a much more deeply rooted crisis of delusion that has spread up and down the ranks of the party. The GOP’s voters and its elites reside in a hermetically sealed world of paranoia so far removed from reality that it is often difficult for them to relate to the concerns of average people. The attempts by the likes of McConnell to address this problem at the level of the nominating process only scratch the surface of the predicament.”

“As anger and frustration ripple through the Republican Party over its underwhelming performance in this year’s midterm elections, Republicans are offering a number of explanations for their losses,” the New York Times reports.

“Some in the Trump wing of the party have settled on their own scapegoat: Ronna McDaniel, who has been the chair of the Republican National Committee since 2017. Coming after McDaniel reshaped the committee in the former president’s image — it was even paying his considerable legal bills until recently — this discontent is a striking turn of events.”

NBC News: “McDaniel’s campaign to lock down votes stands out as a model of speed and efficiency — shutting down most would-be rivals — and for her ability to create any point of consensus within a party that is in open warfare over its future and Trump’s place in it.”

“More important, at a time when some RNC members see Trump as an anchor weighing down the party, McDaniel has convinced many of them that she can maintain independence from him in the 2024 primaries.”

“Republicans are facing a reckoning over their future after their poor performance in the midterms — and the debate is running hot inside the main hub of the GOP,” Politico reports.

“In a series of private email threads… a handful of Republican National Committee members denounced former President Donald Trump, with one pushing for fellow members and RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel to forcefully condemn his decision to host a pre-Thanksgiving dinner with antisemites.”

“The emails, which were sent to all 168 committee members’ email addresses, offer a rare glimpse at the agitation that is roiling among some in the Republican National Committee at a moment of intense scrutiny of the institution and the party it represents.”

Jonathan Bernstein: “For a non-negligible minority of Americans, the biggest political story of the moment isn’t who won last night’s runoff in Georgia. It’s the supposed conspiracy to suppress the truth about corrupt business dealings by President Joe Biden’s son Hunter.”

“The crusade against the younger Biden is easy to dismiss as yet another trumped up narrative designed to keep Fox News viewers engaged. But the continued obsession with fringe theories and paranoid claims helps explain why Republicans have wound up with so many embarrassing and unsuccessful candidates, culminating in the defeat Tuesday of Senate hopeful Herschel Walker in his attempt to unseat Democrat Raphael Warnock.”

“While former President Donald Trump has made the bad-candidate problem worse — he did, after all, personally recruit Walker, and he frequently tried to boost the nomination chances of candidates who ran poorly in November — the underlying supply-side and demand-side problems were there before Trump, and they aren’t going away even if the former president finally does. And the predicament is making it harder for Republicans to govern effectively when they do win.”

Erick Erickson: “No RNC Chair in the history of the whole party, beginning in 1856, has lasted as long as Ronna McDaniel without seeing at least one winning election season.”

“The GOP has lost every election cycle since she took the job in 2017.”

Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY) announced he will not be challenging Ronna McDaniel for Republican National Committee chair.

Said Zeldin: “I won’t be running for RNC Chair at this time with McDaniel’s reelection pre-baked by design, but that doesn’t mean she should even be running again.”

He added: “Republican voters already believe that Washington, D.C. is an irredeemable swamp. They will be proven right, yet again, if Chairwoman McDaniel moves forward with running for a fourth term, despite her prior pledge not to do so.”

“Ronna McDaniel is about to draw a challenge to her post as Republican National Committee chair,” Politico reports.

“Harmeet Dhillon, a RNC committeewoman whose firm represents Donald Trump, is prepping a bid for party chair… Dhillon has been talking with fellow RNC members about a prospective run, and those close to Dhillon say a formal launch could come within the next few days.”

Ron Brownstein: “The role of extremist white nationalists in the GOP may be approaching an inflection point.”

“The backlash against former President Donald Trump’s meeting with Nick Fuentes, an avowed racist, anti-Semite, and Christian nationalist, has compelled more Republican officeholders than at any point since the Charlottesville riot in 2017 to publicly condemn those extremist views.”

“Yet few GOP officials have criticized the former president personally—much less declared that Trump’s meeting with Fuentes and Ye, the rapper (formerly known as Kanye West) who has become a geyser of anti-Semitic bile, renders him unfit to serve as president again.”

A.B. Stoddard: “What’s odd is that Republicans are behaving as if Trump will take the hint, react appropriately to the roast they have coordinated, and go away. Team Normal even seems to think they can create a virtual smoke-filled room and convince the other potential 2024 contenders to keep the field small so Trump can’t win the nomination with a plurality of the vote like he did in 2016.”

“Given what they have experienced since 2015, and what they have consented to, why do Republicans think this can work?”

Charlie Sykes: “Republicans who have never—ever—seen Donald Trump motivated by shame cannot base their plan to exile him on shame. In 2016, he accused Ben Carson of having a pathological temper and showed up to debate Hillary Clinton with women who accused Bill Clinton of sexual harassment and assault. Complete and utter imperviousness to shame is one of Trump’s superpowers.”

Jonathan Chait: “To conceive of this episode as a mere failure to properly vet the Mar-a-Lago guest list, or even more broadly as an indictment of Trump’s leadership of the party, misapprehends its scope. The issue is that Trump has expanded the Republican coalition to the right, activating and encompassing undisguised white supremacists, who, through their entry into the two-party system, have gained newfound influence.”

“This is a dangerous and historically significant change to the American political scene. And hardly anybody in the GOP — certainly not Ron DeSantis — intends to reverse it.”

Amanda Carpenter: “If you want to know how bad things are for the Republican party, consider this: The person most likely to be selected next month to chair the Republican National Committee has already overseen the loss of the House in 2018, the loss of the Senate and White House in 2020, vastly underperformed in the 2022 midterm elections, and may very well lose the Georgia Senate runoff elections for the second year in a row.”

“Here’s the real rub: She’s the Republicans’ best available option…”

“Ronna McDaniel is, apparently, one of only two people in the entire universe of Republicans willing and dopey enough to want the job in the current iteration of Donald Trump’s Republican party. Keep in mind, this is supposed to be a prestigious job—a first-class ticket into the fat-cat GOP donor world. She gets to raise and deploy hundreds of millions of dollars every election cycle! What power! What influence! Yet the only other person openly challenging her for the position is election denier extraordinaire, Hardee’s parking lot search-warrant recipient, and perpetual Bannon ‘War Room’ guest MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.”

“The Republican National Committee is launching a review of the party’s performance in the midterm election and bringing on a team of outside advisers to help guide strategy, as the GOP reckons with its disappointing performance in the election,” Politico reports.

Henry Olson: “The new Republican Party breaks down into four rough factions in response to this query, and none has a clear plurality. Instead, the party has three factions of nearly equal size and a fourth tiny one whose votes might be decisive.”

“The three lions are Mega MAGA, the Old Guard and the MAGA Adjacent. I estimate each are about 30 percent of the party’s voters and are numerous in virtually every state. The minnow is the Never Trump group, which constitutes about 10 percent of GOP voters. They are strongest in wealthy suburbs and major metropolitan areas such as New York and D.C.”

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell wants more power within the Republican Party: he’s officially running to chair the Republican National Committee, Insider reports.

Said Lindell: “With all my due diligence and in prayer, I am 100% running for RNC chairman against Ronna McDaniel. It’s going to change real fast. We’re going to get our country right, really quick.”

He added: “The RNC collects money and then they don’t do anything with election crime.”