Republicans have learned to be careful what you wish for in starting a culture war

This midterm election is like nothing we’ve seen in recent memory. Which makes sense, in a way: It’s the first election after the defeated former president tried to create a violent coup, and he remains the leader of his party, the disloyal opposition. It’s a midterm with a not-very-popular president who still has managed to get a lot of popular stuff done, despite a slim to nonexistent congressional majority.

It’s an election where the Republicans keep talking about “it’s the economy and kitchen table,” and the Democrats are running on the hot-button social issues like abortion and marriage equality. And it looks like it will help the Democrats buck historical trends. President Joe Biden could just as easily see Senate gains and many fewer losses in the House than anyone would have foreseen just a few months ago. So that’s what Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell gets for packing the Supreme Court with Trump nominees: he has made abortion toxic for Republicans.

That’s not the only problem McConnell has, though. There’s that “candidate quality” issue he’s been publicly concerned about, which has in turn led to out-and-out civil war between him and Sen. Rick Scott, the Florida Republican tasked with engineering GOP wins at the National Republican Senatorial Committee. That’s not been going so well, to the tune of more than $150 million squandered in Scott’s big new digital fundraising scheme.