I don’t have much to add from Mike Bayham’s excellent post in the aftermath of the Georgia Senate runoff. He hit pretty much all the major points I would have, so I’d encourage you to read Mike’s entry. But I do have a few things to put forth.

First, I really wanted Herschel Walker to win.

It was obvious from the start that was unlikely.

Everything about his candidacy was problematic. The personal history with domestic abuse, the mental-health issues, the fact that he didn’t live in Georgia, the inability to rally his own party around his candidacy – when the outgoing Republican Lieutenant Governor of Georgia goes on CNN and runs his mouth about how Walker is unsupportable that guy needs to be ostracized forever, but you also need to question how something like that could ever happen in the first place.

That isn’t a shot at Herschel. He fought like a lion and he almost managed to win despite all of those problems.

But more than that, everything about the current state of the GOP – ESPECIALLY its Washington wing – is deficient.

Walker’s loss should be the end of Ronna McDaniel, who is a total failure. It also should be the end of Mitch McConnell, who is the least popular politician in Washington and should take his octogenarian ass back to Kentucky and sip bourbon on a porch.

And yes, Donald Trump has so badly botched GOP politics in Georgia it isn’t even funny.

Doug Collins would have beaten Warnock in a landslide. Marjorie Taylor Greene would have won that race by 4 or 5 points. Even David Perdue would probably have won that race. Running a celebrity instead of a veteran pol against a statewide elected official is outright stupid, and yet Team Trump did it in both Pennsylvania and Georgia and horrendously underperformed both times.

You do not run first-time candidates in Senate races. You run them in House races. Then you run Congressmen, or perhaps statewide elected officials like attorneys general, secretaries of state or governors, for the Senate.

The Democrats understand this, generally speaking. The Republicans, the Stupid Party, don’t. And this is on Trump, who’s so busy trying to take down the Republican establishment from the top down that he doesn’t understand it has to be done from the ground up.

Build an organization. Build a machine. Republican machine politics is the only way to beat Democrat machine politics, unless you can get good enough to break down the Democrats’ machine.

Nothing about how that race was run makes sense. Nothing about the GOP as currently constituted makes sense.

And wait until you see how much more money Warnock had than Walker did. It’s an absolutely criminal number. Well more than 2-to-1 in a red-state Senate seat with a Democrat incumbent who was more beatable even than John Fetterman, and yet there wasn’t enough money to win.

Everybody associated with this needs a stint in the wilderness to contemplate their sins. Nobody is getting one other than Herschel, who probably will be happier not having to worry about politics anymore.