Tough GOP times

Time stops for no one, and Republicans are finding that each day brings them closer to a November abyss.

The loss of now-Sen. Roger Wicker’s (R-Miss.) former House seat in a special election on Tuesday does not quite suggest that “safe seat” has become redundant on the Republican side of the aisle.

But it does make it hazardous to guess where those safe seats might be. Wicker won 66 percent of the vote 18 months ago, but his constituents gave his would-be GOP successor only 46 percent.

Picking through the rubble of their electoral chances, Republicans can find one or two plausible ways to argue that their plight will not be as dire in the general election as it has been in the recent Mississippi, Illinois and Louisiana special elections.

In November, for example, presidential candidates will be on the ballot and the presence of the Republican nominee will probably bring more Republicans out to vote than took part in the GOP’s recent debacles at the House district level.

But when, in searching for reasons for optimism, one gets down to such slim pickings, it does not greatly ameliorate the party’s woe. Rather, it confirms that there is not much to cling to on the bleak Republican landscape.

GOP leaders insist that the party is going to get up off the mat and fight. They insist, too, that they are talking frankly within their conference about what needs urgently to be done. They know they have received what they describe as “a wake-up call.”

Yet, true though that may be, it is well-nigh impossible for Republicans to put on a happy face. The tumbrels keep rolling on toward Election Day, and the most the GOP is likely to be able to do now is manage expectations.

Its challenge in the Senate has been understood since the outset of this cycle to be extremely challenging, and no one expected the party to trim or overturn the Democrats’ advantage in the upper chamber.

But in the lower chamber, talk has swung in just 18 months from discussion of whether the Republicans could retake control all the way across the spectrum of hope and despair to the point at which a mere 10-seat loss would be regarded as akin to a triumph.

Elections, like sporting events, are worth holding because the results are never certain (just ask the New England Patriots). But people involved in federal politics are on the edge of their seats not because they think the Republicans might make a comeback. It is, rather, because it is hard to take one’s eyes off a train wreck.