At last, gaffes seem to be working in the GOP's favor

Did you grit your teeth and brace for a loss six years ago when the GOP Senate candidate in Missouri, Todd Akin, blew a chance to take away Claire McCaskill's seat with a poorly expressed comment about pregnancy rarely arising from "legitimate rape"? Did you grimace when Mitt Romney wrote off almost half of Americans as "dependent upon government"? I can't speak for you, but deep in my gut, I always worry that the GOP will live up to its reputation as the "Stupid Party" and throw away winnable races with undisciplined candidates (and at least one president, sometimes) with fatal gaffes.

But this election is working out very differently. It might be the mass insanity of TDS. But that doesn't explain how Krysten Sinema may have just handed a key Senate seat to the GOP. The Arizona Senate seat being vacated by Jeff Flake was considered one of the races that could power a Democrat pickup of a Senate majority. But thanks to a tweet from a group called The Reagan Battalion, Arizonans now get to see Sinema calling them "crazy" when talking to a group of Texans in 2011: BREAKING: LEAKED VIDEO: in a 2011 speech in TX, Democratic Senate candidate @kyrstensinema mocks Arizonans as “Crazy” and calls Arizona the “crazy” state. pic.twitter.com/fArBGddn16 — The Reagan Battalion (@ReaganBattalion) October 11, 2018 It's hard to see this not torpedoing a race that had just tightened up, with Martha McSally closing in on the lead Sinema had previously enjoyed. John Podhoretz comments: Most important is Arizona, a state whose open Senate seat Democrats must win to have any hope of ousting Mitch McConnell from his majority-leader position. Democratic Rep. Kyrsten Sinema has led in most polls over the past few months, but in the week following the Kavanaugh testimony, Republican Martha McSally finally took the lead in one – and outside the margin of error, by six points. And Thursday, a startling piece of opposition research surfaced in which Sinema is seen telling a small audience at a political conference in Texas in 2011 that Arizona is "crazy" and offering advice on how to make sure Texas doesn't become like crazy Arizona. That's, like, really, really, really, very bad. Extremely bad. Like lose-you-the-election bad. McSally and her team will make sure there isn't a person in the state who is unaware of this speech by Election Day. Whatever is going on (the Force is with us? karma? Providence? coincidence?), please let it continue.