Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza named the best candidate of the 2014 midterm elections in his post yesterday: Senator-elect Cory Gardner from Colorado. Now he offers his conclusion on the worst candidate.
If Republicans had not coming swooping into Kansas to save embattled Republican Senator Pat Roberts in the most favorable election cycle in ages, he’d surely have taken the cake.
But after a better-than-expected victory to retain his seat, Cillizza puts his sites on an even more egregious candidate: Democrat Bruce Braley, who was defeated by Republican Joni Ernst last Tuesday for Iowa’s vacant Senate seat.
Braley’s slide began early on and never really recovered when he was caught on film denigrating his state’s largely rural base, “If you help me win this race, you may have someone with your background, your experience, your voice, someone who’s been literally fighting tort reform for 30 years, in a visible or public way, on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Or, you might have a farmer from Iowa who never went to law school, never practiced law, serving as the next chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee.”
Not to be outdone, Braley went on to insult a neighbor in a tiff over loose chickens near his vacation home in what ultimately added fuel to the fire of his growing reputation as a big-city, arrogant politician.
Finally, after it emerged that Braley had missed as much as 75% of his votes on the House Veterans Affairs Committee in the wake of the VA scandal was probably the nail in his electoral coffin. Braley never really had a chance to recover from those mistakes.
