For a non-negligible minority of Americans, the biggest political story of the moment isn’t who won this week's runoff in Georgia. It’s the supposed conspiracy to suppress the truth about corrupt business dealings by President Joe Biden’s son Hunter.
The crusade against the younger Biden is easy to dismiss as yet another trumped up narrative designed to keep Fox News viewers engaged. But the continued obsession with fringe theories and paranoid claims helps explain why Republicans have wound up with so many embarrassing and unsuccessful candidates, culminating in the defeat Tuesday of Senate hopeful Herschel Walker in his attempt to unseat Democrat Raphael Warnock.
While former President Donald Trump has made the bad-candidate problem worse — he did, after all, personally recruit Walker, and he frequently tried to boost the nomination chances of candidates who ran poorly in November — the underlying supply-side and demand-side problems were there before Trump, and they aren’t going away even if the former president finally does. And the predicament is making it harder for Republicans to govern effectively when they do win.
