The Pennsylvania GOP is spending at least $100,000 to hire DC-based Public Opinion Strategies to conduct research into why the 2022 midterms were such a shitshow for them, Politico reports.

On one level it makes sense that they’d want to do a deep dive and figure out where they fucked up, running all sorts of focus groups and pinpoint exactly what makes independent voters in a crucial swing state tick. On another level, the answer’s pretty goddamned obvious why they lost the gubernatorial and US Senate races, failed to flip a single US House district, and lost their majority in the state House: Republican voters. And disgraced former President Trump too, to an extent.

It was Republican voters who picked New Jersey man Mehmet Oz to be the US Senate nominee after Trump endorsed the TV quack. He won against Glenn Youngkin-esque rival David McCormick by only about 900 votes in the primary. There’s a case to be made that QAnon maniac Kathy Barnette split some of the MAGA vote and Oz would’ve won more comfortably without her in the race, but there’s almost no question David McCormick would’ve won if Trump had stayed out of it.

The same can be said of Doug Mastriano. Trump endorsed the bald conspiracy freak just days before the primary election while Doug was surging in polls, so the weight of his influence is debatable at best there. Either way, Republican primary voters still ultimately picked both of those clowns and both ultimately failed against their Dem opponents who clearly both had better appeal to independents. The party can piss away as much money as they want on “post-mortem” findings, none of that is going to solve the problem of a right wing base that will happily nominate losers.