There are almost 13 million people in Pennsylvania. It’s a swing state, so approximately half of them are Republicans. And, out of all those millions of Republicans, the GOP in its infinite wisdom nominated Mehmet Oz as its candidate for U.S. Senate this year.

Though Oz was once best known as one of the nation’s most distinguished cardiac surgeons, that is no longer the case. More recently, he’s become best known as a peddler of unscientific medical advice on daytime TV. As a political candidate, he’s an out-of-touch millionaire who, as his Democratic opponent John Fetterman never misses a chance to mention, owns 10 houses and may not even be a Pennsylvanian, since he seems to have lived mostly in New Jersey. He doesn’t even seem all that dedicated to campaigning for office — Oz spent most of the summer on vacation in Florida and Ireland.

Dr. Oz is, to put it mildly, not having a lot of success in his race. His fundraising numbers are abysmal, and he finds himself about 10 points behind Fetterman (who had to sit out several recent weeks after a health setback) by about 10 points, even though this is an election in which the Republicans were supposed to have a big advantage.

Why did Republicans choose this man, who seems so unsuited for a Senate campaign (and perhaps not all that invested in one, either)? The endorsement of Donald Trump, a man who loves himself a rich, shady TV personality, certainly helped. Oz’s willingness to lie about the 2020 election was a bonus, as well.

I can’t help but think that, had Republicans chosen a generic candidate — you know, some gray-haired white guy with a military background who talks about “small business” a lot — they’d be doing a lot better in Pennsylvania than they are with this insincere daytime TV star.

Dr. Oz is not the only terrible candidate the Republicans have put forth. There’s Herschel Walker, a former football star running for the Senate from Georgia, who seems to be way out of his depth (just check out his explanation of international climate change politics). There’s J.D. Vance in Ohio, who is what you might imagine if you closed your eyes and tried to imagine a smarmy right-wing opportunist — he’s somehow losing his Senate race in a state that Trump dominated in 2016 and 2020. And Blake Masters, a protégé of billionaire Peter Thiel who seems to embody the worst of the edgelord online right, is losing badly in Arizona.

And that’s just the Senate! There are plenty of terrible GOP candidates all over the ballots in swing states this year. Some are extremists, some are racists, and some are liars. They’ve won their primaries because their weirdness and their radicalism made them popular with the Republican base; these very qualities make them unpalatable to the rest of the country.

I suppose if you wanted to be charitable, you might argue that the GOP is running a high-risk, high-reward strategy. They’re nominating the candidates they really want to see in office, not the “RINOs” Trump often complains about. These people might not win, but if they do, they will not hesitate to enact the hard-right Republican agenda.

The party has no platform anymore, but we can assume that this means that they will work hard to disadvantage gay and trans people, impose draconian abortion bans, force a simplistic version of American history into schools, and, most importantly, do what Trump failed to do in 2020 — use lies and intimidation into making sure Republicans never “lose” an election again. Even if the GOP mostly fails, a few victories here and there — say election deniers win in a couple of key races in Arizona or for governor of Pennsylvania — could lead to something between a constitutional crisis and a coup.

Maybe this is the plan, but I doubt it. It seems more plausible, given the events of the last decade, that the party has no grand plan. Trump himself was the key factor in many primary races, and he generally supported whoever was willing to flatter him the most, or whoever came from “central casting,” as he likes to say.

The GOP seems to be running a bunch of wild-eyed conspiracy theorists, weirdos, and Trump ass-kissers for major offices all over the country and hoping for the best. As a result, they’re likely to lose a bunch of races they seemed likely to win a few months ago.

There are several potential outcomes this fall. It’s possible, I suppose, that the GOP spends enough money — or things go so badly for the Biden administration — that Herschel Walker and Mehmet Oz become candidates who can realistically win big races against serious opposition. In this case, it will be full steam ahead — the Republican Party will continue to move along its current trajectory.

It’s also possible that the Republicans will suffer such a brutal defeat in November that they completely rethink their approach and ideology. I wouldn’t bet on this. A “blue wave” is unlikely, and, even if there was a blue wave, many GOP politicians seem terrified of the ignorant, conspiracy-minded base they’ve cultivated, and won’t turn on them.

It’s most likely that the coming election will be a mixed bag. Some of the bad GOP candidates will lose elections that a competent politician could have won, but the Republicans may still win the House. In this scenario, perhaps Democrats celebrate and decide that things are looking up for them — after all, they eked out a respectable result in a year with 8% inflation and a president with a 40% approval rating.

This would be dangerous for the Democrats. At some point, you’d have to believe that the GOP will realize that nominating candidates who are good at politics is the way forward.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis is a good example of what the next generation of Republicans might look like. He’s too smart to say a bunch of crazy, conspiratorial stuff out loud. Instead, he devotes his time and talents to pushing hard-right policies, and he’s pretty good at it. The media, so used to covering the wild eccentricities of Trump, and desperate to be seen as unbiased, would love to cover people like DeSantis as “normal,” “respectable” politicians.

Would somebody like DeSantis do something shady to undermine democracy and fraudulently swing a presidential election his party’s way? I’m not sure, but I do know he wouldn’t announce it in advance the way a lot of these other clowns have been doing for years. He’d probably actually be able to pull it off, as well.

If Republicans start nominating candidates who don’t say the quiet part out loud, they’ll start crushing the Democrats. The Republican coalition — dominated by less-educated, exurban, and rural white people — is overrepresented in the Electoral College and the Senate map. Increasingly, red state legislatures have locked in Gerrymandered districts that will serve the same purpose for the house.

Another possibility, equally probable, is that the GOP continues to shrink. If the prerequisite for being a successful Republican politician is that you have to be able to repeat Trumpist absurdities with a straight face, maybe all of the capable politicians will be weeded out of the party. Who but a clown would get into a clown car?

Neither of these is an attractive future. In the first scenario, one of our two major political parties becomes much more effective at making the country an illiberal, less democratic place. In the other, it becomes a self-parody — a party of crackpots and nincompoops who, through a dedicated media ecosystem, are able to sway a third of the country.

I never quite thought I’d be yearning for the GOP of old, the party of Bob Dole and George W. Bush, but it seems like a pretty attractive prospect right now.

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