Peter Thiel calls midterms ‘not merely disastrous but also depressing’ for GOP 

Billionaire tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel called the Republican Party’s performance in this year’s midterm elections “disastrous” and “depressing” in a speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute on Tuesday.

“The part of it that’s not merely disastrous but also depressing is just the sense that if we don’t do something different, we’re just gonna be in this Groundhog Day where something like this is going to repeat in 2024, or throughout the rest of this decade,” Thiel said as part of the “A Time for Choosing” speaker series.

Thiel introduced his own comments at the event as “free advice for the Republican party.”  

Thiel spent millions backing Arizona GOP Senate candidate Blake Masters, who was also endorsed by former President Trump and lost his election. He also gave big to Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance, another Trump-backed Republican candidate who won his race against Rep. Tim Ryan (D).

However, many of the former president’s endorsees lost key races, such as his Senate picks in Pennsylvania and Georgia, allowing Democrats to hold control of the upper chamber.

Those losses came despite this year’s midterms being “structurally” set up for GOP wins, Thiel said, citing issues like inflation and rising gas prices.

“If you can’t sort of win in that kind of a context, how are you ever going to win?” Thiel asked, arguing that Republicans failed to put forward a “substantive agenda” and ran a “discombobulated” campaign overall.

“Diversity was more of weakness than a strength in our party,” he said, comparing the GOP to the “ragtag rebel alliance” in the Star Wars film series. 

Thiel also knocked Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and former Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) as examples of the party’s failings.  

“There was sort of a Mitch McConnell intuition that you shouldn’t talk about anything substantive at all, sort of a nihilistic, maybe a passive-aggressive form of nihilism or something like that … which is kind of uninspiring,” he said. 

“And then there was maybe his sort of a opposite problem, something like the detailed Paul Ryan policy wonkery, where you go into a lot of details, but somehow the ideas are unpopular and you’re checkmate on move one.” 

Thiel said his proximity to Masters and Vance gave him a “ringside seat” to the midterms and that he was “wallowing on the disaster,” noting the GOP’s struggle to oust any Democratic Senate incumbents.

Puck’s newsletter “The Stratosphere” first reported on Thiel’s comments.