To leave nominee Lynch dangly is unjustifiable.
But a tough Republican primary left their nominee Representative Jeff Flake, a well-known and well-established Republican, broke, bruised and in need of more help than his party expected to give.
Forced to call himself "severely conservative" to win his party's nomination, Mr Romney ended up too far from the independents he needed for a general-election majority.The primaries' excessive ferocity also left the nominee on the wrong side of the demographic future.
Democrats, with no leverage, are left fighting nominees without really hoping to stop them.
The shorter season has left the nominees feeling a bit less exhausted, or at least that was the appearance on Monday.
Republicans have responded with stalling tactics that have left 74 nominees pending consideration on the Senate floor and an additional 107 bottled up in committees, many of them for economic posts or to run initiatives that Republicans fiercely oppose.
So when Republican objections left his nominees for various government posts in limbo, he pushed them through via "recess appointments", even though the Senate was not technically in recess.
Envious of the Republicans' ability in recent elections to avoid intra-party contests, Democrats had hoped to avoid the kind of bloody primaries that have often left their nominees weakened heading into the general elections.
States the head of the Office of Government Ethics OGEE), the agency in charge of ethics reviews: "It has left some nominees with potentially unknown or potentially unresolved ethics issues shortly before their scheduled hearings.
To the contrary, when Senators went off to the beach earlier this month (or to run for President), they left 14 nominees behind on the Senate floor, twisting in the wind, still waiting for a vote.
At the same time, the sluggish economic growth of past years is likely to leave Republican nominee Donald Trump plenty of room to continue to criticize Democratic policies.
