Notably the GOP bench consists of only three people with elected experience, two AGs (Laxalt and Schmitt) and a congressman (Budd). They'll likely get a second congressman with Mullin, and they might get Morse but that's it. The other candidates are a staffer (Britt), a pair of Thiel acolytes (Masters and Vance), a TV personality (Oz), and an athlete (Walker).
This is very different from the past races:
-Other than Hickenlooper, the candidates who flipped seats in 2020 were either first time candidates (Tuberville, Kelly, Warnock) or lost their only other election. Of the candidates who held open seats only Hagerty is a first time winner, as the rest were all current (Lujan and Marshall) and former (Lummis) congresspeople, plus a row officer was appointed (Padilla)
-The entire 2018 freshman class consisted of people who won elections before. Two governors (Romney and Scott), four congresspeople (Blackburn, Cramer, Rosen, and Sinema - and McSally if you count her), a row officer (Hawley) and a state legislator (Braun). Ditto with 2016 which was all congresspeople (Duckworth, Van Hollen, and Young), governors (Hassan) or row officers (Cortez Masto, Harris, Kennedy)
-Perdue and Sasse were the only first-time candidates to win in 2014. It was mostly congresspeople (Capito, Cassidy, Cotton, Daines, Gardner, Lankford, Peters), legislators (Ernst and Tillis) and a former governor (Rounds).
-In 2012 it was Warren and Cruz. The rest either came from congress (Baldwin, Donnelly, Flake, Henirich, Hirono, and Murphy), governorships (Kaine and King), legislatures (Fischer) and row offices (Heitkamp).
-In 2010 the first time winners were Johnson, Paul, and Lee. Ayotte though was an AG in one of the very few states it's not an elected position. It was mostly congresspeople (Blunt, Boozman, Kirk, Portman, Toomey), two governors (Hoeven and Manchin), a row officer (Blumenthal), a state legislator (Rubio), a local officeholder (Coons) and one ex-senator (Coats).
I agree that we've seen lots of examples of people who never held public office and run for Senate or smtg and are quite successful. However, even then, they're usually related to politics in some way, or are at least well respected lawyers or smtg.
The issue with some of these GOP canidates is not necessarily that they haven't run for office before, but that folks like Walker come from an area that doesn't have anything to do with politics and as a consequence tends to be less knowledgeable on how to be politically savy and also a lot of the Trumpists have trouble regulating themselves and what they say.
