A Republican lawmaker Wednesday got in a fiery exchange with a CNN anchor over what Republicans are learning following the Democratic elections sweep and made a surprising implication about negotiations to try and reopen the government.

CNN anchor Kasie Hunt interviewed Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) and asked what Republicans might be thinking about following the elections.

"Well I say, first of all, I don't know if we really lost. I mean that sincerely..." Mullin responded.

Hunt then interjected, saying "it's a little implausible on its face."

Mullin described why he thinks Republicans saw election losses, saying Republican candidates need to be better quality.

"Virginia was a blue state. Kamala won it by five points. We didn't win New Jersey. We didn't win New York. And we sure the heck didn't win California. So it wasn't a state that the president lost," he said. "It was just like the issue was if you start looking like Jay Jones, the attorney general in Virginia, you know, how did the Republicans lose that race? I mean, here you have Jay Jones, who wanted to, you know, kill one of his colleagues and hoped his kids died. And you go, how did a candidate like that beat a Republican? That's a question that you got to ask."

Hunt pushed back, asking more about the candidate and if they were a weak fit for the race.

"I don't know the candidate personally, but that goes that says, well, maybe we should do a better job in recruiting," Mullin said.

As President Donald Trump admitted Wednesday morning, Republicans lost. And voters voiced what they really think of the shutdown.

"I think the shutdown is bad for everybody," Mullin said. "That's why it's so frustrating that the Democrats want to continue to use it as leverage."

Hunt pushed back.

"You seem to imply that Republicans need to end the shutdown to make it better," she said.

"Well, we're trying to I don't know where we negotiate, though, because we've offered a clean CR that [Sen.] Chuck Schumer (D-NY) wrote a year ago. This isn't any legislation that has Republican policies on it. I don't know how you negotiate when it's already clean. Well, maybe what we should have done, and this is what we talked about is, well, maybe we instead of offering a clean CR because we thought that the Democrats would play ball with it, maybe we should have put a whole bunch of Republican policies on it. They put a whole bunch of Democrat policies on their CR and then we negotiate back to the clean CR," he said. "Maybe that's what we should have done. Maybe there was a negotiating tactic that we that we didn't do, but there's no place to negotiate. When you have a clean CR because what policy do you take off of a clean CR?"