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Two years ago this week, Georgia Republicans named a former NFL star with a doubtful history in the state’s immensely mature Senate race. Before long, every statement and every discrepancy became a new scandal for Herschel Walker, until it became almost impossible to figure out where one began and another ended. And this dragged on for months. Walker said that opposition abortion in all cases, only for stories about fully financing your girlfriends abortions to demolish his credibility, which was in trouble from the start, as Walker was still claiming Texas homestead tax exemptions. Even the candidate’s son has became a vehement critic of his father, who did his best to keep himself gagged as everything fell apart.
It was, frankly, a classic case of a bad candidate verification, part of a larger candidate quality crisis for the Republican Party that year. The Georgia seat should have been a gimmick for the party, if only it hadn’t nominated someone whose past didn’t include stories of pointing out guns to the head of an ex-wife, among others allegations of domestic violence.
Sitting in Atlanta on primary night two years ago, I couldn’t help but send out my own warning that Republicans were setting themselves up for failure. And yet, institutional Republicans have signaled defiance; this was President Donald Trump’s favorite candidate. Nothing – and I mean anything– more mattered.
Until it happened. It’s no exaggeration to say that Walker’s candidacy cost Republicans their Senate majority. But then again, so did his failures Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, NevadaIt is Arizona.
This is the point in the election cycle when both sides insist they are in the best position to end control of the Senate. Democrats have exactly zero margin for error this cycle if they want to keep the Senate, and four incumbents in particular — Sens. Jon Tester in Montana, Bob Casey in Pennsylvania, Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Jacky Rosen of Nevada — are the biggest targets. . Everyone is a talent at the party, but sometimes that doesn’t matter. But just like in 2022, it’s not hard to find Republican donors complaining that their team’s strategy of embracing wealthy foreigners (read: amateurs) is setting them up for another November looking for a red wave that never appears.
Candidates with big checkbooks didn’t save Republicans in 2022. Still, the well-financed are back as likely nominees in Montana, PennsylvaniaIt is Ohio. And the leaders in Montana, Nevada, PennsylvaniaIt is Michigan they are facing varying degrees of real criticism about how long they have actually lived in the state they represent. The attack on transplant newcomers was a mixed bag for Democrats in 2022; falling short in states like Ohio as often as it did in places like Pennsylvania.
It sure looks like both parties are playing some version of their 2022 playbooks. It’s as predictable as it is partisan. Democrats are all-in on attacks against robber barons, while Republicans proudly compare their outsiders to the four most at-risk Democratic incumbents, who between them have a swampy 60 years of experience in the Senate.
You’ll notice that no one here seems to be offering an optimistic vision for the country’s future. It’s enough to remind most armchair political observers why they hate this billion-dollar industry. But the negative campaign works and the margins are as slim as they seem.
Strategists advising GOP campaigns, of course, vehemently reject concerns about untested candidates and insist that they are much stronger than they were in 2022. On the one hand, the carpenter The accusations – although persistently brought forward – are not as clear as they were two years ago. Furthermore, Republicans have a two-pronged strategy that they say is designed to flip some Senate seats: running against a deeply unpopular President Joe Biden has at the same time alleged corruption and hypocrisy against incumbent Democrats who may be battle-tested but whose experience may be seen as close enough to power to appear cronies. And while recruiting ultra-wealthy nominees means they can fund their own campaigns, Republicans smartly favored candidates this cycle with national security and military ties in this year’s competitive races in Pennsylvania, Montana, Nevada and Michigan. It’s difficult to label someone who moves from a home base to a foreign assignment as a rudderless opportunist. (Just to ask John McCain’s opponents like that attack on the adventurer worked.)
Democrats, however, are confident that their incumbents are known and trusted by their voters. In many cases, the Republican Party’s latest attacks date back decades, which may weaken its effectiveness, as many voters will ask why claims of ancient history should matter to someone who has been in office for a lifetime. some voters.
However, Senate Democrats have, to varying degrees of intensity, undermined some of their original arguments for power. To take Pennsylvaniawhere Casey won his first campaign in 2006 by linking his opponent to super lobbyist Jack Abramoff, but now account his brother as a lobbyist and his sister as a half-million-dollar campaign supplier. Likewise, senators who initially ran anti-insider campaigns in Montana It is Wisconsin we now have powerful friends in the upper echelons of power. And although Brown has long burnished a populist crusader image in Ohio, his partisan critics argue that some errors in tax invoice exposed him as a swamp creature.
But the problem is this: each campaign cycle is, in some ways, a repetition of the previous one, and both parties usually continue to apply the old strategy – at least until it stops working. And this time, Republicans appear to have learned one of the most egregious things lessons 2022: ignoring abortion is not a victory strategy.
Take, for example, Maryland, where optimistic Republican donors think the Senate race could be in play thanks to Larry Hogan’s nomination. The popular former governor has developed a national brand about his ambivalence toward Trump and carries with him a healthy dose of goodwill from Democrats. Using his first general election ad to address abortion rights, he is following the advice of national Republicans to speak out in favor of in vitro fertilization and support exceptions to the ban on abortion in cases of rape, incest and to protect the life of the pregnant person. National Republicans are quick to note that Hogan is going further than most other candidates are – or will – when he says he would support a law codifying a national right to abortion, but these strategists also recognize that this is probably the only way for which the real Maryland is going. be in play for the Red Team.
Democrats still count on abortion as a miracle solution against Republicans, which may prove overly optimistic. They also haven’t fully understood that Biden is a liability for their candidates, whether they keep the president at arm’s length or not. Democratic strategists are most concerned about Casey, whose excellent bipartisan appeal in Pennsylvania — buoyed for years by the best family brand in Keystone State politics and his last-in-class status as “pro-life democrat” — was wasted, leaving him more vulnerable to being painted as just another lackey of the pro-abortion crowd.
But both sides have reason to worry. Republicans may have the most fertile field, but that was also true in 2022. The quality of candidates matters, and while the developing lines of attack seem less egregious than they did two years ago, they are still out there. In Ohio, especially, GOP nominee Bernie Moreno faces a clear narrative problem surrounding his personal story. And for Democrats, problematic high-profile incumbents like Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey and Representative Henry Cuellar from Texas are hardly Helping while facing their own criminal corruption charges. His alleged corruption becomes confusing as Republicans make accusations against other Democrats at stake this cycle. A pox for everyone!
For their part, the Democratic national strategists charged with holding the Senate rely on incumbents in Montana, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Nevada – for the most part – to manage their own races. No one is prescribing a one-size-fits-all commitment for them, and Biden has been happy to stay away when necessary. The President spent 36 years in the Senate and eight as Vice President; he knows that the stiff arm treatment is not personal, it is a matter of survival. Furthermore, the four incumbents — along with candidates in Florida and Texas seen as possible contenders — are hardly party yes-men who need insiders’ blessing to raise campaign cash. In fact, national money can even harm.
Read more: Why Democrats are excited about Florida
Here we return to Georgia. That wasn’t the case two years ago. Walker was a known liability who had no natural fundraising base. But he was a shining figure, and Georgia and national Republicans (wrongly) assumed that voters would look past that and give him their blessing. As someone told me two years ago during the primaries, Walker was the one who would lose. “He’s an African-American football player in this state. There are many people who support a football player instead of a preacher. In this state, football is everything,” a 66-year-old actor from Dunwoody told me. He then added the very important caveat: “Unless he intervenes.”
This time, so far there are no Republican recruits with as many warning signs. But the campaign arm didn’t do Senate candidates many favors beyond checkbooks. Waiting for no one to intervene is not a strategy; It’s a gamble. The Democrats have proven their luck and enter the summer with a few points on the board, while the Republicans are starting from scratch. That could make the Republican Party’s climb even more satisfying if it reaches the top, and even more crushing if it stumbles again.
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