When the history of the 2022 midterms is written, the way the GOP blew their early lock will be explained by pointing out how much more successful the Democrats were in painting the Republican Party as extremist fascists than the Republicans were in painting the Democratic Party as extremist communists, namely because the former is true and evident and the latter is false and absurd. On top of that, there will be a lot about the Supreme Court’s Dobb’s Decision overturning Roe and a lot about the GOP’s terrible candidate quality.
At this point, smart money would have to bet the Democrats are not just going to hold onto their tenuous majority in the Senate but expand it. Although poor candidate quality worked against the Democrats in Missouri, they have otherwise either picked pretty good candidates or, at least, the lesser evil across the board. Right now— not counting Alaska, where the battle is between a mainstream conservative Republican (Lisa Murkowski) and an extreme MAGA Republican (Kelly Tshibaka)— the Senate battleground consists of 9 seats... and the Democrats are leading in almost all of them.
Arizona- Democratic incumbent Mark Kelly is leading MAGA-Republican Blake Masters by almost 8 points
Florida- Republican incumbent Marco Rubio is struggling to stay ahead of weak Democrat Val Demings
Georgia- Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock is around 2 points ahead of embarrassingly incompetent Herschel Walker
Nevada- Democratic incumbent Catherine Cortez Masto is around 4 points ahead of Adam Laxalt
New Hampshire- The worst of all the Democratic incumbents, Maggie Hassan, is ahead of likely Republican nominee Don Bolduc by around 5 points
North Carolina is a dead heat
Ohio is a dead heat, Democrat Tim Ryan slightly ahead of another incompetent candidate.
Pennsylvania- John Fetterman leads Mehmet Oz by 8 points
Wisconsin- Republican incumbent Ron Johnson has negative momentum as Mandela Barnes has started leading him in every recent poll, including GOP polls.
The Republicans are desperately trying to expand the battleground to Colorado and Washington but, in both cases, that is flushing resources down the toilet. Michael Bennet is ahead of Joe O’Dea by nearly 9 points and Patty Murray leads Tiffany Smiley by around 13 points. The Democrats have just as much chance to expand the battleground into Iowa and Kentucky.
But with just 2 months to go, the Republicans are facing another disturbing and disruptive factor. Trump’s rage at and quest for revenge against Mitch McConnell has spilled into the campaign, as he encourages NRSC head Rick Scott to displace McConnell as Senate leader. The dispute between Scott, a Trump-like MAGA-espousing extremist, and McConnell, is damaging the GOP rapidly diminishing chances in November.
Scott, a career criminal whose hand is perpetually stuck in the cookie jar, explained his fight-to-the-death with McConnell as a “strategic disagreement.” In an interview with Politico’s Burgess Everett, Scott said “If you trash talk our candidates… you hurt our chances of winning, and you hurt our candidates’ ability to raise money. I know they’re good candidates, because I’ve been talking to them and they’re working their butts off.”
Across the map, Republicans are worried about blowing an opportunity to flip the 50-50 Senate. J.D. Vance is struggling to fend off Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan in Ohio, Herschel Walker is lagging behind Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA), Mehmet Oz is trailing Lt. Gov. John Fetterman in Pennsylvania and Republicans are starting to bail on Blake Masters’ challenge to Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ). But it is only September, and both parties expect races to tighten races and political spending to skyrocket.
In the interview, Scott praised each of those candidates and said he talked to Masters this week: “He knows he has to raise a lot of money.” He called Walker, a former football star, “somebody that lived the dream of Georgia,” said Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy biography illustrates empathy about drug addiction and called Oz “a world-renowned physician and the best health care talk show host in the world.”
…David Bergstein, a spokesperson for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said that “we know Rick’s been yachting in Europe so we’re happy to catch him up: his flunky candidates are still failing, his party’s position on abortion is still unpopular, and his fellow Republicans are still openly complaining about his self-serving, failed leadership of the NRSC.”
…Mitch McConnell is among the myriad Republicans questioning the Senate GOP’s quality of candidates in the midterms. Rick Scott wants everyone to stop doubting his recruits.
“Sen. McConnell and I clearly have a strategic disagreement here … We have great candidates,” the National Republican Senatorial Committee chair said in an interview Wednesday. “He wants to do the same thing I want to do: I want to get a majority. And I think it’s important that we’re all cheerleaders for our candidates.”
McConnell predicted in August that the House was more likely to flip than the Senate, because in the upper chamber “candidate quality has a lot to do with the outcome.” The comment reflected an increasingly public attitude within the GOP about their prospects of flipping the chamber.
And by acknowledging a rift with McConnell over the party’s strategy, the Florida senator is barreling ahead on his unorthodox approach.
Scott’s op ed in for the Washington Examiner website yesterday, didn’t mention McConnell by name and it wasn’t as vicious an attack as Trump would have preferred, but no one doubted where Scott’s criticism was aimed. “When I became the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee,” he began, “Republicans had just lost control of the Senate. This does not merely mean Republicans lost the ability to lead committees; it means we lost the ability to control anything about what the Senate does… Unfortunately, many of the very people responsible for losing the Senate last cycle are now trying to stop us from winning the majority this time by trash-talking our Republican candidates. It’s an amazing act of cowardice, and ultimately, it’s treasonous to the conservative cause. Giving anonymous quotes to help the Washington Post or the New York Times write stories trashing Republicans is the same as working with the Democratic National Committee. If you want to talk about the need to raise more money to promote our candidates versus the Democrats’ terrible candidates, I agree. If you want to trash-talk our candidates to help the Democrats, pipe down. That’s not what leaders do. And Republicans need to be leaders that build up the team and do everything they can to get the entire team over the finish line. Ultimately, though, when you complain and lament that we have ‘bad candidates,’ what you are really saying is that you have contempt for the voters who chose them. Now we are at the heart of the matter. Much of Washington's chattering class disrespects and secretly (or not so secretly) loathes Republican voters. These self-appointed ‘smart guys’ in Washington think they (not the voters) should be able to choose our candidates. The D.C. crowd should not choose candidates, and they do not, and they will not. The D.C. crowd did not choose me and actively opposed me in 2010 when I ran for governor in the Florida Republican primary. If the D.C. crowd was right, I wouldn’t be in the Senate.”
Upshot: McConnell’s SuperPAC, has started cutting back on spending for some of the extreme-MAGA candidates, including shaving $8 million from a TV ad buy for fascist billionaire Peter Thiel’s rumored ex-lover, Blake Masters.
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