Can The GOP Candidate Quality Problem Be As Dire As Kyrsten Sinema?
Politico kicked off Wednesday with another story about the GOP’s candidate quality problem, namely with MAGAt extremists wanting to run in purple states where they can win GOP primaries but not general elections. Pennsylvania is the most glaring example and Holly Otterbein reported after going to a Mastriano rally on Saturday in the northeast corner of the state. Conspiracy theory-infused MAGAts in Pennsylvania aren’t thinking about electability; they’re thinking about finding crackpots as cracked as they are themselves. It doesn’t matter to them that Mastriano lost in a landslide in his gubernatorial bid and dragged the rest of the ticket down with him, costing the GOP, not just the governor’s mansion but also the open red Senate seat, every single swing congressional district the GOP spent money in and, perhaps most disastrously for them, the state House, where the Democrats netted 12 seats, flipping the chamber blue for the first time in over a decade. Many of the nuts claim that Mastriano didn’t lose by 15 points but that the election was stolen. After all, everyone they know voted for him.
Senate Republicans in DC are working to deny the nomination to Mastriano and make sure hedge fund manager David McCormick gets it instead. The head of the DSCC, Steve Daines, has already attacked Mastriano as unelectable. Pennsylvania MAGAts don’t care what Daines, whoever he is, has to say. And they’ve been trained by Fox News and Trump to identify McConnell as an enemy.
“The Senate reelection campaign in D.C. is like, ‘We don’t want Mastriano to run.’ Well, you don’t have a say in that there, fella,” Mastriano told the crowd at his rally over the weekend. “They can’t win any state races without the Walk as Free People movement, right? They can’t win without us. So they better be ginger.”
Mastriano’s rally was part-revival, part-reunion for his fans. Held in a small town in south-central Pennsylvania, it was also a demonstration of what McCormick and his mainstream allies in the party could be up against if he enters the Senate race.
A few hundred people attended the event, where Mastriano promoted a slate of Republicans running for local office this year. In addition to the candidates, speakers included Rep. John Joyce (R-Pa.), Trump lawyer Christina Bobb and conservative media personality Wendy Bell. The main message was that MAGA-ism isn’t dead. The language spoken, however, was conspiracy theories.
On the reliability of the 2020 election: “Where are these numbers coming from? Nothing matched. It didn’t work,” said Bobb.
On Sen. John Fetterman’s recovery from clinical depression at an in-patient facility: “Do we even know if Fetterman is even alive right now?” asked Lori Phillips, a volunteer for Mastriano who attended the rally.
On Covid-19: “China should be held for war crimes, and maybe if our government— if [Anthony] Fauci and all those guys— were involved in it just as much, maybe they should be held for war crimes,” said retiree Larry Haugh, another rally-goer.
…At Mastriano’s rally, a number of attendants were skeptical of McCormick.
“He was a RINO in my opinion,” said nurse Joy Whitesel. “He just seemed too rehearsed for me.”
“I hadn’t even heard of him until he announced he was running for office,” said health care worker Rebecca Evans.
But it wasn’t just McCormick who elicited apprehension, but also the political remedies he and other traditional Republicans were pushing in the wake of the 2022 letdown. Though multiple Republican leaders, including Mastriano, have argued that the party needs to embrace mail-in voting, several of the rally-goers were reluctant about going in that direction.
“I don’t agree with mail-in voting because it’s so easy to become fraudulent,” said Whitesel, adding that she wants Mastriano to run for the Senate and isn’t concerned about his electability “because his loss was only by mail-in votes— he won the in-person votes— and he got zero support from the RINOs.”
For McCormick, this all raises tricky questions: mainly, is there an actual path forward to winning his party’s nod, especially with Trump running for the presidency. During last year’s election, McCormick unsuccessfully sought the former president’s endorsement and hired several of his ex-aides. For the time being, he seems to be taking a different tack. Though McCormick applauded Trump’s approach to China and the economy in his book, he also recounted a private conversation in which Trump told him, “You know you can’t win unless you say the election was stolen.”
McCormick said he “made it clear to him that I couldn’t do that. Three days later, Trump endorsed Mehmet Oz” for the Senate.
Asked whether he supports Trump in the presidential primary, McCormick said there are “great people” who are going to run, but that he has not made a decision yet to back any candidate.
“I want to see how the primary goes,” he said. “I also am a strong proponent of hopefully a vision for the future that’s positive— more looking forward than backwards.”
Whether looking forward— not backward— is what GOP primary voters want is less clear.
Playbook also noted that “far-right candidates are mulling runs and gaining traction amid clear signs they will fail miserably in the general election, putting GOP hopes of reclaiming the chamber at risk. And it’s not just Mastriano.”
Wisconsin: A rep for David Clarke, the controversial former sheriff and Fox News pundit, told the Daily Beast he would “never take anything off the table” regarding a possible run against Sen. Tammy Baldwin.
Arizona: Both Kari Lake and Blake Masters, who lost gubernatorial and Senate races in 2022, respectively, are looking at running for the seat now held by Sen. Kyrsten Sinema.
Montana: Hard-right Rep. Matt Rosendale is exploring a rematch against Sen. Jon Tester, who beat him in 2018 by more than 3 points.
And back in Pennsylvania: Kathy Barnette, who drew support from a quarter of Keystone State Republicans in the 2022 Senate primary, recently told WPHT-AM that she was still considering a run against Casey.
“Candidate quality” was the top reason fingered by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and many other GOP bigwigs after the party’s lackluster 2022 showing, and while it’s still awfully early, they’re beginning to worry again.
…Democrats, meanwhile, are sitting back and watching, skeptical that any pre-primary meddling is going to be successful given the anti-establishment fervor that still animates the party’s base. “Those Republican primary voters are kind of repelled by candidates that are closely associated with the NRSC or the establishment Republicans,” said one Democrat involved in the fight for the Senate.
Even some Republicans admit the moves could backfire. They acknowledge plenty of unanswered questions: Has the primary electorate grown any more pragmatic after 2022’s losses? Will Daines’ moves scare off problematic candidates? Are Trump— and potentially other presidential candidates— going to wade into Senate races with endorsements?
But the alternative, they argue, is worse: “You have these candidates who are uniquely damaged and unelectable that it’s worth going in and spending money to make sure they don’t become the nominee,” a former Republican Senate operative told us last night. “These primaries will get rocky at points.”
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