MISSTEPS HAVE GOP WORRIED ABOUT SENATE
Party’s strategists fret that candidates are underperforming
At a recent Republican donor retreat in Chicago, Herschel Walker was asked a question about fiscal discipline and balancing the budget. The GOP nominee for U.S. Senate in Georgia answered with a long answer on Black Lives Matter and the police, failing to address the question, according to people with knowledge of the event.
The surprised reaction to Walker’s response was familiar to Republicans who have been tracking his struggling bid in one of the most competitive Senate contests in the nation. Since easily winning his primary, his polling edge against Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock has become a deficit amid erratic campaigning, verbal flubs and disclosures about three children he had not previously spoken about publicly.
The result has been a rescue mission, helmed in part by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which has led to several veteran staff hires by Walker’s campaign, including Brett O’Donnell, the party’s most celebrated debate prep strategist. It is just one of the ways GOP leaders have found themselves dealing with cleanup efforts as they round the summer bend on what should be a banner Republican
election season.
Not for decades has the midterm environment appeared as favorable to Republicans, with President Joe Biden’s approval rating at 39 percent, according to a Washington Post polling average in June. But four months from Election Day, Republicans are struggling in several of the marquee Senate races because of candidate challenges and campaigns still recovering from brutal Republican primaries, putting control of the Senate up for grabs.
In the battle for control of the House, which tends to hew closely to the national mood, strategists from both parties say they think Republicans are well-positioned to win back the majority. But their success in the fight for the evenly divided Senate and in gubernatorial races, where candidate quality and the unique political contours of each
state tend to factor into the outcome, are less of a sure thing in crucial battlegrounds.
“In some of these contests right now, there are some concerns, at least in the Senate map,” said Kevin Madden, a veteran GOP operative. “There are warning signs that some of these candidates are not as strong as they could be given the opportunity at hand.”
Democrats are defending the narrowest possible Senate majority — the chamber is split 50-50, with Vice President Kamala Harris breaking ties — in November, and their vulnerable incumbents in states such as Georgia, Arizona and Nevada are top targets for Republicans charting a path back to power. But none is a sure-bet pickup. The GOP is also defending seats in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where it had hoped to be in a more favorable position.
One GOP strategist watching the Senate race closely, who like others interviewed for this report requested anonymity to speak more openly about internal deliberations, said that “there are massive problems on the candidate front.”
It’s not just political novices who are struggling. In Wisconsin, Republican Sen. Ron Johnson is roughly even with three of his four potential Democratic rivals in a Marquette University poll last month, taken before new disclosures that his office had attempted to play a role in pushing an alternate slate of electors for the 2020 election.
Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Republican nominee for Senate in Pennsylvania, is also polling slightly behind his Democratic opponent, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, following a tough Republican primary that flooded the state’s airwaves with attack ads against the retired surgeon and television personality.
Democrats have also been pointing to recent reporting on J.D. Vance, the GOP’s Senate nominee in Ohio, comparing abortion and slavery in an interview last year with a Catholic podcast. In Arizona, where the primary is next month, they have gone after Blake Masters, a Donald Trumpbacked candidate for the Republican Senate nomination who has promoted the false claim that the former president won the 2020 election and has espoused hardline immigration views.