Dems had a hand in GOP recruiting
‘Chaos’ plan kept strong Republicans out of 4 Senate races
They called it the “Summer of Chaos.”
In 2021, as Democratic strategists brainstormed ways to defend their threadbare control of the Senate, they began an aggressive strategy with the goal of choosing their adversaries.
Their best chance of hanging on, Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan told staff members at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, was to focus on the four seats they needed to keep: Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and New Hampshire.
“We knew we needed to localize the races and disqualify our Republican opponents,” said David Bergstein, the group’s communications director.
But Peters, the committee’s chair, also authorized a bit of skulduggery. The emerging plan had two main components: deterring potentially strong Republicans from entering races against those “core four” Democratic incumbents and “maximizing the chaos” within Republican primaries.
In this, Democrats had an unwitting ally in former President Donald Trump, who insisted on supporting only candidates who would back his election lies.
Two Republican governors had Democrats especially worried: Chris Sununu of New Hampshire and Doug Ducey of Arizona. Both were popular, relatively moderate and skilled at raising cash. Republican leaders in Washington were recruiting them to run for Senate.
But each man had points of vulnerability, Democrats thought.
It’s hard to say how much
of a difference the Democrats’ meddling ultimately made. Some Republicans and allies of Ducey and Sununu say other factors, including a shared disdain for the Senate and, perhaps, presidential ambitions, were more central to their calculations.
For Sununu, the Democrats’ potential leverage was his shifting position on abortion.
Running for governor in 2016, he had declared himself “pro-choice,” albeit with some caveats. About two-thirds of voters in New Hampshire say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, polls show.
In June 2021, however, pushed by conservative lawmakers, Sununu signed a budget bill that restricted abortion after 24 weeks of pregnancy with no exceptions for rape or incest.
Sununu had little choice; vetoing the budget would have shut down the government while the pandemic was still raging.
Democrats sensed an opportunity. They had picked up on gossip that some in Sununu’s inner circle were worried about the abortion attacks. True or not, they began ginning up media coverage on the issue.
“Targeting Sununu over abortion will be a key part of the Democrat’s playbook,” read one article in The Concord Monitor, referring to the incumbent senator up for reelection, Maggie Hassan. “It’s easy to imagine ads and commercials blasting Sununu over abortion flooding the TV and radio airwaves and on digital.”
Sununu was under pressure to run from Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader from
Kentucky, who said he would make a “great candidate,” and from Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
Sununu appeared torn. Then he stunned McConnell in November 2021 by not only turning him down but also publicly attacking the job of senator as “sitting around having meeting after meeting, waiting for votes to maybe happen.”
For Ducey, the Democrats’ point of leverage was his refusal in 2020 to go along with Trump’s insistence that the presidential election was stolen.
Throughout 2021, Trump made it known that he would not endorse Ducey if he ran for Senate, and other GOP candidates in Arizona began competing for the former president’s affections.
But GOP leaders ignored Trump and kept recruiting Ducey. And though Ducey repeatedly said he was not interested, Democrats grew nervous in January when they caught wind from people in Arizona of fresh discussions among Ducey, McConnell and Scott.
Democrats tried to force those quiet conversations into the open by passing word of the talks to reporters in Washington, hoping that Trump would see the stories and tee off on Ducey.
The Arizona governor, meanwhile, would get an inkling of what he could expect if he entered the primary. At a rally in Arizona on Jan. 15, Trump obliged, trashing Ducey as “a terrible representative of your state.”
By then, Ducey had already made up his mind — but he left McConnell and Scott hanging for two more
months. “If you’re going to run for public office, you have to really want the job,” he finally wrote in a letter to donors in March. “Right now I have the job I want.”
By the time their vicious primary season ended, Republicans had nominated five political novices backed by Trump: Blake Masters, a hard-edge venture capital executive, in Arizona; Don Bolduc, a far-right retired Army officer, in New Hampshire; Herschel Walker, a troubled former football star, in Georgia; Dr. Mehmet Oz, the celebrity surgeon, in Pennsylvania; and JD Vance, the “Hillbilly Elegy” author, in Ohio.
All struggled to raise money, build campaign infrastructures or appeal to independent voters. Only Vance won outright, with Walker’s race heading to a runoff Dec. 6.