Despite that infamous “candidate quality” issue Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell complained about this cycle, he’s stuck with Herschel Walker in Georgia, through all the surprise children and abortions and other bonkers claims.
“I think we’re going to stick with Walker and all the effort we put in through [the leadership Super PAC] SLF, we’re going take it all the way to the end,” he said back in October. “I talk to [Walker] fairly often,” McConnell said. “I think they’re going to hang in there and scrap to the finish.”
The finish is going to be decided by a runoff election, and McConnell is still backing Walker, because he doesn’t care if a dangerously unqualified candidate advances to the Senate. McConnell has figured out a devious plan to unite his dark money arm, that Senate Leadership Fund Super PAC, with the get-out-the-vote machine of Georgia’s Republican Gov. Brian Kemp. The two inked the deal on Thursday. Never mind that McConnell is supposed to have nothing at all to do with the operations of the PAC because there is supposed to be a firewall between elected officials and the running of their affiliated PACs. Like McConnell is going to be bothered by legalities.
Campaign Action
The PAC will be funding the $2 million-plus campaign, while Kemp will transfer the whole of his GOTV operation—canvassing, data crunching, phone-banking, and micro-targeting—to McConnell’s PAC. Kemp’s team will also be taking over and running the whole field operation.
“Gov. Kemp wrote the playbook for how to win big in Georgia, and we are thrilled to partner with his top-notch team to elect Herschel Walker to the Senate,” said Steven Law, the Senate Leadership Fund president. “As we learned in 2020, Republican turnout is essential for victory in a runoff election, and we are leaving no stone unturned—preparing a ground assault to partner with the coming air war.”
This is McConnell once again trying to clean up a Donald Trump-made mess and attempting to preempt the damage Trump is almost certainly going to do by bigfooting his way into this race. It also might be a little bit of an insurance policy for McConnell, trying to earn the loyalty of a potential incoming senator when he’s facing dissension in the ranks on his continued leadership.
Regardless, it is going to make incumbent Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock’s job in this very short runoff period that much harder, meaning the grassroots really needs to step up to counter the McConnell/Kemp super PAC power.
Election Night 2022 was full of surprises—mostly for people pushing the last couple months of traditional media narrative of a "red tsunami." The problem is that Americans are not super into the GOP. Markos and Kerry have been saying the media narrative was wrong for months, and on Tuesday, Daily Kos and The Brief team was validated. Time to celebrate!