This midterm election is like nothing we’ve seen in recent memory. Which makes sense, in a way: It’s the first election after the defeated former president tried to create a violent coup, and he remains the leader of his party, the disloyal opposition. It’s a midterm with a not-very-popular president who still has managed to get a lot of popular stuff done, despite a slim to nonexistent congressional majority.
It’s an election where the Republicans keep talking about “it’s the economy and kitchen table,” and the Democrats are running on the hot-button social issues like abortion and marriage equality. And it looks like it will help the Democrats buck historical trends. President Joe Biden could just as easily see Senate gains and many fewer losses in the House than anyone would have foreseen just a few months ago. So that’s what Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell gets for packing the Supreme Court with Trump nominees: he has made abortion toxic for Republicans.
That’s not the only problem McConnell has, though. There’s that “candidate quality” issue he’s been publicly concerned about, which has in turn led to out-and-out civil war between him and Sen. Rick Scott, the Florida Republican tasked with engineering GOP wins at the National Republican Senatorial Committee. That’s not been going so well, to the tune of more than $150 million squandered in Scott’s big new digital fundraising scheme.
The New York Times has the deliciously juicy and embarrassing (for Republicans) details, not to mention some anonymous sniping at Scott. Like this: “Mr. Scott’s detractors accuse him of transforming the N.R.S.C. into the “National Rick Scott Committee”—and a vehicle for his presidential ambitions.” Scott did manage to raise a record $185.1 million with his big new digital campaign—but spent more than 95% of it before the campaigns really heated up. The NRSC started August with just $23.2 million on hand. That means lots of canceled television ad reservations and plenty of recriminations.
There was the August reception on Nantucket, where Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance, Pennsylvania’s Mehmet Oz, Georgia’s Herschel Walker, and North Carolina’s Rep. Ted Budd, appeared with Scott in a NRSC fundraiser. They all traveled there for what was promised to be a big funding opportunity, with the tickets going for $50,000 per head. The take for each candidate? A paltry $25,000 each. When the NRSC sends out solicitations for the individual candidates to its big email list, 90% of the proceeds go to the NRSC.
The GOP Senate effort is a mess and if the House GOP regains a majority, it will be thanks only to the massive gerrymandering and voter suppression the party has achieved. Because they’ve got a messaging problem. Rep. Tom Emmer, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, went on Fox News Sunday ostensibly to argue that the election was going to be all about the economy and the kitchen table.
Then he said this: “If Democrats want to make abortion the main issue, when every poll we’ve seen says that the economy and the cost of living is the number one issue, good luck to them trying to defend their extreme position. Every one of them voted for what I call the Chinese genocide bill, which would allow abortion up to moments before a child takes its first breath. I think our candidates know how to message that and they’ll be just fine in the midterms.”
That’s not a great way to defuse the issue, which is shaping up to be the most salient vote-driver in decades. “I’m convinced that, based on numbers we have, Republicans have to make some kind of leap on the abortion issue,” Chuck Coughlin, an Arizona-based GOP strategist told Politico. “Because they’re getting killed among women.”
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Coughlin’s firm has found that women and unaffiliated voters are flocking to Democrats in that state, because of abortion. It’s not just Arizona, which is why so many Republicans are wiping their “100% pro-life” rhetoric off their campaign websites.
One anonymous strategist who sees the “internal data” for Senate campaigns said the big problem is “particularly white middle-aged women,” which is one reason all these white male Republican candidates have started trotting their wives out in their television ads. “We need to soften our guys,” the strategist said. Sure, that’ll work.
“If we are spending the next two months talking about anything other than the economy, it won’t be good,” the strategist said. “If we’re debating abortion or anything else for that matter—that’s not the closing message you want as a candidate.” That’s not even going to work because the economy is rebounding, gas prices are falling, and people really like all the stuff Biden and the Democrats have accomplished.
It’s not a bad time to be a Democrat running for office, which isn’t something you can generally say two months ahead of a midterm election with a Democrat in the White House. Democrats are feeling it, too. They’re continuing to run on abortion and on the accomplishments they’ve achieved so far. It’s a combination that can at least stem losses in the House, if not hold it, and reinforce the existing majority in the Senate.
Make Republicans keep running on abortion, and make them keep running away from Trump. It’s a fantastic formula for November.
