The Koch Brothers and their ilk have spoken. With House Speaker Paul Ryan’s abrupt and untimely exit, the Republican corporate donor base that props up the entire Party are leaving current Republican House members faced with an enraged and unprecedented 2018 Democratic Electoral tsunami to twist haplessly, helplessly in the wind:
A predictable flood of “everything is fine” messages from House-focused strategists and panicked officials hit GOP inboxes shortly after Ryan’s announcement. But a number of top party donors and operatives say those warnings were too little, too late, and that the Speaker’s exit was the final piece of evidence they needed to flip their attention toward the upper chamber.
“I’ve gotten a couple emails,” Dan Eberhart, an energy executive and an increasingly higher-profile GOP fundraiser, told me on Wednesday morning. He paused. “I mean, I think the House is gone. The focus is going to, more and more, be on the Senate.”
That means less money to House Republicans—a lot less money-- from corporate polluters, the oil and gas conglomerates seeking to despoil our public lands and waters, the financial industry looking to engorge itself on its deregulated lending and banking schemes, the NRA and other corrupt Russian interests, and the religious right squeezing their adherents by ginning up donations to finance their war on women. As reported by Gabriel Debenedetti in New York Magazine, all the Republican House members who used to look to those phony “grassroots” organizations like “Americans For Prosperity” to fund their campaigns are probably going to find that the well has suddenly run..sort of dry:
“If you’re a donor, and you’re looking at Paul Ryan saying, ‘I’m going to go ahead and retire,’ it’s a pretty clear signal. If he thinks the House is lost, who would be more in the know than Paul Ryan?
No soup for you, House Republicans. You’re already written off.
GOP operatives and donors spent their Wednesdays looking anew at the 2018 map, glued to their phones as they tried to make sense of the new landscape. Many heard new appeals to help Republican leaders keep the Senate, for the sake of Trump and McConnell’s missions to reshape the judiciary.
If I was a Republican House member, I’d be thinking about that nice cushy job in one of the industries you’ve sold your souls to in the last two years. There’s still time to retire, guys! A lot of those job openings will be gone come November, when your “value” to those corporations is likely to dwindle to nothing!
As far as the Senate is concerned, well there’s an emoji out there with a grim, flat stare. You know the one?
Earlier this week, McConnell’s affiliated super-PAC, the Senate Leadership Fund, began circulating its own memo to donors that warned them of an electoral climate reminiscent of 2006, when Democrats won both the House and Senate. That document, which was originally made public by the Washington Examiner, again made the rounds on Wednesday, as the new Senate focus crystallized.
In that missive, Steven Law, the top McConnell ally running the PAC, insisted things are looking up for the party in most of the looming competitive Senate races, and he described his feelings about Tennessee, Nevada, and Arizona as “cautiously optimistic.”
That means they’re scared shitless.
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