ICYMI: In Senate races, GOP haunted anew with ‘candidate quality’ issues [MSNBC]

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MSNBC: In Senate races, GOP haunted anew with ‘candidate quality’ issues
By Steve Benen
April 30, 2024

• Senate GOP leaders were right to worry about “candidate quality” in recent years. There’s little to suggest, however, that they’ve solved the problem.

• Around this time two years ago, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell expressed some concerns about his party’s direction.

• “In the Senate, if you look at where we have to compete in order to get into a majority, there are places that are competitive in the general election. So you can’t nominate somebody who’s just sort of unacceptable to a broader group of people and win.” McConnell went on to say that some of his party’s nominees had been “bizarre.”

• Three months later, as regular readers might recall, McConnell offered a follow-up assessment of Senate Republicans’ chances of reclaiming a majority, conceding that “candidate quality” might stand in his party’s way.

• After the 2022 contests, GOP leaders were determined not to repeat these mistakes. “Candidate quality” might’ve haunted the party in recent election cycles, they said last year, but Republicans have learned valuable lessons. In 2024, the party will focus on recruiting and running the most credible and appealing Senate candidates possible.

• How’s that working out?

• In Montana, Senate hopeful Tim Sheehy is dealing with a controversy in which he admits he lied about a gunshot incident. He doesn’t help that the GOP candidate has told voters that he grew up “rural Minnesota,” which wasn’t altogether true.

• In Michigan, Senate hopeful Mike Rogers has spent the last several years living in a lovely home — in Florida, where he was registered to vote up until very recently.

• In Wisconsin, Senate hopeful Eric Hovde — a Californian, up until recently — hasn’t just struggled with the Pledge of Allegiance, he’s also repeatedly suggested that seniors in nursing homes shouldn’t vote. It’s against this backdrop that The New York Times reported two weeks ago, “The bank he leads, Utah-based Sunwest, last month was named as a co-defendant in a California lawsuit that accuses a senior living facility partly owned by the bank of elder abuse, negligence and wrongful death.”

• In Pennsylvania, Senate hopeful Dave McCormick has spoken and written about “growing up on a farm” and starting with “nothing,” which now appears to be a rather dramatic deception. He also appears to live in a different state, and has some explaining to do about his China trade policies.

• And in Arizona, conspiratorial Senate hopeful Kari Lake’s candidacy is such a mess — see her odd meandering on abortion policy and her unsettling “glock” rhetoric, for example — that even Donald Trump has reportedly lost confidence in her prospects.

• GOP leaders were right to worry about “candidate quality” in recent years. There’s little to suggest, however, that they’ve solved the problem.

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