The road to Democrats having kept the Senate thus far is lined with Trump’s bungled attempts to play kingmaker.
In Ohio… [Bernie] Moreno is seen as the weaker general election candidate to face off against Senator Sherrod Brown… Moreno, whose experience is in owning car dealerships rather than politics, hasn’t faced the scrutiny of running in a high-profile Senate race.
In Montana… part-time Senate candidate and full-time CEO of a publicly traded aerospace company Tim Sheehy […] wants to get rid of the Department of Homeland Security—that is, the department that deals with the border.
He’d also like to “return health care to pure privatization,” and has absurdly blamed high hospital bills on a “subsidy system that’s got perverse incentives.”
As for taxes, Sheehy doesn’t seem too big a fan, having reportedly skipped out on state livestock taxes of his own. And to top things off, the Senate hopeful proudly presents as a self-made multimillionaire—but like you know who, received large investments from both his father and brother.
[Kari] Lake continues to post lies about the 2020 election, talk nonsense about the border, and engage in plain old racism. As one GOP strategist told NBC, Lake’s “instincts seem to be to quadruple down on ultra MAGA and all that entails.”
One of the interesting trends I’ve noticed this year is that a lot of these Trumpy candidates are wealthy carpetbaggers parachuting back into states they have only a tangential relationship with.
Consider Wisconsin Senate candidate Eric Hovde, who endorsed Trump but hasn’t been endorsed by Trump…yet. Hovde appears to live in California, he owns a nearly $7 million house in Laguna Beach and a family banking business in California.
There’s also Dave McCormick, who has been running to represent Pennsylvania in the Senate since 2022, when he lost his primary to Dr. Oz. According to the AP, McCormick lives in Westport, Connecticut, but flies his private jet down to Pennsylvania seemingly every chance he gets. He has a dynasty trust. His wife, Dina Powell McCormick, worked in the Trump administration and is currently on the board of oil giant and serial polluter ExxonMobil.
(There’s also Trump-backed former representative Mike Rogers, who for all intents and purposes lives in Cape Coral, Florida—in a house five times the price of the Detroit home he bought just last year!)
As we saw in 2022, money doesn’t necessarily mean political mastery. Candidates like Kari Lake and Tim Sheehy are largely undisciplined, while Dave McCormick and Eric Hovde don’t even appear to live full-time in the states they hope to represent.
