What They’re Saying: Senate Republicans “Extreme Candidates Have Cost The GOP Before …and There’s Reason To Believe It Could Happen Again.”

The Washington Post: “Could Republicans blow it with bad candidates — again?”

The New York Times: “The G.O.P. has backed candidates who can self-fund. But their wealth is likely to factor in the fight for Senate control.” 

See for yourself: 

The New York Times: Republicans Are Counting on Millionaires to Flip the Senate
By Jonathan Weisman
March 21, 2024

• The decision by Ohio voters on Tuesday to nominate Bernie Moreno to take on Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, is the capstone of a year that has crowned nominees — or anointed clear front-runners — with remarkable wealth in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Montana and now Ohio.
   
• The sheer affluence of the candidates — and how they made their money — is sure to be a factor in the fight for Senate control.

• To call Mr. Moreno a former auto dealer, for instance, is to miss the scale of his business and investment fortune. In 2023, Mr. Moreno, a Colombian-born businessman, filed financial disclosure forms that revealed assets valued from $25.5 million to $105.7 million and an annual income nearing $6 million. Those assets include a $2.3 million Aston Martin Vulcan, one of only 24 ever made, a house listed in Ocean Reef, Fla., worth as much as $25 million, land in Zapotal, Costa Rica, condominiums in New York, Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio, and a home in Avon, Ohio, valued at up to $5 million.

• The Republican Party, wary of the Democrats’ fund-raising prowess in recent cycles, has recruited candidates from a significantly higher economic echelon than the working-class voters it is trying to woo in swing states. 

• In Pennsylvania, David McCormick, the former chief executive of Bridgewater Associates, one of the largest hedge funds in the world, is challenging Senator Bob Casey. Mr. McCormick and his wife, Dina Powell McCormick, a Trump administration official and former partner at Goldman Sachs, reported assets in 2022 worth $116 million to $290 million.

• In another key swing state, Wisconsin, Republicans are banking on Eric Hovde, the chairman and chief executive of Sunwest Bank, a $2.8 billion commercial lender, to challenge Senator Tammy Baldwin.

• [Hovde] has been listed as a mover and shaker in Orange County, Calif., business circles. Democrats have repeatedly hit him over his $7 million home in Laguna Beach, Calif.

• “The roster of Republican Senate recruits come with enough baggage to fill a bank vault,” said David Bergstein, a spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “Their finances demonstrate a wealth of vulnerabilities against them, from conflicts of interest to outsourcing to questionable financial practices.”

• In Ohio, Mr. Moreno’s Republican opponents, especially the Republican establishment’s choice, State Senator Matt Dolan, repeatedly went after him for a lawsuit filed by an employee of one of his car dealerships, who sued him in 2017 for failure to pay overtime. The judge in the case determined that Mr. Moreno “either did not retain or shredded” monthly reports on overtime hours. …Mr. Moreno did lose the suit and was ordered to pay $416,160 to his employees.

• Mr. McCormick, Mr. Hovde and Mr. Sheehy will all face questions about their commitments to the states they seek to represent in the Senate. Mr. McCormick’s home in Connecticut was the main point of attack in 2022 when he lost the Republican primary to Mehmet Oz for a vacant Senate seat in Pennsylvania.

• Mr. Hovde[‘s]… ties to California will be central to the Democratic case against him.

• In facing Mr. Tester, a flat-topped farmer from Big Sandy, Mont. …Mr. Sheehy[‘s]… recent arrival in the state could prove to be an issue. He grew up in Shoreview, Minn., a suburb of Minneapolis, in a multimillion-dollar lake house.
  

The Washington Post: Could Republicans blow it with bad candidates — again?
By Aaron Blake
March 20, 2024

• In selecting Moreno, Ohio Republicans not only gave Donald Trump what he wanted; they also gave Democrats what they wanted… believing he would be a weaker general-election opponent for Brown.

• Extreme candidates have cost the GOP before, up to and potentially including Senate majorities. And there’s reason to believe it could happen again.

• So far this cycle… problematic MAGA-aligned statewide candidates…have emerged as standard-bearers in very important races — namely: Moreno [and] Senate candidate Kari Lake in Arizona.
  
• We’ve seen this story play out before. Republicans lost a series of key Senate races in the 2010s thanks to flawed candidates; you might recall the likes of Christine O’Donnell, Sharron Angle, Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock.

• In 2022, the GOP also ran a bunch of flawed, Trump-aligned statewide candidates who almost uniformly underperformed other Republicans. That might well have cost the party the Senate.

• Lake was a case in point. A voter study after her 2022 campaign indicated she lost because lots of voters who otherwise mostly voted Republican wouldn’t pull the lever for her.

• “Not only will Moreno handily lose to Brown,” said GOP operative Brittany Martinez, a former aide to the Republican National Committee and ex-House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), “he will be just the latest in a long list of MAGA-endorsed candidates who are incapable of winning in a general.”

The Washington Post: In Ohio, Republicans keep taking the tougher road to the Senate
By Paul Kane
March 20, 2024

• Bernie Moreno won the GOP nomination over a 14-year veteran of the state legislature, Matt Dolan. Their battle served as a proxy between the far-right forces aligned with ex-president Donald Trump versus the more politically successful establishment figures close to Gov. Mike DeWine (R) and former senator Rob Portman.

• There’s no mistaking that Republicans have taken the harder path.

• Once he won, Democrats released an ad highlighting Moreno’s GOP opponents raising issues of trust and covering up an investigation into his labor practices, along with his support for a national abortion ban despite Ohio’s overwhelming support for codifying abortion rights in a ballot referendum last fall.

• Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, described Moreno on Wednesday as “an individual who is ethically challenged and has a number of policy positions that are completely out of step with a majority of people who live in Ohio.”

• There’s a reason DeWine and Portman, along with their wives, shunned Moreno late in the race and jumped on board with Dolan. Those two know not just how to win, but to do so convincingly.

• Moreno puts the seat at greater risk […] DeWine told Politico’s Jonathan Martin.

TIME: Trump Is Mapping Out a More MAGA Senate
By Eric Cortellessa 
March 20, 2024

• Many of Trump’s handpicked Senate candidates across the nation are facing no serious primary threat. The Trump-loving former broadcast anchor Kari Lake is running virtually unopposed to be the GOP nominee for Arizona’s open Senate seat.
  
  
• In Tuesday’s Ohio Senate primary, GOP voters overwhelmingly elected the Trump-backed businessman Bernie Moreno over the wealthy Ohio state senator Matt Dolan, whose family owns the Cleveland Guardians.
  
  
• Republicans have tried this before. In 2022, Trump endorsed MAGA diehards in midterm races throughout the country, ensuring their primary victories. Many went on to lose in November. “MAGA doesn’t work as a general election political strategy,” argues Simon Rosenberg, a veteran Democratic operative who worked in the Clinton Administration. 

• After the midterms, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell seemed to reach the same conclusion. When asked about his party’s poor performance, he lamented a “candidate quality” problem in Trump’s picks.

See also: ICYMI: DSCC Chair Sen. Gary Peters Discusses Senate Republicans’ Flawed Candidates  Like Bernie Moreno on Morning Joe; HuffPost: Senate Republicans Have Rich People Problems; Axios: Democrats attack Senate GOP’s wealthy “carpetbagger” candidates; The Washington Post: Democrats highlight GOP Senate candidates’ out-of-state ties; MSNBC: How problematic is the Senate GOP’s ‘carpetbagger’ problem?; Heartland Signal: Republicans are now running three Senate candidates with loose ties to their state; POLITICO: “Can Republicans shake the carpetbagger charge?”; NBC News: Democrats are trying to turn the GOP’s 2024 Senate contenders into Dr. Oz.

###