By Noah
Rothman
Friday,
May 26, 2023
It’s
seldom validating to be wrong in public.
On
Tuesday, I made note of the ominous efforts from
some of the Republican Party’s losing 2022 candidates to telegraph their
imminent return to the political fray. While some of those individuals have
already declared their candidacies, the more menacing prospects are still
waiting in the wings. Save one. On Thursday night, former Pennsylvania
gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano informed his supporters that he would
not, in fact, run for Senator Bob Casey’s seat in 2024.
“We’re
going to continue to be relevant,” Mastriano
assured his
supporters after bowing out of another run at statewide office. That relevance,
however, will take the form of his support for whomever emerges as the
Pennsylvania GOP’s senatorial nominee.
Mastriano’s
decision doesn’t exactly clear the field for former hedge-fund CEO Dave
McCormick, who narrowly lost a primary for the U.S. Senate nomination in 2022
to television broadcaster Mehmet Oz and has flirted with the prospect of
another run. Still,
the race looks more like his to lose. In 2022, McCormick was the preferred
candidate among Republican
Party officials and strategists — both in the Keystone State
and in Washington, D.C. — but Donald Trump’s vocal support for Oz in that primary contest
proved determinative. That dynamic persists. According to Politico’s reporting, the effort by some
Republicans to convince Mastriano to remain on the sidelines next year has not
been subtle.
The news
out of Pennsylvania isn’t the only sign that Republicans are taking steps to
avoid the unforced errors that resulted in the sacrifice of almost every
winnable Senate seat in 2022. As Jewish Insider editor in
chief Josh Kraushaar
observed,
Republicans have convinced a “top recruit” in West Virginia, Governor Jim
Justice, to take on Senator Joe Manchin next year. Moreover, Republicans are
“optimistic” about their recruiting prospects in Montana, where perennial hard
target Senator Jon Tester is once again up for reelection.
Perhaps
most important, the GOP isn’t going to take a hands-off approach to candidate
selection this year and cede the field to political entertainers and outside
groups. “The National Republican Senatorial Committee,” the Associated
Press reported
in February, “intends to wade into party primaries in key states, providing
resources to its preferred candidates in a bid to produce nominees who are more
palatable to general election voters.” Some astute
political observers have speculated that the current NRSC chairman, the
relatively conventional Republican and savvy operator Senator Steve Daines
(Mont.), endorsed Donald Trump early in the primary race so as not to
antagonize the figure most likely to complicate this strategy. Indeed, his
endorsement might even allow Daines to convince the former president that the
NRSC’s plan of action was Trump’s idea all along. With the former president,
flattery will get you everywhere.
If that
tactic succeeds, the NRSC’s strategy may look something like how the GOP
approached the 2014 midterm election cycle to pull off one of the biggest
electoral hauls in recent memory.
The
degree to which establishmentarian Republicans and the party’s committees
aggressively intervened in the GOP primary process in 2013 reads like a
dispatch from another era — a time when the parties were strong enough to see to their own
interests even at the risk of offending influential ideologues. It brought
anemic incumbents back from political death. It dropped opposition research on
GOP candidates that were sure losers but enjoyed the support of the party’s
more radical factions. It orchestrated backroom deals to ensure that the most
electable candidate ran for the most winnable seat. The party’s efforts were
rewarded in November 2014 with a shocking nine-seat gain in the upper chamber.
Though
Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell reserved the right to intervene in the
GOP’s primary process in 2021, he and the organizations that his allies control
ultimately chose to avoid walking into that buzz saw. The results that this
hands-off approach produced speak for themselves. This year, McConnell retailed
his intention to engage early and aggressively in the pursuit of his preferred
outcomes.
“He said
that his main focus for now is on flipping four states: Montana, West Virginia,
Ohio, and Pennsylvania,” CNN’s Manu
Raju wrote of
his candid conversation with McConnell regarding the “much heavier hand”
Republican leadership plans to apply to the primary process. While he
acknowledged the risk that establishmentarian intervention into the primaries
could escalate “intraparty feuding,” it’s a risk McConnell is willing to take.
“We’ll
be involved in any primary where that seems to be necessary to get a
high-quality candidate, and we’ll be involved in every general election where
we have a legitimate shot of winning — regardless of the philosophy of the
nominee,” McConnell said. “We don’t have an ideological litmus test. . . . We
want to win in November.”
Opponents
of this strategy might attempt to revive 2016-style criticisms of “the
establishment” and its myopic focus on winning elections over having a mandate
to do anything with the power it seeks. That line may not have the punch it
once did, in part because there’s no point in having political objectives if
your candidates stand no chance at the polls. In the years that have elapsed
since 2016, the distinctions between an establishmentarian Republican and an
insurgent Republican have blurred almost to the point of negligibility. If
Donald Trump and the NRSC chairman are on the same page, are their shared goals
establishmentarian or blood-red MAGA? Does that distinction matter if the
party’s organs are loyal to its Senate leadership and can cajole, convince, and
strong-arm unelectable candidates out of their respective races?
Regardless,
the GOP is off to a promising start in its quest to avoid a recurrence of the
disaster that befell Republicans in 2022.
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