Republicans remain terrible at picking Senate candidates
Tim Sheehy and Kari Lake are the new Blake Masters and Herschel Walker.
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Republican Montana Senate candidate Tim Sheehy spent last week confirming that he’s a liar, which is not exactly how you want to spend your week as a Senate candidate.
Sheehy also demonstrated, for anyone who doubted it, that the GOP continues to have serious problems recruiting decent candidates for high office. Recruitment problems are why they don’t control the Senate right now. And it’s why, despite every advantage and a map that couldn’t be better for them, they still, with a good bit of luck, may be able to pull defeat from the jaws of victory this November.
A never-ending clown show
Sheehy is a former NAVY Seal and millionaire business owner with no record in politics and little record in public life. He has never been vetted in a national campaign— and now that the vetting is finally happening, things are getting weird.
Last week, reports surfaced that in October 2015, Sheehy was visiting Montana’s Glacier National Park when he was injured. He told a Park Ranger at the time that he had discharged a pistol and shot himself in the right arm. However, in campaign materials, Sheehy has claimed that he was shot in the arm while serving in Afghanistan.
Sheehy now says that he fell and injured himself in Glacier and when medics questioned him about the bullet in his arm, he made up the story about discharging a firearm. Why did he lie? Because, he says, he was worried an investigation would show that the wound was from friendly fire and would cause complications for people in his platoon.
This scandal is unlikely to seriously damage Sheey’s campaign. But it could encourage reporters to look further into his background to find out what else he may or may not have lied about.
In 2022, Georgia GOP Senate candidate Herschel Walker was plagued by a series of scandals, including allegations of infidelity and pressuring partners to get abortions. That helped Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock retain his seat in a reddish state. Incumbent Montana Senator Jon Tester, a Democrat, is hoping that Sheehy self-immolates in similar fashion. Currently in polls the two are roughly tied, though Montana is a +16 Trump state.
Montana’s not the only state where the GOP are earnestly trying to throw away a significant Senate advantage. Ohio is a Trump +8 state, and it should be fairly easy for the GOP to pick off Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, the only statewide elected Democrat. However, Donald Trump endorsed, and the Republicans nominated, Bernie Moreno.
Like Sheehy, Moreno has no background in politics; he’s a multi-millionaire car dealership owner. And as with Sheehy, the lack of experience has already created problems for his campaign. Moreno, who embraces the GOP’s homophobic stances on LGBT issues, was linked to an adult website profile seeking men for sex. An intern now says that the profile was a prank.
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Perhaps more damaging long term, Moreno shredded documents in a wage-theft lawsuit. He’s also refused to say whether Biden won the 2020 election. He’s also extremely anti-abortion, calling for a national abortion ban even as Ohio voters approved a referendum in 2023 protecting abortion rights. Moreno’s inexperience and extremism, along with weak polling, led Split Ticket this week to move the Ohio race from Lean Republican to Toss Up.
Republican Senate candidate woes don’t end there. In Arizona, the GOP nominated gubernatorial campaign loser and election denier Kari Lake, who has alienated her own party by leaking a recording of a private conversation with GOP chair Jeff DeWit and forcing him to resign.
This week, the GOP Senate candidate in Wisconsin, Eric Hovde, claimed that anyone in a nursing home was too incompetent to vote. Like Sheehy and Moreno, Hovde (facing incumbent Sen. Tammy Baldwin) and Lake (facing US House Rep. Ruben Gallego) have not held political office.
Defeat from the jaws of victory
The GOP in the Trump era has a gift for selecting terrible Senate candidates. But are those candidates so terrible that even the GOP’s massive structural advantage in the chamber can’t help them?
The Senate has a huge bias in favor of Republicans. States like Montana — mostly white and rural, with just 1.1 million residents — have as many senators as California and its population of 39 million. That means Democrats need to win difficult elections in red states to win the chamber, while Republicans can win just by basically holding their home turf.
The imbalance is especially stark this year, as Democrats face a grim Senate map. To keep control of the chamber, Democrats need to win two of three seats in states Trump won in 2024. With the resignation of West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, his seat is essentially unwinnable, which means Democrats have to hold both Montana and Ohio. More, they have to retain Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, states Biden won narrowly.
It looks grim. But it also looked grim in 2022, when Republicans nominated embarrassing bozo candidates like Blake Masters in Arizona, Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, and Herschel Walker in Georgia. That year Democrats managed to actually increase their seats in the Senate from 50 to 51.
Why can’t the GOP just nominate normal candidates and win the Senate forever? Part of the reason is Trump; his endorsements drive donor money and attention, and can be the deciding factor in many nomination contests. Trump likes celebrity candidates; he likes candidates who lie about the 2020 election being stolen from him; he likes candidates who have no other base of power in the party and therefore can be relied on for unalloyed sycophancy. In short, Trump prefers to endorse conspiracy theorists, grifters, and neophytes, none of whom make strong Senate contenders.
Beyond that, though, Republicans are enamored of grifters and conspiracy theorists for the same reasons they nominated grifter and conspiracy theorist Trump. Thanks to the conservative media bubble and growing fears of demographic losses, the American right has become increasingly radical and detached from reality. The GOP base is wildly out of step with majority opinion on core issues like abortion rights and banning books with LGBT content. They nominate weird hateful radical candidates because they are weird hateful radicals.
The problem with horrible GOP candidates is that they sometimes win
In nominating terrible candidates, the GOP has allowed Democrats to remain competitive in Senate races. In fact, Democrats have controlled the Senate for Biden’s entire term.
But despite these successes, even very bad Republican candidates can still win elections. In 2022, Ohio Republican Senate candidate JD Vance underperformed by 5 points according to Split Ticket. But that was still enough for a comfortable win.
Moreno could do even a little worse than Vance and still win. Sheehy could do a whole lot worse than Vance and still win in red Montana. Even when Republicans hobble themselves with terrible candidates, they can sometimes still get across the finish line thanks to structural advantages and a whole lot of voter suppression (see Ohio’s very restrictive voter ID laws).
Unfortunately, the same factors that make Republicans recruit bad candidates are likely to make them bad senators. In Trump’s first term, the Senate was a barrier to some of his worst excesses; the Republican Senate refused to repeal the ACA, and blocked a Federal Reserve appointee who supported the gold standard. But as moderate Republicans like Mitt Romney retire and are replaced by rabid MAGA goofballs like Vance, the guardrails come off.
If the GOP wins the Senate, they’ll do it by electing irresponsible, ignorant, radical candidates like Sheehy, Moreno, and Lake. Should Biden retain the presidency, that will mean gridlock on crucial issues like aid for Ukraine and a major brake on the president’s efforts to confirm liberals to the courts. If Trump wins, it will mean many of his hand-picked dittohead senators will cheer on his plans for militarized mass deportations and, yes, for repealing the ACA.
Sheehy’s confused lies are a reminder that Republicans in 2024 have continued to nominate the worst possible candidates for Senate. The question now is whether those worst possible candidates help Trump to destroy the GOP, or whether they help him instead to destroy the country.
That’s it for this week
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We’ll be back tomorrow with more Monday. Until then, have a great weekend and thanks for reading.
Surely your second option: Trump's GOP will destroy the country. This is not just a wolf cry. Words like "lemmings" that have been used are really apt now. People are being led right off the cliff.
Structurally we are doomed. And I am a relatively positive person and hesitant to say this. Democrats and Independents of sanity and good will towards all need to work en masse to overwhelmingly defeat the poison of this GOP this coming election. A vote for third party or sitting home is just as good as voting GOP. it's not just Trump; the GOP is infected. Hang on to your sanity and the truth, it's being assaulted.
Is the Converse true? Do Democrats pick GOOD Senate candidates? Jon Ossoff and Rev. Warnock won their Senate races in (red) Georgia in the general election (with trump on the ballot) and in the following election run-off against trumpian Senate incumbents. Warnock had to run again for a full term.