{"id":1658214,"date":"2022-09-26T09:22:37","date_gmt":"2022-09-26T13:22:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1658214"},"modified":"2022-09-26T09:22:44","modified_gmt":"2022-09-26T13:22:44","slug":"amber-athey-will-the-gop-blow-the-midterms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/amber-athey-will-the-gop-blow-the-midterms\/","title":{"rendered":"Amber Athey: Will the GOP Blow the Midterms?"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"float:left\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">16<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Famber-athey-will-the-gop-blow-the-midterms%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1658214&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>At the start of the year, largely thanks to the actions of the president, the Republican Party was sitting pretty. It would be generous to say that Joe Biden\u2019s first year in office didn\u2019t live up to expectations. The former vice president who was heralded by his party and the liberal media as the man who would return the country to normalcy, restore faith in government institutions and protect democracy instead created new post-pandemic chaos. Biden and the Democrats failed to deliver in pretty much every area that mattered to Americans: gas prices, inflation, supply chains, the southern border, Afghanistan, Covid-19 and crime. National polls reflected the mood; Biden\u2019s approval rating in January 2022 sat in the low forties and congressional Democrats were trending even lower.<\/p>\n<p>Things seemed ripe for Republicans to ride a \u201cred wave\u201d that would return them control of the House and the Senate. But now, with campaign season in full swing, the GOP\u2019s enthusiasm advantage has all but disappeared. By mid-August, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was publicly tempering expectations as Republican candidates struggled in key battleground states. Polls at the time had Mehmet Oz down double digits to John Fetterman in Pennsylvania and Blake Masters back about ten points behind incumbent Mark Kelly in Arizona. <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/3057\/9780062300553\"><em>Hillbilly Elegy<\/em><\/a> author J.D. Vance was holding on to a slim lead in Ohio, former pro football player Herschel Walker was up a few points on Georgia incumbent Raphael Warnock and Ted Budd in North Carolina was in a dead heat with opponent Cheri Beasley.<\/p>\n<p>If just a couple of these races flip the wrong way, it could dash Republican hopes of winning the Senate. How could things possibly be this close? Is the red wave going to be little more than a ripple?<\/p>\n<p>If you ask Democratic strategists how they\u2019ve managed to make up so much ground, they will likely tell you that the Supreme Court\u2019s decision to overturn <em>Roe\u00a0<\/em>v. <em>Wade<\/em> changed the entire tenor of the midterms. Rather than the race being a referendum on the economy and the Biden administration, voters are now heavily motivated by protecting access to abortion. The polls tell a different story. Despite a majority of Americans opposing the <em>Dobbs<\/em> decision, abortion is still lucky to crack voters\u2019 top five most- important issues. Democrat Terry McAuliffe tried to use abortion as a wedge issue during the 2021 gubernatorial election in Virginia, wasting millions on ineffective TV ads against eventual winner Glenn Youngkin.<\/p>\n<p>\u201c[<em>Dobbs<\/em>] has changed things to some degree. I don\u2019t think you can argue that it hasn\u2019t. But I think ultimately that this is still going to be an election that is decided on economic issues and on the approval of voters for the president,\u201d Jim Hobart, a Republican consultant and partner at Public Opinion\u00a0Strategies, told me. \u201cWhen you look at the voters who decide elections, who are independent voters, the Democrats\u2019 numbers and President Biden\u2019s numbers with independents are still very, very bad.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, even before voting has started, the Republican Party faces something of a civil war over who is to blame for their candidates\u2019 poor performance.<\/p>\n<p>The Trump-aligned right blames Mitch McConnell, arguing that he holds a grudge against populists. The minority leader, they claim, is deliberately withholding money from the \u201cAmerica First\u201d faction of the GOP as punishment for defeating establishment picks in the primaries. McConnell dumped fuel on this fire when he questioned the \u201cquality\u201d of candidates running in statewide races this summer.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI think there\u2019s probably a greater likelihood the House flips than the Senate. Senate\u00a0races are just different,\u201d the GOP leader said at a Northern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce luncheon in mid-August. \u201cCandidate quality has a lot to do with the outcome.\u201d The McConnell-aligned Senate Leadership Fund then pulled $10 million in ad buys for Blake Masters out of Arizona. This was further proof to the new right that McConnell was not dedicated to a Republican majority.<\/p>\n<p>However, GOP insiders tell me that McConnell\u2019s \u201ccandidate quality\u201d comment was likely a reference to his personal frustrations with Dr. Oz, who spent the better part of the spring and summer running a lazy campaign built around little more than name identification. The simpler and more persuasive explanation for the SLF decision to pull money from Arizona isn\u2019t bad blood between McConnell and Masters, but the reality that scarce resources must be efficiently distributed if the GOP is to secure a majority in November.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cArizona is an expensive state with a candidate who has no money, with a late primary up against an incumbent that reliably polls between 49 and 51 and who has $50 million. This is not difficult math. It\u2019s not emotional. It\u2019s not sentimental,\u201d one Republican campaign strategist explained to me. \u201cBlake Masters is the fifty-third or fifty-fourth seat. McConnell is focused on the forty-seventh through fifty-second.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe\u2019re leaving the door wide open in Arizona, but we want to move additional resources to other offensive opportunities that have become increasingly competitive, as well as an unexpected expense in Ohio,\u201d Senate Leadership Fund president Steven Law told <em>Politico<\/em>. This explanation makes sense when you consider that SLF dumped $28 million more into the Ohio race in August. This massive investment was of course going to affect spending elsewhere, and if McConnell truly hated populist candidates, why would he be spending tens of millions on Vance?<\/p>\n<p>Further, McConnell tried to avoid\u00a0hanging Masters out to dry. According <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/politics\/2022\/08\/31\/peter-thiel-mcconnell-blake-masters\/\">to<\/a> the <em>Washington Post<\/em>, the GOP leader called Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel to see if he would be willing to split costs on the Arizona race or cover the ad buys SLF pulled in August. McConnell acknowledged that the Ohio race was becoming costlier than expected. Thiel, a friend of both Vance and Masters who invested significant dollars into their primary campaigns, declined to get further financially involved in Arizona.<\/p>\n<p>The finger-pointing at McConnell, several Republican strategists I spoke to argue, misses the real villain of the campaign cycle: Rick Scott.<\/p>\n<p>Insiders say that Scott, the National Republican Senatorial Committee chair, has simply failed to raise enough money to support candidates in key races, forcing SLF to pick up the slack. The NRSC spent a huge\u00a0chunk of its money \u2014 $40 million \u2014 early in the midterm season, leaving candidates without a financial lifeline in the homestretch. Last year, Scott gambled on investing millions in a digital fundraising program, which only worked briefly before crashing and burning.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThey dumped tens of millions of dollars into a small-dollar texting program that has clearly just come up a dry socket. So they\u2019re broke. They don\u2019t have half as much cash on hand as the Democratic counterpart,\u201d a source with knowledge of NRSC finances told me.<\/p>\n<p>As the committee faced financial trouble, Scott took a two-week vacation to Italy to celebrate his fiftieth anniversary with his wife. He defended the ill-timed trip, noting it had been planned a year in advance, but critics still slammed him for seemingly\u00a0abandoning the GOP in its time of need. The attacks on McConnell, sources suggested to me, were a way for the NRSC to cover for Scott\u2019s dereliction of duty.<\/p>\n<p>The Florida senator indeed poked at McConnell for questioning the quality of Republican senatorial candidates \u2014 and has previously flouted the minority leader\u2019s approach to the midterms by releasing his own policy platform for a Republican-led Senate. \u201cSenator McConnell and I clearly\u00a0have a strategic disagreement here\u2026 We have great candidates,\u201d Scott said in early September. \u201cHe wants to do the same thing I want to do: I want to get a majority. And I think it\u2019s important that we\u2019re all cheerleaders for our candidates.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Scott is surely right that it is probably counterproductive for McConnell to publicly trash the party\u2019s candidates. However, he doesn\u2019t have much room to complain if it is true that he has run the NRSC\u2019s finances into the ground.<\/p>\n<p>Despite all the internal chirping, Republicans still have reason to be optimistic. There is plenty of time to get back to basics: voter registration, on-the-ground campaigning and an aggressive approach to earned media. Voter registration, in particular, promises to be a huge boon, as demonstrated in Florida: when Governor Ron DeSantis took office in 2018, Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 300,000. Now Republicans have a 250,000-voter advantage. Races in Pennsylvania and Arizona have tightened considerably \u2014 and the GOP is currently enjoying a post-August fundraising bump.<\/p>\n<div class=\"banner_small conntent-banner\">\n\t\t\t<a href=\"https:\/\/spectatorworld.com\/subscribe-the-dc-diary\/\"><noscript><\/noscript><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"lazyload wp-image-29949\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/02\/email-newsletter-mob.png\" alt=\"\" \/><\/a>\t\t<\/div>\n<p>\u201cThere\u2019s always a lot of finger-pointing. I get it, folks are frustrated, but the reality is people have to run good, solid campaigns,\u201d says a senior campaign official in North Carolina. \u201cWe don\u2019t have to make it real complicated.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps most importantly, the president is still historically unpopular. Biden, the face of the Democratic Party, is badly bruised after his first year and a half in office. And, even among Democratic voters, a majority don\u2019t want him to run again in 2024. The GOP should still be able to deliver a knock-out blow to unified Democratic government. And if they don\u2019t, there will be plenty of time for blame games.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIf in February of 2021, someone came to you and said, \u2018Hey, Joe Biden\u2019s approval rating is going to be 42 percent going into Labor Day of 2022, is that going to be good for Republicans?\u2019\u201d asks Hobart rhetorically. \u201cThe answer would be it\u2019s going to be a really good night for Republicans.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><em>This article was originally published in\u00a0<\/em><a href=\"http:\/\/spectator.us\/subscribe\">The Spectator<\/a><em>\u2019s October 2022 World edition.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At the start of the year, largely thanks to the actions of the president, the Republican Party was sitting pretty. It would be generous to say that Joe Biden\u2019s first<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1346817,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1658214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1658214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1658214"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1658214\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1346817"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1658214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1658214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1658214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}