Republicans are playing the blame game as they watch their chances of winning back control of the Senate shrink two months before Election Day.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is citing “candidate quality” as a reason why GOP hopes are fading, an implicit criticism of former President Trump and his support for several controversial GOP candidates who are faltering in polls.
Trump, for his part, for weeks has been setting the stage to blame McConnell if Republicans fail to win back the Senate at a time when they are widely expected to win the House majority.
The finger-pointing goes beyond the nation’s two most powerful Republicans, too.
McConnell’s remarks doubled as a not-so-subtle critique of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) and its leader, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who has also been at loggerheads for much of the year with the Senate GOP leader.
Scott has come under scorching criticism himself for vacationing on a luxury yacht off the Italian coast during the August recess and for his expensive attempt to expand the NRSC’s online donor pool.
Under his leadership, the committee raised $181.5 million by the end of July but spent 95 percent of it, leaving it with far less cash on hand than the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), according to a New York Times analysis.
For his part, Scott last week fired back at fellow Republicans “trash-talking our Republican candidates,” calling it an “amazing act of cowardice” and “treasonous.”
It’s not the best backdrop for Republicans to return to Washington, and senators getting back to work on Tuesday sought to play down the internal frictions.
Scott told reporters after the Senate GOP leadership meeting that his Sept. 1 op-ed in the Washington Examiner accusing fellow Republicans of undermining “the conservative cause” was not aimed at McConnell but instead anonymous Republican sources who have criticized Senate GOP candidates in the media.
“I said people that do anonymous quotes to the liberal media,” he said. “People are doing anonymous quotes and trashing our Republican candidates.”
Asked if he was referencing McConnell, Scott replied: “No.”
Other Republicans in the meeting said McConnell and Scott did not talk about their public spat.
“It’s a non-issue, everybody is focused on November,” insisted Senate Republican Whip John Thune (S.D.).
One Senate Republican strategist said Scott’s scathing criticism of Republicans was an attempt to deflect blame from his own track record.
“He’s embarrassed he was caught on an Italian vacation 100 days from the most consequential election in a decade and he’s reaching for someone to blame other than his travel agent,” said the source.
The strategist said the Times’s in-depth report on the NRSC’s fundraising woes “raises more questions than anything Republicans have seen thus far” about the Democrats’ money advantage and called it a “serious cause for concern.”
McConnell declined to answer a question about his public clash with the NRSC chairman as he walked from the Senate floor to his office Tuesday afternoon.
But Sen. John Cornyn (Texas), one of McConnell’s deputies on the GOP leadership team, said he’s concerned that Democrats have substantially more cash on hand at the DSCC.
“It concerns me a lot that Democrats are going to vastly outspend Republicans across the board, but as long as we have enough money to tell our story and defend our position, we’ll be fine,” he said, noting “there are multiple sources of funds for elections,” such as individual campaign committees and super PACs.
Cornyn, however, downplayed the public feud between McConnell and Scott.
“I think we all want the same thing. We want to get the majority back and that’s what I’m focused on. And I think both of them, that’s what they both want to do,” he said.
Brian Darling, a GOP strategist and former Senate aide, said Senate Republican powerbrokers are positioning themselves in case their battle to win back the majority falls short.
He said he couldn’t ever remember a Senate Republican leader and the Senate GOP campaign arm chairman engage in such open warfare before.
“Seeing them battle like this, publicly, is not helpful,” he said. “Ultimately I think it’s a lot of noise with regard to what’s actually going to happen in the election, but it definitely makes Republicans look like they’re in disarray.”
More broadly, Senate Republicans are concerned that Trump’s legal troubles are consuming too much of the national spotlight, diverting public attention from what they want to make the 2022 midterm election about: President Biden’s economic record.
The polling and political handicapping website FiveThirtyEight now gives Democrats a 69 percent chance of keeping their Senate majority.
Political handicappers now rate retiring Sen. Pat Toomey’s (R) Pennsylvania Senate seat as a likely Democratic pick-up because of the struggles of celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz, the GOP nominee.
The Cook Political Report rates the Pennsylvania Senate race as leaning Democratic, while FiveThirtyEight rates it as a likely Democratic win.
Meanwhile, Republican candidates in other battleground states such as Arizona, Georgia and Ohio are seen as underperforming, either by making costly gaffes or falling behind fundraising expectations.
In Georgia, former NFL star Herschel Walker, the Republican Senate nominee, has committed a string of gaffes, such as a false claim that he had worked as an FBI agent and a head-scratching argument that federal money spent on limiting pollution will allow “our good air” to “float” over to China and be replaced by “China’s bad air.”
Walker is one of several candidates, along with Republicans Blake Masters in Arizona and J.D. Vance in Ohio, who were backed by Trump. Plenty of Republicans will blame the former president’s influence if they fail to win back the Senate given high inflation and gas prices and Biden’s faltering approval ratings.
GOP strategists still think they’re favored to win in Ohio and feel confident of their chances in Georgia, predicting that incumbent Republican Gov. Brian Kemp’s voter mobilization work will help turn out Republicans and carry Walker to victory.
But the remarks by McConnell and Scott, along with Trump’s unceasing criticisms of his party’s Senate leader, signal the finger-pointing may continue if the GOP has a disappointing Election Day.
“McConnell is basically hedging his bets in case things don’t go right,” Darling said.