Senate Republicans Boasted Of An Ultra-Favorable Map. Now The Pressure Is On.

Throughout 2023, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and Sen. Steve Daines (Mont.), the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, had a consistent message for donors, the media and their fellow senators: This cycle would be different.

Free from what McConnell and Daines clearly saw as an incompetent NRSC in 2022, Republicans were in a fantastic position to take advantage of a favorable map. Democrats were defending six seats in states former President Donald Trump had won at least once, giving Republicans the chance to build the substantial majority the party had been eyeing as far back as 2016, when Trump’s gains with white working-class voters had seemed to create the perfect conditions for a sustainable majority in Congress’ upper chamber.

“The outcome in ’24 will likely define the makeup of the United States Senate for the rest of the decade,” Daines told Bloomberg Government in April of 2023.

“I think that this is the best map I’ve seen in a long time,” McConnell told The Washington Post in February 2024.

But with barely two weeks until the election, the pressure is on the GOP to take full advantage of the opportunities in front of them. While Republicans are favored to win control of the Senate, as many as six of their candidates are in position to lose their states even if Trump triumphs. 

“This is the best opportunity in a generation to maximize Republican Senate seats,” said one GOP strategist, requesting anonymity to speak frankly about the party’s faltering chances. “If they take the gavel but only by one seat, I think it will be a big disappointment.” 

A key part of the strategy was to recruit wealthy, self-funding candidates, who could put in their own cash to make up for a persistent Democratic edge in small-dollar fundraising. Undergirding it all was a belief the party needed to do relatively little to defend its incumbents in Texas and Florida, never mind any states a degree or two redder. 

There have been clear successes: With the help of the NRSC, some wealthy recruits managed to clear the Republican field in their states, enabling the party to avoid damaging and expensive primaries. One recruit, West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice, helped force Sen. Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.) out of the race entirely. Another, Montana businessman Tim Sheehy, is now seen as a favorite to oust Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.)

But the self-funders’ opposition research files have created headaches their money may not be able to solve. Meanwhile, leaders’ efforts to put blue states in play appear far-fetched, GOP incumbents feel neglected, and the party is spending millions defending a seat in blood-red Nebraska. 

The NRSC insists everything is going according to plan. While Daines has carefully avoided making bold predictions, the NRSC shared internal polling last week showing the party winning 53 Senate seats, with most of their numbers far rosier than those appearing in a leaked polling memo from Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC controlled by allies of McConnell, which showed Republicans winning just 50 seats.

“They worked extraordinarily hard to recruit great candidates and they have helped those candidates run first-rate campaigns,” SLF President Steven Law said of the NRSC. “It takes a team to win a majority, and they’ve been great team players.”

But not everyone on the team is so happy, with even prominent conservative pundits making clear a two-seat pickup would be something of a disappointment.

“The [NRSC leadership] talked a big game when they came into these jobs,” a second veteran Republican strategist said, also requesting anonymity to speak frankly about internal divides. “They’re leaving seats on the table, and it’s going to hurt GOP chances of holding the Senate for years to come.”

Understanding why merely winning the Senate — objectively the goal of any campaign committee — could be a disappointing result for Republicans requires zooming out to look at the big picture of American politics: There are simply more solidly red states than there are solidly blue states. And with split-ticket voting on the decline, that should translate to GOP victories downballot as well. Note that word: should.

Democrats have compensated for this imbalance by holding seats in solidly red territory like Ohio, Montana and West Virginia, and by dominating swing-state Senate races: Of the 14 Senate seats in the seven battleground states of this year’s presidential race, 11 are held by Democrats. Republicans hold just a single Senate seat in a blue state.

Republicans are on track to win at least two of the three red-state Senate seats up this year, but are leading in none of the five swing-state Senate races, with Democrats clearly favored to hold seats in Nevada and Arizona.

The GOP’s edge in the Senate is rooted in the surge of white working-class voters toward the Republican Party following Trump’s election. The dynamic led to predictions of doom for Democrats, with noted Democratic data analyst David Shor suggesting before the 2022 midterms that the average outcome of the 2024 election would be Republicans winning a filibuster-proof Senate majority. (Shor has said Democrats’ outperformance in 2022 was due, primarily, to backlash to the Supreme Court’s decision overturning abortion rights, which helped Democrats with independent voters.) 

Democrats, over the past eight years, have also managed to counter the GOP’s demographic advantage by establishing a clear financial edge. Small-dollar donors giving through ActBlue have consistently kept Democratic coffers full, while Republicans have struggled to establish similar programs. This meant the GOP is more reliant on super PACs, which get far less advertising value for their dollar because television stations are required by law to offer the lowest possible rate to candidates.

This year, this has played out most clearly in Ohio’s Senate race. From Sept. 3 to Sept. 30, with the help of a crypto-focused super PAC eager to take out the populist chair of the Senate Banking Committee, Republicans spent a whopping $38 million on television ads attacking incumbent Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown and boosting Republican Bernie Moreno. Over the same time frame, Democrats spent just $10.1 million.

But looking at gross ratings points — a measurement of how many people actually see a given ad — Democrats got 46,000 points for their much cheaper investment, while Republicans got 41,000, according to a source tracking media buys.

The NRSC’s solution to this recurring problem? Find candidates who can fund their own campaigns. For the 2024 cycle, they recruited candidates in West Virginia, Montana, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin with the wealth to fund their own campaigns. (Moreno, who won a primary the NRSC stayed neutral in, is also personally wealthy.)

But personal wealth hasn’t actually done much to close the candidate cash gap with Democrats. Of the GOP recruits, only Wisconsin businessman Eric Hovde — who has put in $20 million of his own money — has given more than $10 million to his own campaign. 

Meanwhile, the NRSC has engaged in coordinated spending with almost all of these candidates: $12 million for Moreno, just shy of $7 million for Sheehy, just shy of $6 million for Hovde and $7 million for Dave McCormick, the party’s nominee in Pennsylvania. 

And the self-funders’ wealth has come attached to major weaknesses Democrats have sought to exploit. Hovde, Sheehy and McCormick have faced questions about their ties to their state; Hovde’s bank did business with a Mexican bank accused of links to drug cartels; McCormick’s hedge fund bet against Pennsylvania-based companies; Moreno faces accusations he shredded documents to hide wage theft at a car dealership he owned. Even Sheehy, who is leading Tester, faces accusations he lied about being shot in Afghanistan.

“Senate Republicans’ bad candidates and flawed recruiting strategy are hurting their prospects across the entire Senate map,” said David Bergstein, a spokesperson for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “It turns out the NRSC’s plan to tap a bunch of scandal-ridden, carpetbagging liars isn’t panning out how they hoped.”

Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, a former chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said Republicans simply won’t be able to recruit quality candidates in many states until after Trump leaves the scene.

“The price of admission is signing up to a range of policy positions that are just way outside the mainstream,” he said while on a swing through Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania to campaign for his Democratic colleagues. “So then the question becomes: Who’s available to run in these races? And it tends to be people without a lot of real political conviction.” 

But while the committee focused mostly on its new faces, its incumbents were not exactly cruising to victories. Polls in Florida and Texas have shown Democratic challengers within the margin of error of GOP incumbents, and independent union leader Dan Osborn is improbably in a tight race with Sen. Deb Fischer (R) in Nebraska, one of the most Republican states in the country. 

Two sources with knowledge of the situation said the NRSC this year was requiring incumbents to raise their own share of coordinated spending into the committee, a break from established practice. In the past, a candidate would simply need to raise $2 million to set up a $4 million coordinated buy with the NRSC, with the committee’s staff and chairman raising the remaining $2 million. This cycle, the incumbent candidate needs to raise the full $4 million. 

Republicans who support the NRSC’s plan argue the organization is simply spending money prudently, with GOP Sens. Ted Cruz (Texas), Rick Scott (Fla.) and Fischer all still favored to win their seats. It simply makes more sense, they say, for more of the committee’s limited cash to go to challengers. 

“The NRSC’s number one priority is bringing back all of our incumbents,” said NRSC spokesman Phil Letsou. “Our incumbents are strong fundraisers and are well-positioned to defeat their radical opponents. In places where the Democrats have gone in heavy, like Texas and Nebraska, the NRSC has responded in kind with over $6 million in investment.”

And Cruz has taken his complaints about a lack of support from outside groups public, blaming it on McConnell’s purported dislike of him. “Mitch McConnell runs the largest Republican super PAC in the country and has $400 million but that super PAC is used to reward the Republican senators who obey him and to punish those who dare to stand up to him,” Cruz said on Fox News earlier this month. (Republicans allied with McConnell say Cruz is simply using decades-old disputes as fodder to attract small-dollar donations.)

Overall, however, there is also a sense the party’s outside groups are not spending their money efficiently. Both McCormick and GOP Gov. Larry Hogan in Maryland have received intense outside support, in part because they are far more palatable to the establishment businessmen who cut some of the largest checks for the GOP. 

That’s led both candidates to have financial advantages over their Democratic opponents even as candidates in more theoretically competitive races have been outspent. In Pennsylvania, Republican outside groups have spent about $108 million, according to the campaign finance watchdog OpenSecrets, compared with $72 million from Democratic outside groups. In Maryland, they’ve spent $22 million compared with $11 million from Democrats. 

Despite the cash advantage, Democrat Angela Alsobrooks has a 10-point lead over Hogan in 538’s polling averages for the Senate race in Maryland, with Hogan polling a hair below 40%. In Pennsylvania, Casey maintains a 5-point edge on McCormick. Polling averages show races in both Michigan and Wisconsin are closer, though the Senate Leadership Fund only began spending in those races earlier this month, well after Democratic outside groups had begun airing ads.

In an interview earlier this month, Hovde — whose race has seen roughly $43 million worth of outside spending from both parties, according to OpenSecrets — acknowledged he could have used additional outside assistance.

“I’m glad it’s finally arrived,” Hovde said. “It would have been nice to have it be here a bit earlier.”