You know that things are looking hella bleak when the knives are out before it’s even Election Day.
GOP operatives are rushing to preemptively blame their own candidates for being losing losers, which doesn’t exactly seem like a winning pre-election message.
According to Axios , Republicans are furious about having to spend money to prop up the fortunes of incumbent Sens. Roger Marshall of Kansas and Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi, as well as quasi-incumbent Sen. Darline Graham of South Carolina.
Like, a lot of money—as in $33 million in Kansas, $2.4 million in Mississippi, and $21 million in South Carolina.
Somehow, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina is being painted as a hero for telling red-state Republicans last year that the National Republican Senatorial Committee wasn’t planning to spend any real time or money to drag them across the finish line.
“Incumbents need to do everything in their power to control their own destiny,” he said at the time.
But most of the ire seems to be reserved for Marshall, who has spent much of his campaign sitting on his hands while his Democratic opponent Adam Hamilton gained ground.
Come on, you didn’t expect Marshall to spend his own money or trouble his beautiful mind with fundraising, did you?
This is the guy whose Federal Election Commission filings show that literally no one working for his campaign has gotten a paycheck for the last five years, proving that he likely uses people from his taxpayer-funded Senate office instead—which is a legal no-no but a solid move for a cheapskate.
Related | DOJ pulls out all the corrupt stops hours before midterms
Marshall really needs to be in an extremely safe seat, because his political instincts are hot garbage. In fact, his closing message to voters was to explain that to “keep the lights on” for his medical practice, he “occasionally handed some accounts over to a collection agency.”
Chat, is it good when your own staff begs you not to run an ad like this? What about when you’re a multimillionaire and you think it makes you look good to say that you sicced collection agencies on people who owed you a few thousand bucks?
Republicans are also getting ahead of the possibility that Darline Graham might lose , which would be genuinely amazing. They’re mad that she hasn’t seemed to tap dearly departed Lindsey Graham’s donor network, which is indeed a bit odd given that she’s only on the ballot because she’s Lindsey’s sister.
But if Graham loses, the GOP should really blame President Donald Trump, who forced her candidacy despite the fact that she has no political experience whatsoever and appears to have no strong desire to run for office or serve in the Senate.
Who knew that being related to the previous occupant of the seat wouldn’t make her a shoo-in?
Lastly, Hyde-Smith has raised only about half what her Democratic opponent Scott Colom has. And while she’s up in the polls , it isn’t nearly as much as expected.
The GOP clearly assumed that it could treat most red states as gimmes and focus only on swing states—but that was before Trump became an all-around disaster, even in the eyes of his supporters.
Now Trump’s dragging everyone down with him. We genuinely love to see it.
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