Extremism and bad candidates cost the GOP the Senate before. What does the party do now?
By Aaron Blake
Bloomberg
March 24, 2021 at 2:42 p.m. CDT
Whatever one thinks about how Republican members of Congress handled then-President Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, they generally declined to fully echo his rhetoric. Trump claimed there were millions of fraudulent votes; Republicans in Congress mostly merely argued that states didn’t follow their own election laws. Trump and his allies launched myriad baseless theories about rigged voting machines and international conspiracies; congressional Republicans didn’t do much of anything to repudiate those, but they didn’t sign on to them, either.
The GOP’s efforts to keep these claims at arm’s length, though, are running headlong into the party’s efforts to reclaim power. Multiple high-profile candidates have signaled they will run on the baseless “stolen election” claims, including some running against those who defended the legitimacy of the election.
The questions for the GOP establishment are whether it wants these conspiracy theories to infect its ranks even more than they already have and — if it doesn’t — whether it actually has the will to stop
Several Republican purveyors of the stolen-election claim have announced campaigns in high-profile Senate races in recent weeks. Among them are former Ohio state treasurer Josh Mandel and Rep. Mo Brooks (Ala.) — both of whom featured that claim in their campaign launches — and scandal-plagued former Missouri governor Eric Greitens. Rep. Jody Hice (Ga.) also announced a primary challenge to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) in a more symbolic race for Trump allies, given Raffensperger’s repeated repudiations of Trump’s claims of election rigging in Georgia.
Each of them has promoted baseless fraud claims in the process, as CNN’s Stephen Collinson reported.
Hice claimed this week that 700,000 Georgia voters — about 1 in 10 voters in the state — were illegal and that Raffensperger missed all kinds of fraud. (Raffensperger responded by saying, “Few have done more to cynically undermine faith in our election than Jody Hice.”)
Mandel launched his campaign by saying that “I think when we look back on this election, we’ll see in large part that it was stolen from President Trump.”
Brooks was one of the foremost House architects of the effort to challenge the electoral college votes before the Capitol riot, with that effort eventually earning the support of several GOP senators, including Josh Hawley (Mo.) and Ted Cruz (Tex.). He said upon the announcement of his campaign that in the 2020 election, “ America suffered the worst voter fraud and election theft in history.”\
Greitens has focused his launch this week more on his support for Trump’s agenda than on alleged 2020 fraud, but he, too, has in the past given voice to multiple conspiracy theories about the election and the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
Greitens is a particularly problematic potential GOP nominee for the Senate, given the circumstances of his resignation as governor less than three years ago. He made that decision in the face of allegations that he improperly used a charity donor list — which led to criminal charges that were later dismissed — and allegations of sexual misconduct. The Republican-controlled legislature threatened to impeach him, and among those calling for his exit was then-state Attorney General Hawley.
Hawley stood by that call this week, and Greitens on Wednesday got even more of a taste of the kind of establishment resistance he might confront.
Appearing on the show of conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, who writes columns for The Washington Post, Greitens was peppered with questions about the past allegations against him. He denied that he had taken a photo of a restrained woman with whom he was having an affair, a photo that the woman alleged he later used to blackmail her.
Hewitt compared Greitens’s candidacy to that of former Missouri congressman Todd Akin, whose comment about “legitimate rape” helped hand a Senate seat to Democrats a decade ago. “I’m afraid Todd Akin got killed over ‘legitimate rape,’ ” Hewitt said. “And in this Missouri report, you were accused by a witness of ‘half rape.’ What are you going to do when the ads attack you of ‘half rape?’ ”
The Akin parallel is actually a good one in this moment — but perhaps less for the reasons Hewitt enunciated. Back then, the opposition of the GOP establishment was less a scarlet letter than a badge of honor in Republican primaries. The National Republican Senatorial Committee sought to intervene in several Senate races, only to see the GOP base almost reflexively go in the opposite direction — with its critics often playing up the opposition of the party establishment.
And that almost definitely cost the GOP Senate seats — if not the majority. The potential nominees who might have more appeal to the broader electorate lost, and Senate seats went to Democrats in states including Colorado, Delaware, Indiana, Missouri and Nevada. It’s not clear that the preferred GOP nominees would have won each seat, but the winners were ill-equipped even in some conservative-leaning states. The national GOP soon took a publicly hands-off approach to primaries.
The situation is somewhat different now. All the states in which the candidates mentioned at the top are running are pretty solidly red, with Missouri and Ohio in particular trending that way. Given that history suggests 2022 is likely to be a good year for Republicans, the GOP could just as well let things play out and not bother with trying to determine who might inhabit its Senate ranks in the near future — either because it fears trying or because it truly doesn’t care and a vote is a vote.
But even aside from whether the likes of Greitens, Mandel and Brooks can win is how much Republicans decide their potential victories are worth trying to prevent in the name of other, less extreme, less Trumpian nominees. That will be as telling as anything when it comes to what course today’s GOP intends and hopes to chart. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) voted against convicting Trump in his impeachment trial, but only for procedural reasons and even as he rebuked the allegations of widespread voter fraud and decried Trump’s role in the Capitol riot. He’s now confronted with welcoming potential GOP senators who went even further than Cruz and Hawley.
And as the races a decade ago showed, even the states that conservatives expect to win might not be so simple with the wrong nominee, and in a 50-50 Senate, every seat counts.
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