Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s brutal assessment last week was that Republicans cannot win the Senate back in 2022 because of a lack of “candidate quality.”
“I think the House is more likely to be flipped than the Senate,” McConnell said at a Northern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce luncheon in Florence, Kentucky.
“Senate races are just different. They’re statewide,” he said. “The quality of a candidate has a lot to do with the result.”
This was not merely an acknowledgment of the GOP’s challenges in trying to take back control of an equally divided room. It was also a clever way for McConnell to put former President Donald Trump’s political future on this November’s ballot. And looking at the current election, the prospects in the major battleground states for Trump and some of his chosen Senate candidates are looking bleaker than some forecasters predicted.
Many saw McConnell’s comments as a dig at Trump for his public support of several flawed Senate candidates in the GOP primaries, who are now trailing in the polls. It also explains why Trump’s media aide Sean Hannity used his Fox News show Friday night to pitch McConnell his remarks.
At first, Hannity criticized McConnell for failing to keep an “agenda” and reportedly leaving Trump’s candidates to “dry up and fend for themselves.”
But then the Fox News host thought about the real problem with the GOP Senate leader’s remark: “Maybe Mitch McConnell hates Donald Trump so much that he’ll probably see Trump-backed candidates lose, because he thinks it will. Donald might get hurt. Trump?”
Bingo! Hannity finally got something right. Trump’s Senate choice is faltering, and McConnell is putting the blame on the former president’s door.
And if those Senate candidates end up losing in swing states, it will likely hurt Trump politically as he prepares for a potential 2024 GOP presidential bid. After all, if Trump runs for these Senate candidates in 2022 and is rejected on the battlefields, his clout within the party will be significantly weakened.
It’s no secret McConnell and Trump are not BFFs. McConnell voted not to indict Trump during his second impeachment trial over his role in instigating the attack on our Capitol on January 6, 2021. However, the Senate GOP leader made a fiery speech on the chamber floor after the impeachment vote, in which he declared, “Former President Trump’s actions before the riots were a shameful dereliction of duty.” “There is no doubt that President Trump is pragmatically and morally responsible for instigating the events of that day,” McConnell said.
Trump returned the love shortly after when he openly urged Senate Republicans last year to step down McConnell as GOP leader. Trump was even trying to recruit Senate candidates who would support him in that effort.
For his part, it’s unlikely that McConnell is hoping that all Trump-backed Senate candidates will lose. The senator from Kentucky is a living, breathing political machine that understands that only if his party controls the Senate can he set the agenda in that chamber—from his legislative goals to that of federal judges and Supreme Court justices. for confirmation.
Still, there’s no dispute that some of Trump’s chosen nominees for the Senate are running, and McConnell clearly wants Republican voters to know who’s to blame if the GOP doesn’t win the Senate: Donald J. Trump.
For starters, Trump-champion television personality, Dr. Mehmet Oz is the nominee for the GOP Senate in Pennsylvania. It was no secret that Oz lived primarily in New Jersey for three decades before moving to Pennsylvania in late 2020.
And as expected, Oz’s Democratic opponent, John Fetterman, has made it a central issue, even releasing comedic videos from MTV’s “Jersey Shore” by famous Jerseyans like Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi and Steven Van Zandt. Do – one of the stars of “The Sopranos” and a part of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band – furthering the message that Oz is a Jersey boy, not a true Pennsylvanian. This helps explain why Oz Why July was behind Fetterman by 11 points in a Fox News poll.
Another celebrity GOP Senate candidate Trump champion, Herschelle Walker, is facing difficulties in Georgia. The football great has been beset by a series of scandals, among them: falsely claiming that he worked in law enforcement, exaggerating his business and academic records, and telling his top colleagues about those children. I failed to tell whom she gave birth outside her marriage. In a recent Fox News poll, Walker is 4 points behind Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, which President Joe Biden won by 0.3% in 2020.