GOP insiders are hopeful that Daines’s close relationship with Trump and his insistence on recruiting quality candidates could be the winning formula.
Eric Hovde, the brand new, wealthy GOP Senate recruit hoping to take on two-term Democratic senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin in November, was all smiles as he strolled the halls of the Capitol Tuesday afternoon. En route to the office of Senate GOP Whip John Thune, Hovde was flanked by the man who encouraged him to run: National Republican Senatorial Committee chairman Steve Daines of Montana.
“I’m getting ready to go meet Senator Thune right now,” an enthusiastic Hovde told National Review in a brief interview Tuesday on his way to the elevator.
Hovde, who jumped into the race last week after running unsuccessfully for his state’s Senate GOP nomination in 2012, is one of many new strong GOP Senate candidates that Daines is hoping will help flip the Senate red this cycle, thanks to a recruiting style that prioritizes candidate quality and aggressive involvement in GOP primaries.
Up until this point, Daines’s close relationship with Trump also appears to have paid major dividends for Senate GOP recruitment, as the former president has gotten onboard with NRSC-preferred candidates in a number of must-win states, and has largely stayed out of many primaries in blue-leaning battlegrounds the party is hoping to put on the map this cycle.
That’s not to say that this outcome was inevitable. Daines endorsed the former president’s 2024 bid in late-April 2023, when FiveThirtyEight’s polling average in the GOP presidential primary showed a much closer race between Trump and the soon-to-announce candidate Ron DeSantis, who waited until late May to formally launch his campaign.
By throwing his support behind the former president so early in the race, Daines took a major risk with Trump-skeptical GOP donors, according to a source familiar with the matter, many of whom were initially eager to move the party beyond the divisive former president. Roughly ten months later, Daines’s bet appears to have paid off — at least for now — as the former president is all but guaranteed to win the 2024 GOP nomination and the Senate GOP looks poised to have strong recruits running down-ballot in nearly every battleground state.
“He’s working very, very hard to make sure that we have top-quality candidates,” Senate GOP Policy Committee chair Joni Ernst of Iowa told NR Tuesday afternoon. “And he works well with Trump. So that’s a bonus.”
Alongside Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who announced Tuesday he will step aside from his leadership post after November, Ernst is one of two members of Senate GOP leadership who has yet to endorse Trump. Thune, Senate GOP conference chairman John Barrasso, and Senate GOP vice conference chair Shelley Moore Capito have all joined forces with Daines to rally behind the former president.
That’s likely in part thanks to the fact that Daines has been privately lobbying his Senate GOP colleagues to endorse Trump since shortly before the January 15 Iowa caucuses. He still talks regularly with Trump about the former president’s 2024 race and the Senate map, a source familiar with the matter tells NR.
The NRSC chairman’s relationships in Trump-world extend well beyond the former president: Daines is also hunting-and-fishing buddies with the former president’s oldest son, Donald Trump Jr.
Those personal relationships have helped the party coalesce around a number of recruits in must-win states that are crucial to retaking the majority. Over the summer, the NRSC threw its support behind Republican-turned-Democrat-turned-Republican governor Jim Justice in West Virginia in hopes that the governor’s deep pockets, high favorability ratings, and universal name ID would scare centrist Democratic senator Joe Manchin into retirement.
Roughly three weeks after Trump endorsed Justice in his primary against Representative Alex Mooney, Manchin announced he would not run for reelection in 2024, essentially guaranteeing that the seat will fall into GOP hands in November — no matter the eventual GOP nominee.
The Trump–Daines relationship has also come in handy in Montana. Eager to avoid a rerun of 2018, when then–Senate nominee Matt Rosendale lost a crucial battleground state to incumbent Democratic senator Jon Tester by 3.5 points, the NRSC nailed another top-tier recruit: ex–Navy SEAL and wealthy businessman Tim Sheehy. Trump stayed neutral in the GOP Senate primary until hours after Rosendale announced his campaign, dealing a humiliating blow to a candidate who was counting on Trump’s support to win statewide. Rosendale suspended his campaign one week later.
“Chairman Daines has done a superb job of emphasizing the importance of recruitment, ensuring that donors remain motivated, and running the operation in an efficient fashion,” Republican senator Todd Young of Indiana, who served as NRSC chairman during the 2020 cycle, told NR in the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday. “I would especially note his success in recruitment. He’s been able to get some really A-list recruits, most recently in Maryland.”
Earlier this month, former GOP governor Larry Hogan of Maryland shocked Washington when he announced he will run for his state’s open U.S. Senate seat in 2024, putting an otherwise noncompetitive general-election race within reach for Republicans this cycle, thanks to outreach from Daines. Hogan’s decision to hop into the race reportedly came just weeks after Daines’s own chief of staff sent a personal letter encouraging Hogan to run this cycle, according to the Washington Post.
The NRSC is staying neutral in Ohio ahead of the state’s March Senate GOP primary — where Trump has endorsed businessman Bernie Moreno over secretary of state Frank LaRose and state senator Matt Dolan. But the committee is backing candidates in blue-leaning battlegrounds that he hopes to put on the map in 2024, including Hovde in Wisconsin, former hedge-fund CEO Dave McCormick in Pennsylvania, ex-congressman Mike Rogers in Michigan, and Army veteran and businessman Sam Brown in Nevada.
The NRSC and Trump also joined forces to back Representative Jim Banks for retiring GOP senator Mike Braun’s seat in Indiana. By rallying around Banks over prospective Senate candidate and former governor Mitch Daniels early on, Daines, Trump, and other Republicans avoided a costly, contentious, and media-obsessed GOP primary in a deep-red state.
Daines’s aggressive 2024 primary strategy comes after a disastrous 2022 cycle under the leadership of former NRSC chairman Rick Scott, who declined to pick favorites in primaries and got a number of weak candidates as a result, including former football star Herschel Walker in Georgia and celebrity television doctor Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania. The hope this cycle is for the Senate GOP to rally behind personally wealthy and high-quality candidates who can make Democrat-held battlegrounds competitive without embarrassing the party along the way.
Americans for Prosperity, an influential political network founded by the Koch brothers, sees the Senate as its “top priority” this cycle because it has the “best chance of making the greatest difference,” AFP communications director Sydney Stubbs told NR. The group’s political arm, Americans for Prosperity Action, has endorsed Senate candidates in four competitive states — Nevada, Montana, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — and intends to endorse in the other two, Ohio and Michigan, “soon.”
The group is out with new ads this week hitting House and Senate lawmakers who supported Bidenomics. The new ads, shared exclusively with NR, will target 31 lawmakers, including incumbent Democratic senators in several key battleground states: Jon Tester of Montana, Jacky Rosen of Nevada, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin.
Wisconsin-based GOP strategist Brandon Scholz says there are two big questions around this cycle’s Senate races: how much support the NRSC will give to self-funded candidates, like Wisconsin’s Hovde, and how the candidates will deal with the topic of Trump. “How do you run your Senate race? Do you lock arms with the Trump campaign? Do you run your own race? Or are you kind of somewhere in the middle?”
In 2022, Trump became an albatross for Republican candidates, with his controversial presence and “stop the steal” rhetoric proving toxic in several key races. It remains to be seen how Trump’s presence on the presidential ballot in November might impact down-ballot races this time around. Trump, who is currently running just neck-and-neck with Biden in a general-election polling matchup, could undoubtedly have a negative impact on candidates in blue and purple states.
But the former president has preached about party unity in recent days, saying in his South Carolina primary victory speech that he has “never seen the Republican party so unified as it is right now.”
This unity has been a key part of Senate GOP leadership’s plans to win big this November.
“There’s a unified effort at all levels in the Republican Party to take the Senate, and President Trump has been integral in those decisions and in our efforts,” a “very optimistic” Barrasso told NR in a brief interview on Tuesday. “Steve Daines has been a remarkable chairman and done an incredible job of continuing with very successful recruits that can win races all across the country, and really increasing our chances of taking the Senate.”
Around NR:
• Michael Brendan Dougherty reflects on the results out of South Carolina:
While it’s true that home-state candidates are supposed to win their states, nobody expected Nikki Haley to do this well a few weeks ago. It doesn’t present a new path for her candidacy to succeed. But it’s absolutely a showing, like Pat Buchanan’s in New Hampshire in 1992, that demonstrates a fundamental split in the party and a weakness of the general-election candidate.
• Nikki Haley 2028 is not happening, Rich Lowry says:
It’s a long time till 2028, and at that point, it will have been ten years since Haley was U.N. ambassador and all sorts of new Republican figures will have emerged or grown bigger (think J. D. Vance or Sarah Huckabee Sanders). Even if Republican voters are ready to quit on Trump after a second loss, they won’t necessarily appreciate being told that they were wrong and predictably wrong.
• In a world where Nikki Haley accepts a hypothetical invitation to run on a No Labels ticket, so-called “sore loser” laws would prove a likely hurdle to her efforts, Jim Geraghty explains. At least eight states have laws that could prevent Haley from appearing on the ballot as a third-party presidential candidate once she has lost the GOP primary — though there will be debates about whether those state laws apply to presidential candidates, or just candidates for state office.
Add up the electoral votes of the eight states listed above, and you’re at 131 electoral votes that would be out of reach for No Labels, including Haley’s home state, unless the Supreme Court struck down those sore loser laws. A No Labels ticket of Haley and “Democrat to be named later” was never likely to get 270 electoral votes, but it would be frustrating to concede that many states and electoral votes before the campaign began.
• Noah Rothman seeks to answer the question of whether Trump really has a Republican problem:
The general-election polling that forecasts a united GOP by Election Day isn’t hard to believe. That’s what we would expect following an exhausting and unusually prolonged general-election campaign that polarizes the electorate around the two party’s respective nominees. Trump’s ceiling, if he has one, is not made up of disaffected Republicans who still identify as Republicans. It would be composed of high-propensity suburban and exurban voters, voters with college and post-graduate degrees, and voters at the higher end of the income spectrum.
• Sue Altman, the presumptive Democratic nominee in New Jersey’s seventh congressional district, has ties to anti-Israel individuals and organizations that could hurt her in a general-election matchup against the incumbent, Representative Thomas Kean Jr. (R.), in the heavily Jewish district, Zach Kessel reports.
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