NRSC v. FEC

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

 Rick Hasen at Slate:

As disastrous Supreme Court election cases go, Tuesday’s decision in National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission doesn’t make the list of complete abominations, like the court’s decision this term in Louisiana v. Callais killing off the remaining key part of the Voting Rights Act, or earlier decisions like 2010’s Citizens United that kicked off the unraveling of our campaign finance system. Indeed, it’s possible that the NRSC decision makes our campaign finance system a bit less distorted in bringing candidates and parties closer together. But NRSC, written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh for the six Republican-appointed justices, is an excellent example of the Roberts court’s “deregulatory bootstrapping,” in which the court relies on its earlier partial overruling of precedents—that only makes things worse—to justify more changes in the law. Fundamental change to campaign finance will have to wait for a new Supreme Court.

...

The court went through a period in the early 2000s when it was deferential to Congress’ judgments as to the need for contribution limits and for spending limits on corporations and unions, and in one of those cases, Colorado II, from 2001, the Supreme Court held that Congress could limit how much money political parties may spend in coordination and cooperation with candidates. The court reasoned that without these limits, large donors could seek improper influence over candidates by giving money through political parties.

...

In Tuesday’s opinion in NRSC, the court overturned Colorado II, and said that the part of federal campaign finance law limiting how much political parties can spend in coordination with candidates violates the First Amendment. The court pointed to the “unique” role that political parties play in helping candidates win, and that they have their own First Amendment rights.

But the court also pointed to the development of super PACs as a reason to overturn the limits. All of these outside groups are unaccountable, spreading negative messages. Parties help preserve democracy in the court majority’s view, and it was only fair to free the parties of limits on them.

Texas Day

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

Trump endorsed Ken Paxton for the Senate.

Andrew Howard at Politico:

Paxton officially ousted Sen. John Cornyn in the GOP runoff by a hefty margin, after top Republicans in Washington lit $100 million on fire burning the man they now have to embrace for the incumbent they thought would be the better bet in the general election.

That rescue mission for Cornyn officially failed on Tuesday, but Trump had already sealed his fate when he endorsed Paxton last week. Now, those same Republicans who have spent months attacking the scandal-plagued Paxton are coming around. Grudgingly.

The NRSC, which backed Cornyn, scrubbed its social media and website of anti-Paxton posts.

In a statement on Tuesday, the committee led by Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) said the state “isn’t going to elect James Talarico,” the Democratic nominee, while attacking his record. Missing from the statement, notably, was any mention of Paxton by name, as well as any formal commitment to spending on his behalf. The Sen. John Thune-aligned super PAC Senate Leadership Fund, whose affiliated nonprofit poured millions into ads for Cornyn and attacking Paxton, had made no public comments as of 12:30 a.m. Eastern, hours after the race was called.

Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott, who has had an occasionally rocky relationship with the attorney general, congratulated Paxton on X, but his public statement on Instagram focused on the broader GOP ticket, calling for Republicans to “crush socialist Democrats’ dream of turning Texas blue” and promising that a “united Republican Party will drive victory.”

Other GOP-aligned groups are jumping right in for their nominee. The powerful Club for Growth Action immediately lent its endorsement, and one of its aligned-PACs quickly dropped an ad that repeatedly mocks Talarico as a “woke weirdo.”

And the Akin ploy is alive and well.

Ben Kamisar at NBC:

Democrat Johnny Garcia has won his party’s primary in Texas’ 35th Congressional District, NBC News projects, defeating a rival whom party leaders had condemned for antisemitic comments as Democrats look to compete in a district Republicans redrew to their benefit.

The district stretches from Austin to San Antonio, the result of Republican efforts to combine two Democratic seats into one and create a new district leaning their way. Donald Trump carried the district by about 10.5 points in 2024.

Despite that result, there are signs the district could be competitive in the general election, including $1 million in spending from an opaque outside group aimed at boosting Garcia’s opponent, sex therapist Maureen Galindo, despite the controversies dogging her. Punchbowl News reported that the super PAC, Lead Left PAC, had links to a GOP fundraising platform.

”

2. Popular Information found that Lead Left is linked to Caleb Crosby, a Republican operative. Crosby is the treasurer of the Congressional Leadership Fund (CLF), the primary super PAC of the House GOP.https://t.co/cwW6n9yUBV

— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) May 27, 2026

Pick Your Opponent, 2025

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections. 

In the 2012 Missouri  Senate race, incumbent Democrat Claire McCaskill ran ads during the GOP primary campaign saying that Todd Akin was "too conservative."  The idea of the "attack ad" was to drive GOP voters to Akin, her weakest potential foe.  It worked.  Other campaigns have tried variations of the "pick your opponent" ploy.

Reese Gorman at NOTUS:

Republicans’ Senate campaign arm has actively worked behind the scenes to encourage Rep. Jasmine Crockett to jump into the Senate Democratic primary in Texas, believing she will be the easiest opponent to beat.

Just a month ago, there was grave concern among Republicans about the Senate race, where incumbent Sen. John Cornyn is running for reelection. Democrats were running two formidable candidates, and Cornyn was caught in the middle of a bruising three-way primary that Republicans were concerned would weaken the eventual nominee.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee put out a poll in July with Crockett’s name included, which showed her as the leading Democrat in a hypothetical matchup.

“When we saw the results, we were like, ‘OK, we got to disseminate this far and wide,’” a source familiar with the process told NOTUS.

The fact that Crockett was included in the poll was no accident.

In June news broke that Texas Democrats Colin Allred, James Talarico, former Rep. Beto O’Rourke and Rep. Joaquin Castro met to discuss the 2026 election. Operatives at the NRSC realized that Crockett — whose political stock had been rising — wasn’t included in that meeting and also hadn’t been included in any credible poll. So they decided to change that.

Following the NRSC’s polls, other surveys began to include Crockett and showed similar results: She was surging in the primary.

The NRSC then worked to amplify those polls and is taking credit for helping “orchestrate the pile on of these polling numbers to really drive that news cycle and that narrative that Jasmine Crockett was surging in Texas,” the source said.

Senate GOP Recruitment

 Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections.

 Al Weaver at The Hill:

Senate Republicans’ string of major recruiting wins could soon be coming to an end as the party prepares for less-than-welcome entries in two races that could help decide the fate of the Senate majority next year.

Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.) and former gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake are widely expected to launch bids for the upper chamber in Montana and Arizona, respectively, in the coming months.

That’s creating headaches for GOP leaders in their quest to flip two seats and retake control of the Senate after four years in the minority.

Republican leaders in the Senate haven’t been shy about calling out “candidate quality” as a major issue for the party in 2022 and National Republican Senatorial Committee Chair Steve Daines (R-Mont.) vowed to more aggressively recruit and back candidates with a better shot of winning a general election.

Thus far, those efforts have borne fruit in a number of key contests.

West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice (R) is the leading contender to take on Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) next year (if Manchin runs), Tim Sheehy entered the race in Montana to unseat Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) and Sam Brown launched a campaign in Nevada. Manchin and Tester, who represent states former President Trump carried by a wide margin, are at the top of Republicans’ target list.

The party also has a number of acceptable candidates in Ohio to take on Sen. Sherrod Brown (D), though none are considered to be sterling by GOP operatives.

But it’s the potential coming pair of Rosendale and Lake that has Republicans worried.

NRSC = "Not Really Supporting Candidates"

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections.  NRSC  chair Rick Scott is proving to be the cycle's biggest asset ... for the Democrats.

 Shane Goldmacher at NYT on the National Republican Senatorial Committee:

By the end of July, the committee had collected a record $181.5 million — but had already spent more than 95 percent of what it had brought in. The Republican group entered August with just $23.2 million on hand, less than half of what the Senate Democratic committee had ahead of the final intense phase of the midterm elections.

Now top Republicans are beginning to ask: Where did all the money go?

The answer, chiefly, is that Mr. Scott’s enormous gamble on finding new online donors has been a costly financial flop in 2022, according to a New York Times analysis of federal records and interviews with people briefed on the committee’s finances. Today, the N.R.S.C. is raising less than before Mr. Scott’s digital splurge.

...
The committee had squeezed donors with hyperaggressive new tactics. And all the money coming in obscured just how much the committee was spending advertising for donors. Then inflation sapped online giving for Republicans nationwide. And the money that had rolled in came at an ethical price.

...

One internal N.R.S.C. budget document from earlier this year, obtained by The Times, shows that $23.3 million was poured into investments to find new donors between June 2021 and January 2022. In that time, the contributors the organization found gave $6.1 million — a more than $17 million deficit.

Rick Scott Screws Up

 Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good.

Rick Scott is a disaster.

Isaac Arnsdorf at WP:

Republican Senate hopefuls are getting crushed on airwaves across the country while their national campaign fund is pulling ads and running low on cash — leading some campaign advisers to ask where all the money went and to demand an audit of the committee’s finances, according to Republican strategists involved in the discussions.

In a highly unusual move, the National Republican Senatorial Committee this week canceled bookings worth about $10 million, including in the critical states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona. A spokesman said the NRSC is not abandoning those races but prioritizing ad spots that are shared with campaigns and benefit from discounted rates. Still, the cancellations forfeit cheaper prices that came from booking early, and better budgeting could have covered both.

“The fact that they canceled these reservations was a huge problem — you can’t get them back,” said one Senate Republican strategist, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters. “You can’t win elections if you don’t have money to run ads.”

The NRSC’s retreat came after months of touting record fundraising, topping $173 million so far this election cycle, according to Federal Election Commission disclosures. But the committee has burned through nearly all of it, with the NRSC’s cash on hand dwindling to $28.4 million by the end of June.

Since Donald Trump first suggested the 2020 election might be stolen, Republicans have latched onto the claim. Here’s how it became a litmus test for the party. (Video: JM Rieger/The Washington Post)

As of that month, the committee disclosed spending just $23 million on ads, with more than $21 million going into text messages and more than $12 million to American Express credit card payments, whose ultimate purpose isn’t clear from the filings. The committee also spent at least $13 million on consultants, $9 million on debt payments and more than $7.9 million renting mailing lists, campaign finance data show.

“If they were a corporation, the CEO would be fired and investigated,” said a national Republican consultant working on Senate races. “The way this money has been burned, there needs to be an audit or investigation because we’re not gonna take the Senate now and this money has been squandered. It’s a rip-off.”

The NRSC’s chairman, Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, has already taken heat from fellow Republicans for running ads featuring him on camera and releasing his own policy agenda that became a Democratic punching bag — leading to jokes that “NRSC” stood for “National Rick Scott Committee” in a bid to fuel his own presumed presidential ambitions.

New: Rick Scott is spending part of his congressional recess on a luxury yacht in Italy w/ his family while Republicans face cash problems & rough headlines about their midterm chances

He also recently attacked Biden for vacationing in Delaware https://t.co/tVxcr8pdio

— Alayna Treene (@alaynatreene) August 23, 2022

Rick Scott: Gift to Democrats

Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good.

Michael Scherer and Josh Dawsey at WP:

Florida Sen. Rick Scott has been publicly dressed down by Republican leader Mitch McConnell, privately rebuked by his colleagues and repeatedly accused of running the National Republican Senatorial Committee in a way that benefits his own future over the candidates he was hired to get elected.

He has directed a sizable share of his fundraising as NRSC chair to his own accounts, while shifting digital revenue away from Senate campaigns and buying ads promoting himself that look all but identical to spots he does for the national committee.


But during the seven weeks of turmoil since Scott dropped a provocative conservative policy bomb on an unsuspecting party — a plan that called for tax increases and expiration dates for all federal laws, including those establishing Social Security and Medicare — he has not once expressed regret. Instead, the former hospital chain CEO and two-term governor, the richest man in the Senate, argues that he owes his detractors nothing.

...

“We’ve got three words for him: Keep it up,” said David Bergstein, the communications director at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which has been championing the Scott plan as a way to scare voters. “No NRSC chair has done more for Senate Democrats than Rick Scott.”

Julia Manchester at The Hill:

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) marked Tax Day on Monday by rolling out billboards in Florida and Wisconsin, hitting Republicans over Sen. Rick Scott’s (R-Fla.) proposed plan to require all Americans to pay at least some income tax.

The billboards, which read “Senate Republicans’ Plan: Raise Your Taxes,” will be deployed in Orlando, Miami, and Oshkosh, Wis., near the offices of Sens. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.). Scott is the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee and Rubio and Johnson are facing closely watched reelection bids.

Tom Howell Jr. at Washington Times:

President Biden used Monday’s tax-filing deadline to promote his social welfare agenda while lobbing attacks at Senate Republicans, saying his tax plan would look out for the little guy while Senate Republicans promote a plan that would impose income taxes on those who currently pay none.

Mr. Biden is making hay with an “11-point” plan released by Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, who leads the Senate campaign arm. The plan said all persons should pay some income tax to “have skin in the game” and that all legislation should sunset after five years, an idea that would ostensibly apply to Medicare and Social Security.

“The president is fighting for tax cuts for the middle class and to ensure that the super wealthy and large corporations pay their fair share, while congressional Republicans, led by Senator Scott, are proposing big tax increases on middle-class families,” the White House said in a fact sheet.

Senate GOP Fundraising

In Defying the Odds, we discuss campaign finance and campaign technology. The 2019 update includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms.

Elena Schneider, James Arkin, and Amy Mutnick at Politico:

Last month, the National Republican Senatorial Committee prepared a slideshow for Senate chiefs of staff full of bleak numbers about the party's failure to compete with Democrats on digital fundraising. For anyone not getting the message, the final slide hammered home the possible end result: a freight train bearing down on a man standing on the tracks.

The slideshow, obtained by POLITICO, painted a grim picture of the GOP’s long-running problem. Republican senators and challengers lagged behind Democrats by a collective $30 million in the first quarter of 2020, a deficit stemming from Democrats’ superior online fundraising machine. Since then, Democrats' fundraising pace accelerated further, with the party’s challengers announcing huge second-quarter hauls last week, largely driven by online donors giving through ActBlue, the party’s preferred fundraising platform.
...
Republicans have a new online donation tool backed by Trump, WinRed, which they have hailed as an answer to their ActBlue problem. But a dozen Republican Party strategists and donors warned in interviews that not enough GOP campaigns are taking active steps to properly use the tools at their disposal to haul in money.
...
Democratic Senate campaigns have outraised Republicans in small-dollar donations (under $200) in 10 of the 12 most competitive races, according to a review of the most recent Federal Election Commission reports, which this week are due for an update covering the second quarter. Already, many Democratic campaigns have announced that they raised massive sums in the last three months, while few Republicans have tipped their hands. Unitemized donations also represented a higher percentage of individual receipts for Democrats in every competitive race featuring a GOP senator.

“Some GOP Senate candidates have made great strides online, but we’re still light-years away from where we need to be as a party,” Kevin McLaughlin, executive director of the NRSC, said in a statement. “2020 should serve as a canary in the coal mine to anyone on the ballot in 2022 and beyond. They have a simple choice: Adapt immediately or find a new job. We have better resources than Democrats, but they don’t do any good if no one uses them.”

...
The numbers are also troubling for the House GOP. Vulnerable House Democrats raised a staggering $35 million in the second quarter and ended with a collective $117 million in their campaign accounts, building a layer of financial protection on top of the favorable polling currently shielding their majority.

“[Democrats] are better at online fundraising than we are — period,” said Corry Bliss, who as executive director of Congressional Leadership Fund, the GOP’s main House super PAC, warned of a Democratic “green wave” in 2018. Now, he said, it’s “back.”

The NRSC Memo: "Don't Defend Trump"

In Defying the Odds, we discuss the 2016 campaign. The 2019 update includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms. The 2020 race, the subject of our next book, is well under  way.   

Coronavirus presents unprecedented challenges to public policy and the electoral process. 

Alex Isenstadt at Politico:

The National Republican Senatorial Committee has sent campaigns a detailed, 57-page memo authored by a top Republican strategist advising GOP candidates to address the coronavirus crisis by aggressively attacking China.

The memo includes advice on everything from how to tie Democratic candidates to the Chinese government to how to deal with accusations of racism. It stresses three main lines of assault: That China caused the virus “by covering it up,” that Democrats are “soft on China,” and that Republicans will “push for sanctions on China for its role in spreading this pandemic.”

“Coronavirus was a Chinese hit-and-run followed by a cover-up that cost thousands of lives,” the April 17 memo states.

The document urges candidates to stay relentlessly on message against the country when responding to any questions about the virus. When asked whether the spread of the coronavirus is Trump’s fault, candidates are advised to respond by pivoting to China.

“Don’t defend Trump, other than the China Travel Ban — attack China,” the memo states.

...
The NRSC memo shows that Republicans are also eager to make China an issue in down-ballot races. It was distributed by the Senate GOP campaign arm, though it was not explicitly drafted by or for the committee. It was authored by the political consulting firm of Brett O’Donnell, a veteran Republican strategist who has advised Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton.

The memo provides a clear, real-time example of how consultants provide talking points and anticipate questions:

Answers To Likely Arguments:

Q: Isn’t this Trump’s fault?

Note - don’t defend Trump, other than the China Travel Ban -- attack China

● This is China’s fault. The virus came from China and China covered it up. Because China lied about the extent of the virus, our public health officials acted late.
● I wish that everyone acted earlier -- that includes our elected officials, the World Health Organization, and the CDC.
● I’m glad that President Trump acted early to ban travel to China -- that’s something my
Democratic opponent did not support and that Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi criticized as
xenophobic and racist.
.
Q: Aren’t you being racist by blaming China and causing racist attacks against Chinese Americans?

● No one is blaming Chinese Americans. This is the fault of the Chinese Communist Party for covering up the virus and lying about it’s danger. This caused the pandemic and they should be held accountable.
● And no one has suffered more from the murderous Communist Chinese Party dictatorship than the people of China. We stand with them against their corrupt government that caused this pandemic.

GOP Tong Warfare in Georgia Senate Race

In Defying the Odds, we discuss state and congressional elections as well as the presidential race. The update looks at political and demographic trends through the 2018 midterm.  Our next book will explain 2020.

In January, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp appointed wealthy Kelly Loeffler to fill the vacancy of Senator Johnny Isaakson, who resigned because of ill health.  But Rep. Doug Collins, a zealous defender of Trump on the Judiciary Committee, wanted the job, and Trumpworld supported him  He is now challenging her in the November 3 special election, which will trigger a January 3 runoff if nobody wins a majority. At WP, Paul Kane reports on the resulting warfare:

After years of producing hamstrung nominees from contested primaries, the National Republican Senatorial Committee announced in 2013 that it would not allow any dollars to go toward firms that worked for GOP challengers to incumbents. Only one GOP incumbent has lost a primary challenge since then.

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has no such rule, so consultants for Rep. Joe Kennedy (D-Mass.) face no blowback in his challenge to Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.).\

McConnell’s team offers no apology for its tactics. Its blacklist policy is well-known to every Republican consulting firm, as is its well-honed image of being willing to be the toughest kid in the political sandbox.

“With this emotional, ill-informed decision, Doug Collins has united conservatives in opposition to his candidacy, and Senator Loeffler has quickly assembled more Republican support in Georgia than Collins ever knew existed,” said NRSC spokesman Jesse Hunt, calling the four-term congressman “a swamp creature."

...
 Soon after Isakson announced his retirement plans in August, Collins began considering the Senate race. In early October, his campaign paid almost $30,000 to John McLaughlin, a well-known Republican pollster. With impeachment looming, Collins signed Convergence Media onto his House campaign account to boost his online fundraising presence.

Convergence has close ties to Kevin McCarthy and is on retainer to NRCC,.

The three GOP leaders — McConnell, [Kevin] McCarthy and [RNC Chair Ronna Romney] McDaniel — never spoke to one another about the feud, according to their advisers. But the messages were sent at the highest staff levels.

NRSC officials complained to top advisers of McDaniel, who employs Shields’s wife, Katie Walsh, as a consultant. And McConnell’s world made their displeasure clear to McCarthy’s orbit.

 ...In a roughly 10-day span after Collins entered the race, Convergence Media declined to work on his Senate race, followed by a direct-mail firm and John McLaughlin, the GOP pollster.

The same D.C. establishment political swamp that tried to stop President Trump is trying to stop me now!

Don't let them win: https://t.co/gr1VS9mnEN pic.twitter.com/EaXGKNItgJ

— Doug Collins (@CollinsforGA) February 14, 2020

Independent Expenditures

In Defying the Odds, we discuss congressional elections as well as the presidential race.  Campaign finance is a big part of the story.

A release from the Campaign Finance Institute:

General Election IE Tool

Follow CFI on Twitter:

Independent expenditures (IEs) reported to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) for general election House and Senate contests have continued on a record pace, totaling $695 million through October 21st. This is $103 million more than on the same date in 2016, based on a Campaign Finance Institute (CFI) analysis of data supplied by the FEC. Detailed data on all races with independent expenditures, and on the organizations making the IEs, are available and updated daily on CFI's website via these links: House | Senate |Spenders.

Spenders

Eight of the top ten spenders in the general election are party committees (DCCC, NRCC, NRSC, DSCC) or organizations, mostly Super PACs, tied to the congressional leadership. These organizations were responsible for a combined $409 million, or 59% of all general election IEs through October 21. Breaking them down, the leadership-related entities have been responsible for $265 million and the formal party committees $144 million. This is the first time the leadership-related committees have been quite so important. In 2014 the leadership-related groups spent about half as much as the formal party committees. By 2016 they had pulled almost even. This year, the leadership-related entities so far have come close to doubling the formal party committees.

With respect to the partisan breakdown: All IE spending has been virtually even in the amount spent to support Democrats and Republicans. Republican candidates currently hold a slight edge at 51% to 49%.

Top Races

A large number of House races are considered to be competitive this year and IE spending decisions are backing that up. In 2016 there were forty House races that had $1 million or more in independent expenditures through the entire general election. With two weeks still remaining before the 2018 election, there are already sixty-two districts with over $1 million in outside money.

The competitive landscape in the House is heavily weighted towards Republican incumbents defending their seats. The top ten House races by IE spending, each exceeding $9 million, all represent such districts. On the Senate side, the situation is mostly reversed with Democrats defending seats in seven of the top ten races.


# 30 #

Hillary, the Enemy

In  Defying the Odds, we discuss attacks on Hillary Clinton.

Saul Alinsky: "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it. Don’t try to attack abstract corporations or bureaucracies. Identify a responsible individual. Ignore attempts to shift or spread the blame."

Richard M. Nixon: "Politics is battle, and the best way to fire up your troops is to rally them against a visible opponent on the other side of the field. If a loyal supporter will fight hard for you, he will fight twice as hard against your enemies."

Eric Bradner at CNN:

Hillary Clinton hasn't hit the campaign trail yet on behalf of Democrats running in 2018, but that isn't stopping Republicans from using the former 2016 Democratic presidential nominee as a reliable campaign boogeyman.

In Pennsylvania's special election earlier this month, a super PAC aligned with House Speaker Paul Ryan handed out door-hangers that featured Clinton and Nancy Pelosi to attack Democrat Conor Lamb.

And over the past two weeks, Republicans have tried to tie vulnerable Democratic senators to comments Clinton made at a recent event in India that were seen as a knock at more conservative areas of the country, in which she said she "won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward." President Donald Trump, she said, ran a backward-looking campaign.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee has cut digital ads featuring Clinton's comments that target 10 Democratic senators running for reelection in states Trump won in 2016. The Republican challenger to one of those Democrats, Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill, has also released digital ads tying McCaskill to Clinton and her comments.

Saving the GOP Senate III

At The Hill, Reid Wilson reports on non-coordination coordination in the 2016 Senate races:

The NRSC’s strategy of spending its money early meant the party was being vastly outspent by its Democratic counterpart late. The NRSC had spent $31 million between August and September, while the DSCC spent just $13 million. But beginning in October, the NRSC had reserved just $10 million in late airtime — while the DSCC had reserved $44 million in ads. The NRSC took out a $15 million line of credit for last-minute spending, but its hope was that outside groups would fill in the rest.

“The disparity between the two committees is unlike anything I’ve seen since I started doing this,” said one longtime GOP official.

McConnell took the lead in warning donors about what was to come. Though he could not directly solicit contributions for the Senate Leadership Fund, run by his former chief of staff, Steven Law, McConnell sent signals, Law said, that the GOP’s leading outside group needed late cash. Last-minute donations gave the group the ability to dump more than $35 million into advertising in crucial states.

All told, the Senate Leadership Fund (SLF) and One Nation raised and spent $165 million on behalf of Senate Republicans. Of that, the SLF spent almost $38 million on television spots in just the last 14 days of the race.

At Morning Consult a few months ago, Reid Wilson provided some background:

As Republicans prepared to assume control of the Senate a little more than a year ago, incoming Majority Leader Mitch McConnell delivered a clear message to the members of his conference: Don’t set up your own super PAC.

McConnell, a keen student of politics, wanted Republicans to follow a model established by Senate Democrats, who steer their big donors to a single outside group. Doing so, he told fellow Republicans, would allow the single entity to raise and spend money in the best interest of the new majority, keep down costs and coordinating messages across the country.

At a meeting held at the NRSC, the Senate GOP’s campaign arm, McConnell and his top political adviser, Josh Holmes, told Republican senators they should steer big donors to One Nation and the Senate Leadership Fund, two groups tied to the American Crossroads network of organizations.

In previous cycles, “there were a number of super PACs, all of which complicated the broader messaging that would have helped the candidates,” Holmes said in an interview. “Donors asked that that be fixed for this cycle.”

The man who heads the two groups, Steven Law — like Holmes, a former McConnell chief of staff — would use their monetary power to keep vendor costs down and prevent the kind of rampant profit-taking that has plagued some candidate-specific super PACs. They could also ensure that Republican efforts to keep the Senate would not be hampered by multiple outside groups stepping over each other and muddling message

Saving the GOP Senate

At The Hill, Reid Wilson reports that the Senate GOP leadership and NRSC worked hard to save their party's majority.  They took early action to deter primary challenges.

From the beginning, [Ward] Baker, the hard-charging and brashly blunt retired Marine who ran the NRSC, pushed his candidates to insulate themselves from a national tide. After studying Senate races from 2012 and 2014, Baker and his team came to two conclusions: First, that candidates with strong favorable and job approval numbers tended to survive waves, and second, that the party’s money would be best spent to influence races early.
...

Though presidential turnout would favor them, Democrats started the cycle in a dark period. They hadn’t anticipated the depth of their losses in 2014, when Republicans took back the majority. Unexpected defeats of incumbents like Sens. Kay Hagan (N.C.) and Mark Udall (Colo.), two members popular among other Democratic senators, cast a pall over the caucus.

Two-thirds of the remaining 46 conference members had never served in the minority, and relinquishing power hurt. Some of the younger members even considered making a change at the top by ousting their leader, Harry Reid (Nev.). Reid’s team heard those rumblings and successfully navigated around what could have been an ugly leadership fight.

But both sides thought that the map favored the Democrats.

Even beyond the traditional battleground states, Republicans saw worrisome signs that some of their members could face trouble. In October, more than a year before Election Day, One Nation, an outside group tied to the Crossroads network, began running advertisements touting Blunt’s work on behalf of military families. Trump was surging among Republican voters sick of the political establishment, and some worried that Blunt — a longtime Washington insider with a family full of lobbyists — could be vulnerable in a climate that favored outsiders.

“You could see the vulnerability a long way away,” said Josh Holmes, a Republican strategist with close ties to McConnell.

Together, One Nation and the Senate Leadership Fund, another Crossroads entity, had budgeted $4 million to protect Blunt, who defied some pundits’ predictions and kept his seat.

Senators Running for Sheriff

At Medium, NSRC executive director Ward Baker pretty explicitly declares that it's an all-politics-is-local campaign for his candidates.

There’s no question that the dynamics of a presidential election can create a great deal of uncertainty for downballot candidates — and in both parties, this cycle has created more uncertainty than most. While nearly every observer and talking head spent 2015 writing off Donald Trump’s chances at securing the Republican nomination, we were already working with our Senate campaigns last summer to prepare for every possible outcome to the presidential primary. As the Washington Post discovered, the NRSC began mapping out a strategy for our candidates to run concurrently with any potential presidential candidate last summer.

...
The results of our preparation are already apparent. In a cycle where many reporters like to pontificate about the “Trump effect,” our Senators have successfully navigated tricky waters in their primary contests. Across the board, Republican Senators have outperformed the top of the ticket in raw votes, and Senators like Richard Shelby, John Boozman, Richard Burr, and Mark Kirk scored decisive primary wins that were hardly guaranteed given the mood of Republican voters. In fact, every Republican Senate incumbent has won with over 60%.

In addition to mastering the intricate mechanics of running a modern campaign, we have a very clear messaging strategy. Republican Senators are talking to voters like they’re running for sheriff. Every message is highly targeted and purposefully local. Our Senators are making sure their voters know they’re focused on issues that matter in their states — Rob Portman and Kelly Ayotte are leading the fight against opioid abuse; Roy Blunt is a forceful advocate for mental health funding; John McCain and Ron Johnson are going above and beyond for reform and accountability at Veterans Affairs and VA hospitals. We want to make sure voters are casting votes for Senate candidates based solely on issues related to that Senate race — not up, down, or adjacent on the ticket. We’ve embraced data analytics, new digital platforms and non-traditional message delivery in order to talk to voters in targeted segments amounting to 7–8% of the electorate at a time. The results are self-evident: Portman is running the best field and data program in America and Pat Toomey has been a leader on the digital front with the use of Snapchat to expand his message universe.

GOP Dominates Cromnibus Loophole

Russ Choma and Ben Jacobs report at Open Secrets:

A new loophole stuck into a budget bill last year allows donors to gives hundreds of thousands of dollars to political parties. However, only the Republican party is benefiting from it.

A provision quietly inserted into the combination continuing resolution/omnibus spending bill – or Cromnibus – last year increased the maximum that party committees can accept from $33,400 to over $334,000 each year. (The limits were also increased for Senate and congressional campaign committees to $234,000 apiece.)

And while Republicans are already taking advantage of this and have several donors giving this amount, Democrats are not keeping up.

According to the most recent FEC finance reports, while the Republican National Committee has six donors who have given the maximum of $334,600 to the GOP, not a single Democratic donor has even approached these totals in gifts to theDemocratic National Committee. This imbalance is less pronounced but still present in contributions to the National Republican Senatorial Committee and National Republican Campaign Committee versus those to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

The result is that even as Democrats worry about the growing rise of Republican super Pacs heavily funded by conservative mega-donors, they are lagging even further in competing with the GOP in this new category of hard money.

Missed GOP Opportunities

It was a good election for the GOP but it could have been even better.

Steven Shepard writes at Politico:

For two years, Republicans had been working to correct one of the party’s greatest embarrassments of recent years: the flawed polling that led so many in the party to believe Mitt Romney was on the cusp of victory in 2012. But after dramatically underestimating Democratic turnout in 2012, it was now obvious that the GOP had erred in the other direction in 2014. Their pollsters had understated Republicans’ leads in a number of states, causing the RNC and GOP campaign committees to pour money into places where it wasn’t needed and hold money back from places where it might have made a difference — such as Virginia, where Republican Ed Gillespie lost by less than a percentage point.

“It’s just as bad to be wrong by being too conservative,” said [RNC chief of staff Mike] Shields. “It’s just as big a mistake to tell a client that you’re only winning by one point when they’re winning by eight. Especially at the party committee level, there are just too many decisions being made … That money can be used elsewhere.”

Jon Fleischman writes at Breitbart:

Nationally, Republicans had an outstanding election earlier this month. Besides the huge gains in the U.S. Senate, House Republicans made modest gains (12 seats), bringing their majority to an impressive 244 of 435 members. That said, one cannot help but note that House Republicans could have had an even better night but for being completely routed by Democrats in California. Here is a snapshot of nine separate House races, all likely won by Democrats, that could have gone Republican.

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Obviously hindsight is, as they say, 20-20. But there is simply no way to look at all of these results and not conclude that, had the NRCC made different decisions, there could have been a whole bunch of new freshman Republicans from California, replacing Democrats. 2016, a Presidential election year, will make all of these seats more difficult for GOP pickups in two years.

It is worthy of note that strong performances were made by two GOP incumbents in tough seats in California — both in the Central Valley — Jeff Denham and David Valadeo. And it should be said that this year the California GOP turned the tide back a bit in the state legislature, going from 12 up to 14 members in the 40-member State Senate, and from 25 to 28 members in the 80-member State Assembly. These state legislative gains were in no small part due to a strong focused and well-financed plan largely orchestrated by State GOP Chairman Jim Brulte.

Tillis, Crossroads, and NRSC

How did Thom Tillis upset Kay Hagan in North Carolina?  Alexis Levinson writes at Roll Call:

It was not clear how much outside help Tillis would get in the home stretch. Heading into the final month, Republican groups faced a gaping $7 million spending disparity with Democrats.Only Crossroads had reserved airtime for October. The NRSC, already stretched thin, had not put any money in.

“It was a huge investment for us. And there was talk, do we put 5, 6 million here, or do we go up and shore up these other states — because we were pretty confident in Iowa and Colorado,” [NRSC political director Ward] Baker told reporters after the election.

They believed Tillis could win, but they knew they had to close the spending gap for that to happen. Outside groups, they were sure, were not going to fill a hole that big. In the second week of October, the NRSC’s independent expenditure arm put $6 million into the race.

“As soon as we did that, a race that could have been left for dead, you saw all the other outside groups do what we hoped they do, which was all of a sudden going to their donors, and filling a $2 million hole is a lot easier,” NRSC Executive Director Rob Collins said.

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A major turning point in the campaign, said Tillis supporters, was the Oct. 8 debate, after which Hagan admitted that she had missed a classified hearing for Armed Services Committee about ISIS to attend a campaign fundraiser in New York City.

It gave the Tillis campaign a concrete data point on which to hang the charge that Hagan, like Obama, was mishandling ISIS and the nation’s security. And while few people watch Senate debates, plenty of North Carolinians saw Hagan’s remarks. Three days later, Crossroads GPS, the NRSC, and the Tillis campaign were all running ads attacking her for missing the hearing.

At that same debate, Hagan took heat for her husband’s company that received money from the government stimulus, which Hagan had voted for. The story had come out in September, but those attacks amped up in the final weeks, and, in an environment where distrust of Washington is high, they hurt her.

Agents of REDD

Jon Ward reports at Yahoo about a January NRSC meeting at New York's Standard High Line Hotel:

The group included general consultants for most of the competitive Senate campaigns, mail vendors, pollsters, TV buyers, principals at the top Republican digital and data firms, and NRSC leadership and staff. They met in the High Line room on the third floor, whose glass walls provided a view of the city on one side and the Hudson River on the other.

“I think there were more blazers in The Standard those two days than any other period of the hotel’s existence,” said Matt Lira, the NRSC’s deputy executive director.
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The High Line summit was a table setter, a beginning. It did two things: it cleared away obstacles to greater cooperation among the GOP’s paid consultant class and between them and the NRSC, and it delivered a clear message to them that the NRSC was expecting the consultants to execute digital-savvy campaigns. But Lira, with the backing of NRSC executive director Rob Collins and political director Ward Baker, was going to do more than just ask. He was determined to hold the campaigns accountable.

So Lira assembled a team to do just that. In March, he hired Mindy Finn, a well-respected digital strategist who had worked on multiple presidential campaigns and also as an executive at Twitter’s D.C. offices. Finn’s sole responsibility was to create what she named the R.E.D.D. program, short for Republicans Excelling at Digital and Data.

Here is the REDD report 

The Iron Law of Emulation: Campaign Tech Edition

Previous posts have discussed the iron law of emulation: the tendency of both sides in a conflict to copy each other.

Ashley Parker writes at The New York Times:

The Republicans’ ground game and digital strategy in 2012 were disasters, bad enough to become a political punch line. The party was determined not to repeat those mistakes, and operatives were well on their way to overhauling its systems this election cycle when the Democrats announced their “Bannock Street project,” an ambitious voter-mobilization program.

Though the Republicans were already building a national ground game, they decided to leverage the Democrats’ $60 million get-out-the-vote effort to their own advantage. They devoured news reports about the project and scoured Federal Election Commission filings to learn as much as they could about how their rivals were structuring their turnout operations in battleground states.

“It was kind of a mirror image of what we were doing,” said Rob Collins, executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “It gave us the scope, it gave us the size, and it gave us the target, which was helpful.”

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Both sides have a tendency to overstate the role of the technological wizardry, especially after a lopsided election. “Frankly, it’s easier to say the other side had better computers than to say we had worse ideas,” said Sasha Issenberg, author of “The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns.”

But, he added, those tactics can make a critical difference in a close election — and keep an election closer for a party facing political headwinds.

“It appears that Bannock Street was successful in what they were trying to do,” said Mike Shields, chief of staff at the Republican National Committee. “The difference is we are now in this game, too, and they don’t have the game to themselves.”

At National Journal, Ron Fournier writes:

A review of the RNC's targeting operation (including a preelection sample of specific projections) suggests to me that the GOP has made significant advances on targeting and mobilizing voters. While the Democratic Party may still own the best ground game, GOP Chairman Reince Priebus has narrowed, if not closed, the tech gap.

A few Democrats saw this coming. "Our side has underestimated the GOP ground game," Democratic pollster Celinda Lake told me Tuesday morning. "Their electorate doesn't look like ours, so we don't recognize or respect what they're doing."