Republican Senate Recruitment Shows Big GOP Problem

Eric Hovde (R-WI)

This past week, Eric Hovde announced that he would be pursuing the Republican nomination for the US Senate from the state of Wisconsin.  Hovde is making his second run for the nomination; he first ran for the US Senate in 2012, losing the nomination to former Gov. Tommy Thompson, who at the time was viewed as the better candidate.  This cycle, Hovde is likely to get the nomination, or at least is the favorite of the NRSC, against Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D), who is running for a third term.  Wisconsin is home to one of the most important swing elections on a presidential level this cycle.  But it's worth noting something about Hovde that it's hard to ignore: he's kind of an (on-paper) lousy candidate.

To start with, Hovde is a loser, having lost his contest for the US Senate in 2012.  This isn't necessarily a dealbreaker.  Everyone from Maria Cantwell to Mitt Romney to Jon Ossoff to Susan Collins-all of them are sitting US Senators who had lost their previous election.  Some, like Jeanne Shaheen, John Kennedy, & John Thune, lost previous races for the US Senate.  But Hovde has a lot of other problems.  Unlike all of these people (save Ossoff & Collins), he's never held political office beforehand, and he didn't even get the nomination in 2012.  He's also not well-known to Wisconsin voters.  In fact, he has only cursory connections to Wisconsin.  Though he does own a home in Madison, he also has properties in California & DC, and voted absentee from California in the 2023 Wisconsin Supreme Court race.  His kickoff was hardly impressive-he didn't even bother to mention the words "Wisconsin" in his commercial, something DSCC Vice Chair Sen. Tina Smith was quick to point out.  Even in a commercial, he came across as stiff, ill-at-ease, and wooden (watch the commercial and tell me I'm wrong).  Hovde feels like a third-tier candidate, one who is being courted after other options (i.e. better options like Rep. Mike Gallagher) passed on the race.

This is the problem the NRSC has run into all year.  For starters, Hovde isn't alone in having tangential connections to the state he's running for the Senate in-it's a common refrain.  In Pennsylvania, Dave McCormick has basically lived most of his life in Connecticut, only moving to Pennsylvania for political campaigns.  In Montana, Tim Sheehy recently moved there from Minnesota, and Nevada Republican Sam Brown ran for office in Texas before trying his hand in the Silver State.  Even someone with credible connections to his state, such as Rep. Mike Rogers, have spent most of his retirement in Florida despite years previously representing Michigan.  This is a strange counter to the Democrats, people like Jon Tester, Bob Casey, & Tammy Baldwin, whose ties go back to birth in the states they represent.

Also, a lot of the Republicans are relying upon previous losers to run this year.  Hovde, McCormick, & Brown are joined by Kari Lake (AZ), Bernie Moreno (OH), & Rep. Peter Meijer (MI) as candidates who lost their last election.  Looking down the line, the best recruit for the Republicans is Gov. Larry Hogan (MD), who is running in a state so blue he has no hope of actually winning.

The Democrats are not having this problem.  They have three sitting members of Congress running for swing seats: Elissa Slotkin (MI), Colin Allred (TX), & Ruben Gallego (AZ).  Their biggest recruiting gap might've been Florida, but even there they're running Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, a former congresswoman who beat an incumbent to get her seat before being ousted in a Trump district.  Most of the major Republicans this year (like Doug Ducey of Arizona or Stacy Garrity of Pennsylvania) declined runs for the Senate.

This is a serious problem for the Republicans partially because of why they are relying upon these candidates: they are trying to fill a gap in fundraising.  We talked about this yesterday, but while NRSC fundraising has been on-par with the DSCC, the Democrats have much more cash-on-hand, and because they have prolific fundraisers like Tester, Slotkin, Casey, & Sherrod Brown (OH) running this year, the Democrats will head into this election with a heavy advantage.  The Republicans are relying upon wealthy self-funders like Hovde & McCormick to pick up a good chunk of their bill, though it's not at all clear if they'll do that.  We saw what happened when candidates couldn't fundraise properly in 2022, when candidates like JD Vance had to take tens of millions of dollars from national organizations to make up his fundraising gap against Democrat Tim Ryan.  Vance won, but in the process the NRSC was cash-strapped and unable to pay more in places like Pennsylvania, Nevada, & Arizona (all states they ended up losing).

The other problem here is that the Republican bench is evaporating.  The Democrats have done a great job in the past decade of building up left-of-middle Democrats with moderate swing state profiles.  This has helped them promote figures like Katie Hobbs, John Fetterman, & Jacky Rosen to higher office, and it's the plan they're hoping to mirror with people like Slotkin & Allred.  But the Republicans, thanks to Donald Trump demanding fealty above all else, has driven out more moderate or mainstream Republicans, and they are left with inexperienced candidates.  This cost Republicans greatly in 2018, 2020, & 2022.  That they are going with the same playbook of MAGA losers and inexperienced self-funders in 2024 makes me wonder if it's less about them thinking this is a good strategy, and more about them not having any other ideas of how to win in blue/purple states in the Trump Era.