A former Navy SEAL sneaked into the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas this month for a clandestine meeting with Donald Trump aimed at reshaping the U.S. Senate battleground.<\/p>\n
As Trump watched President Biden on television \u2014 stumbling through a Feb. 8 news conference over concerns about his age \u2014 Montana Senate candidate Tim Sheehy, an Afghan war veteran with a Bronze Star and Purple Heart, gave the former president his best pitch for an endorsement over Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.), according to people familiar with the meeting.<\/p>\n
Sheehy\u2019s hole card was the benefactor who got him through the door, Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Daines had been maneuvering behind the scenes for months to avoid any bloody intraparty primaries like the one potentially brewing in his home state. Twice previously, Daines brought Sheehy to meet with Trump \u2014 at Trump\u2019s Bedminster, N.J., golf club and at a rally in South Dakota. Countless times, Daines had texted or spoken with Trump about the importance of a Sheehy endorsement.<\/p>\n
Rosendale formally announced his Montana Senate campaign to unseat Sen. Jon Tester (D) the next day \u2014 only to be blindsided hours later by Trump\u2019s endorsement of Sheehy. Mike Berg, the NRSC\u2019s communications director, promptly posted a meme of dancing pallbearers carrying a coffin inscribed with Rosendale\u2019s campaign logo and the words, \u201cFeb. 9, 2024-February 9, 2024.\u201d<\/p>\n
The moment capped a banner year for Daines and his revitalized NRSC, effectively reviving the power of party bosses to shape Republican primary battles long before voters ever get a say.<\/p>\n
Daines\u2019s predecessor, former NRSC chair Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) liked to say that voters didn\u2019t want \u201cWashington to pick who the candidates are.\u201d Daines has bet the 2024 cycle on the opposite proposition. Rosendale abandoned his Senate campaign after only a week.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople are sick and tired of losing,\u201d Daines said Tuesday, in an interview with The Washington Post explaining the strategy. \u201cI have always said filing day is more important than Election Day.\u201d<\/p>\n
Just over a year in the job, Daines has all but cleared Republican fields in Indiana, Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania and Montana for his chosen candidates. He has recruited former Maryland governor Larry Hogan (R) to put that state in play. He has discouraged multiple candidates, including former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels (R), from getting involved in primary contests, while appealing for muted infighting states like Michigan and Ohio. Most importantly, he has formed a close relationship with Trump, bridging the still-festering divide between the former president and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).<\/p>\n
Brutal primary battles and problematic candidates have been the bane of Republican Senate leaders since the first inklings of the tea party in 2010 and 2012, when Missouri Republicans nominated a Senate candidate who said \u201clegitimate rape\u201d rarely leads to pregnancy and Delaware got a nominee who campaigned with the slogan, \u201cI am not a witch.\u201d<\/p>\n
The 2022 elections proved a spectacular continuation of that losing theme \u2014 with a hapless Georgia candidate, Herschel Walker, who had held a gun to his wife\u2019s head; a struggling Pennsylvania TV doctor nominee in Mehmet Oz; and a mysterious Arizona contender, Blake Masters, who praised the Unabomber as an underrated \u201csubversive thinker.\u201d Even before Election Day, McConnell warned, \u201ccandidate quality has a lot to do with the outcome.\u201d<\/p>\n
McConnell now proudly praises Daines\u2019s accomplishments. \u201cI think we\u2019ve got a good shot at having the majority,\u201d McConnell said in a recent interview. \u201cDaines is very much in my group of people who feel that you need a quality candidate.\u201d<\/p>\n
Democrats still argue that the 2024 Republican field remains problematic. Several of the GOP candidates \u2014 in Wisconsin, Montana and Pennsylvania, to name three \u2014 are vulnerable to attack because they have lived and worked out of state.<\/p>\n
\u201cSenate Republicans have recruited a roster of unvetted, carpetbagging losers with enough baggage to sink a ship,\u201d said David Bergstein, communications director for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. \u201cBy the time voters learn the truth about their disqualifying flaws, they won\u2019t be able to get elected dogcatcher.\u201d<\/p>\n
Voter concern about new abortion restrictions remains a Republican problem as well. Daines has also embraced some candidates who lost in 2022, including Kari Lake, who ran for governor in Arizona while denying the legitimacy of the 2020 election and is still appealing her 2022 loss in court.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is not a single candidate that we don\u2019t have lock, stock and barrel on abortion,\u201d said J.B. Poersch, president of the Senate Majority PAC, the top Democratic funder of television ads. \u201cYou can give them credit to trying to avoid records that they already have. But Daines and McConnell weren\u2019t able to recruit candidates who didn\u2019t already have a record on this stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n
Daines has responded by issuing clear marching orders to his own candidates on the issue of abortion \u2014 insisting that they all embrace exceptions for rape, incest and life of the mother to any legal limits on the procedure \u2014 and calling on the party to collectively back in vitro fertilization procedures after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos were children and that people can be held liable for destroying them.<\/p>\n
Daines said his party will be ready for the Democratic attacks.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey are going to lie about our opposition to abortion any way they can,\u201d he said. \u201cWe are not going to sit back and let them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Such tough talk has cheered Republican donors and leaders, who are daring to believe again that the Senate majority is in their grasp after two disappointing election cycles. Daines, who spent years as an executive at Procter and Gamble, has taken to pitching donors in private settings on the argument that this is the best chance Republicans will have for many more years to win seats.<\/p>\n
With the retirement of Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), Democrats are almost sure to lose at least one seat in their 51-seat majority and many of the party\u2019s incumbents face reelection in red and purple states this cycle. The Republican presidential nominee is also a lock to win Montana and Ohio in November, a tough headwind for Tester and Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), who are both seeking reelection. Democratic-held seats in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada and Michigan will also be in play, as Democrats work to gain footing in only two states held by Republicans, Texas and Florida.<\/p>\n
Steven Law \u2014 a McConnell ally who runs the Senate Leadership Fund, the largest super PAC supporting GOP Senate candidates \u2014 said he joked with GOP strategist Karl Rove in 2022 about how many times they found themselves thinking voters would have to \u201chold their nose\u201d to vote Republican. This time he says, the NRSC has established an entirely different playing field.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have seen just a consistent workmanlike focus in getting us in the best position to win as possible,\u201d Law said.<\/p>\n
Much of Daines\u2019s work has been out of public view. He worked to discourage Daniels from running for Senate in Indiana against Rep. Jim Banks (R), worried that the battle would expose disunity in race for a safe red seat. Daines also came out hard against former Michigan congressman Peter Meijer when he entered the race against Daines\u2019s chosen Senate candidate, former congressman Mike J. Rogers (R)<\/p>\n
Meijer continues to run, but Rogers is seen as the favorite in that state\u2019s primary. Daines has also not tried to block a contested primary in Ohio, but has implored the candidates there to avoid the scorched earth negativity that wounded, but did not derail, the party\u2019s nominee in 2022, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio).<\/p>\n
Perhaps the biggest coup for the NRSC was the recruitment of Hogan, who declined similar offers of support in 2022. Over Christmas break, Daines\u2019s chief of staff, Maryland native Darin Thacker, wrote a personal appeal for Hogan to run for the open seat in the state, which prompted a quick response from Hogan asking for a meeting, according to people familiar with the exchange.<\/p>\n
Daines then commissioned polling in January that showed Hogan with a clear path to victory in the heavily Democratic state. Trump is not expected to weigh in on the Maryland primary, though there has been no deal brokered between the two camps, said a person familiar with the discussions. Hogan, a longtime critic of Trump, announced his campaign this month.<\/p>\n
Daines\u2019s ability to work with the former president has also been a key part of the job.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe realizes that Trump\u2019s a force,\u201d Sen Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a close Trump ally, said. \u201cSteve is really smart \u2014 he\u2019s played all the moving parts well.\u201d<\/p>\n
Daines traveled to Mar-a-Lago in February 2023 for an obligatory thumbs-up photo with the former president, and became the first member of Senate leadership to endorse Trump\u2019s presidential campaign months later. Before the Iowa caucuses, Daines worked to get his colleagues to come on board Trump\u2019s campaign. Six Senate Republicans did so in the first weeks of January.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is an affinity between the two men,\u201d said one Republican strategist familiar with the Trump relationship. \u201cThe president respects Senator Daines immensely, and Senator Daines is not all pomp and circumstance. He is just very straightforward. He is a western state U.S. senator.\u201d<\/p>\n
Daines has also managed the relationship with McConnell, a change from 2022 when Scott was in open war with the Senate\u2019s Republican leader. The result is a Senate caucus that has been generally united. Daines declines all questions about whether he would be interested in continuing in Senate leadership after November, when McConnell, 82, may step back from his role as leader.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy sole focus is making sure we are having a discussion about a future majority leader,\u201d Daines said.<\/p>\n
Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) said Daines showed he was able to recruit quality candidates, dissuade less compelling candidates and \u201cmanage the Trump factor\u201d all at once in the Senate race in his home state of Montana.<\/p>\n
\u201cAny one of these things could burn most people,\u201d Cramer said.<\/p>\n
Democrats, in the meantime, have not backed away from Montana, which may be the party\u2019s last stand in their fight to hold onto Senate control. Millions of advertising dollars on both sides are expected to flood into the state later this year, though Democrats expect to have more money to influence voters.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe resource gap is something that concerns me,\u201d Daines admits.<\/p>\n
Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) said he believes Rosendale dropping out \u201cdoesn\u2019t change anything\u201d about his race.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re literally going to do the same thing they\u2019ve done the past three [cycles],\u201d Tester said. \u201cThey try to make me into something I\u2019m not so they can run against that person because they can\u2019t beat who I am.\u201d<\/p>\n
Paul Kane contributed to this report.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
A former Navy SEAL sneaked into the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas this month for a clandestine meeting with Donald Trump aimed at reshaping the U.S. Senate battleground. As Trump watched President Biden on television \u2014 stumbling through a Feb. 8 news conference over concerns about his age \u2014 Montana Senate candidate Tim Sheehy, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1554,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1553"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1553\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}