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On Deck: 2022

What happened to the Republicans' campaign money? Senator Rick Scott is in charge of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, but under his leadership, the money became depleted so fast that the NRSC has had to cut back on its ads. But this Senator has a history that does not reflect very well on him.

Rick Scott's Fraud Settlement Resurfaces as Senate GOP Runs Low on Cash
Critics of Senator Rick Scott, a Florida Republican who chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), resurfaced a past Medicare fraud settlement from his tenure as CEO of a hospital corporation, as his committee reportedly is running short on cash and pulling ads in support of GOP Senate candidates with less than three months until the midterm election.

The NRSC is the primary organization working to raise funds and support Republican candidates in the party's bid to take back the majority in the upper chamber of Congress. Scott has led the committee since January 2021, but The Washington Post reported on Friday that campaign advisers are asking "where all the money went and to demand an audit of the committee's finances" as the NRSC pulls ads and runs low on funds.

Many on Twitter pointed to Scott's past Medicare fraud scandal during his time as CEO of Columbia/HCA. When Scott was deposed in 2000 amid the investigation, he pleaded the Fifth Amendment 75 times.

Columbia/HCA later reached a settlement with the Justice Department of $840 million in 2000, and another settlement of $881 million in 2002, with the combined fines totaling $1.7 billion. At the time, this was the record health care fraud settlement, although it has since been surpassed, according to PolitiFact.
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noting
Gary Legum on Twitter: "Rick Scott oversaw the biggest Medicare fraud in history, so the GOP in its genius put him in charge of its national campaign fund and now is wondering where all its money went. Incredible. (link)" / Twitter
noting
GOP spending under fire as Senate hopefuls seek rescue - The Washington Post - "A cash crunch at campaigns and the NRSC set off a panic as GOP candidates emerged from bruising primaries playing catch-up in polls and advertising"

What Sen. Scott did to the NRSC seems suspiciously close to what he did to Florida Medicare.
 
Why Rick Scott is facing so many criticisms from his own party - "Rick Scott's leadership of the National Republican Senatorial Committee was already controversial within his own party. It's vastly worse now."
When Sen. Rick Scott sought the chairmanship of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, no one was especially surprised when he ran unopposed. The elevation seemed to make sense for everyone involved.

...
The first sign of trouble came literally in the first week of the new Congress. Senate Republican leaders implored their members to be responsible and not oppose the certification of the 2020 election results. Eight GOP senators ignored the calls — including Scott.

In the months that followed, under Scott’s leadership, the National Republican Senatorial Committee set out to recruit their top choices in several key 2022 contests. Those efforts failed.

Soon after, as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell declared that his conference would not present a policy blueprint ahead of the midterm elections, Florida’s junior senator did the opposite — unveiling a radical vision that Democrats continue to treat as a pinata.

Scott nevertheless used NRSC resources to promote himself and his unpopular plan, fueling chatter that “NRSC” stood for the “National Rick Scott Committee.”
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Then noting Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) draws criticism for actions as Republican Senate campaign chief - The Washington Post
From that article,
Sen. Rick Scott of Florida has been publicly dressed down by Senate 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.
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What blatant corruption. One might expect that he might not want to rip off his fellow Republican Senators, but he has done exactly that.

How a Record Cash Haul Vanished for Senate Republicans - The New York Times - "The campaign arm of Senate Republicans had collected $181.5 million by the end of July — but spent 95 percent of it. A big investment in digital, and hyperaggressive tactics, have not paid off."
 
Republicans Downplay Trump and Abortion on Their Sites Before Midterms - The New York Times - "At least 10 Republican candidates in competitive races have updated their websites to minimize their ties to the former president or to adjust their stances on abortion."
For months, the campaign website for Adam Laxalt, the Republican Senate nominee in Nevada, greeted visitors with a huge banner exalting his endorsement from former President Donald J. Trump in all capital letters. Now, that information is nowhere on his home page.

Representative Ted Budd, the Republican Senate nominee in North Carolina, also made Mr. Trump’s endorsement far less prominent on his website last month. And Blake Masters, the party’s Senate nominee in Arizona, took down a false claim that the 2020 election had been stolen from Mr. Trump and softened his calls for tough abortion restrictions.

... Mr. Masters’s overhaul, in which he deleted, among other elements, a call for an anti-abortion constitutional amendment that would give fetuses the same rights as infants and adults, was first reported by NBC News and CNN. Other news outlets have identified editing by several House candidates, including Yesli Vega in Virginia and Barbara Kirkmeyer in Colorado, Bo Hines in North Carolina and Tom Barrett in Michigan.
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Noting
Republicans in key races scrap online references to Trump, abortion - The Washington Post - "Attempts by GOP candidates in competitive contests to pivot away from these issues have emboldened Democrats to mount an aggressive offense"
Yesli Vega, a Republican running for the U.S. House in a competitive Virginia district, no longer mentions her connection to former president Donald Trump in the bio section at the top of her Twitter page.

Colorado state Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer, also running in a battleground House race, has stopped promoting language defending the “Sanctity of Life” on her campaign website. Now, there is no mention of abortion at all, a review of the website showed.
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Also
Republican candidates are changing how they handle abortion after Roe v. Wade - "At least three candidates have edited their campaign websites to remove references to strict abortion bans — a reflection of growing voter backlash to the overturning of Roe v. Wade."
Arizona U.S. Senate candidate Blake Masters, who is trailing incumbent Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly in recent polling, removed language from his website indicating support for a “federal personhood law” that would treat abortion as murder.

Tom Barrett, running in Michigan’s 7th Congressional District against Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin, removed language saying he would “always work to protect life from conception.”

And in North Carolina’s 13th Congressional District, since winning the May 17 primary, Republican Bo Hines has removed his “life and family” issues section from his website, which previously linked to a fundraising page touting his belief “that life begins at conception and that we must protect the rights of the unborn.”

Masters’ website now suggests he supports a law banning third-trimester abortions, which are already allowed in only a handful of states. Barrett’s website describes him as “consistently pro-life.” Hines’ website has no reference to abortion.
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Insider: Top Michigan Democrats may not need to debate GOP opponents, lawmaker suggests (paywalled)

Good to see Republicans running scared, trying to imply that they are not hardline Trumpies and fetus worshippers.

It's common for politicians to seem more centrist after winning primaries, but this takes such seeming centrism to a whole new level.

More broadly, this seems like a problem with partisan primaries. Seems to me that nonpartisan ones would be better, because candidates will have to get the votes of the same voters as in the general elections.
 
lpetrich said:
More broadly, this seems like a problem with partisan primaries. Seems to me that nonpartisan ones would be better, because candidates will have to get the votes of the same voters as in the general elections.
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I agree. But that is a double-edged sword. It would harm the extremists on the Left too who are using partisan primaries to primary mainstream/moderate Democrats.
 
Back to the NYT.
Anna Greenberg, a Democratic pollster who is working with several campaigns, including Mr. Masters’s opponent, Senator Mark Kelly, said that “the magnitude of the changes and the volume” among Republicans were well beyond what she had seen in past election cycles.

...
National Democrats have been quick to try to capitalize on these apparent attempts by Republicans to suppress their less popular stances. David Bergstein, a spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said in a statement: “Republican Senate candidates won’t be able to run away from their records. The truth is they’ve made their positions clear, and in many cases we have them on video tape.”

Other differences have been more subtle. Mr. Budd, for example, has made no changes to a page that outlines his views on abortion, but he has moved the link to that page lower on his website’s list of his positions; it was second as of July 23, but is now fifth.

J.D. Vance, the Republican Senate nominee in Ohio, once listed abortion sixth on his “issues” page, but now lists it 10th.
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Why Abortion Has Become a Centerpiece of Democratic TV Ads in 2022 - The New York Times
“Rarely has an issue been handed on a silver platter to Democrats that is so clear-cut,” said Anna Greenberg, a Democratic pollster working with multiple 2022 campaigns. “It took an election that was going to be mostly about inflation and immigration and made it also about abortion.”

...
“I clearly believe abortion is going to matter because I think it cuts across demographics and it really does get into many voters, including Trump voters and independents, and their concept of personal freedom,” said J.B. Poersch, the president of Senate Majority PAC, a Democratic super political action committee that has already funded abortion commercials in multiple states.

...
On the airwaves, though, few Republicans have had an answer. One notable exception has come in the New Mexico governor’s race; Mark Ronchetti, the Republican nominee to take on Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, has been under fire over his stance on abortion.

“I’m personally pro-life, but I believe we can all come together on a policy that reflects our shared values,” Mr. Ronchetti said in a campaign spot that detailed his position on the issue.
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Good that the Democrats are fighting so strongly on this one, instead of being cringing cowards, whimpering that they want abortion to be rare as well as safe and legal.
 
2022 Special Elections and how they turned out for the Republican Party. I've used Ballotpedia's numbers and 538's partisanship estimates for the districts, and I note that all these elections were after the Supreme Court's revoking of Roe vs. Wade.

DistrictDateD-R(538)Diff
NE-01Jun 28-5.4-17+12
MN-01Aug 9-4.2-14+10
NY-19Aug 23+2.3-1+3
NY-23Aug 23-6.5-23+16
AK-01Aug 16+3.0-15+18

538 is now rating both the House and the Senate as toss-ups, with plenty of scatter in both directions for the two chambers -- 538 uses a "Monte Carlo" simulation model, with repeated runs with random numbers, and the site displays some of its simulation results in its diagrams.

Democrats Sense a Shift in the Political Winds, but It May Not Be Enough - The New York Times - abortion and Trump as liabilities for the Republican Party. Enough to overcome Republican gerrymandering?

Trump and Abortion Shift Narrative for Midterm Elections - The New York Times - "The G.O.P. is still favored in the fall House races, but Trump and abortion are scrambling the picture in ways that distress Republican insiders."
One day, it might be Mitch McConnell, the top Republican in the Senate, complaining about the “quality” of his party’s candidates while his deputies point fingers at Senator Rick Scott of Florida, who runs the G.O.P.’s Senate campaign arm.

Another day, it might be Donald Trump calling for McConnell’s ouster and giving McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, bizarre nicknames like “Coco.”

On days that end in “y,” you might find Republicans on television complaining about Trump’s hold over the party ...
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Opinion | Women Are So Fired Up to Vote, I’ve Never Seen Anything Like It - The New York Times
I’ve watched Americans in recent years acclimate to some very grim realities. Especially since the ascension of Donald Trump, numerous tragedies and extreme policies have been met with little political consequence: schools targeted by mass murderers, immigrants treated as subhuman and autocratic regimes around the globe affirmed as allies. While Mr. Trump did fail in his re-election bid, a swing of just over 20,000 votes in the three states with the narrowest margins would have produced a win for him, and Democrats hold razor-thin majorities in the House and the Senate.
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But then the Supreme Court gave a big part of the Republican base what it wanted.

Author Tom Bonier then looked at who was registering to vote in Kansas before that referendum.
Sixty-nine percent of those new registrants were women. In the six months before Dobbs, women outnumbered men by a three-point margin among new voter registrations. After Dobbs, that gender gap skyrocketed to 40 points. Women were engaged politically in a way that lacked any known precedent.

Repeating the Kansas analysis across several other states, a clear pattern emerged. Nowhere were the results as stark as they were there, but no other state was facing the issue with the immediacy of an August vote on a constitutional amendment. What my team and I did find was large surges in women registering to vote relative to men, when comparing the period before June 24 and after.

The pattern was clearest in states where abortion access was most at risk, and where the electoral stakes for abortion rights this November were the highest. The states with the biggest surges in women registering post-Dobbs were deep red Kansas and Idaho, with Louisiana emerging among the top five states. Key battleground states also showed large increases, including Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Ohio, which are all facing statewide races in which the fate of abortion access could be decided in November.
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Peter Thiel rebuffs Mitch McConnell over Senate rescue in Arizona - The Washington Post - "The Senate minority leader and the billionaire venture capitalist each say the other should be subsidizing Blake Masters in the final months of his campaign"
After J.D. Vance won the Republican primary for Senate in Ohio, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) called Peter Thiel, the billionaire investor who had pumped $15 million into a super PAC backing Vance, to congratulate him but also to make a request: Since McConnell’s resources were limited, the senator said, would Thiel continue to finance Vance through the general election?

Thiel demurred, according to a person familiar with the May exchange who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions.
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Then mentioning other conversations between PT and MMC.
They also illustrate McConnell’s vexed relationship with candidates elevated by former president Donald Trump and donors, such as Thiel, sympathetic to Trump’s worldview.
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Great fun to watch this squabble.
 
lpetrich said:
What happened to the Republicans' campaign money? Senator Rick Scott is in charge of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, but under his leadership, the money became depleted so fast that the NRSC has had to cut back on its ads. But this Senator has a history that does not reflect very well on him.

Rick Scott's Fraud Settlement Resurfaces as Senate GOP Runs Low on Cash
Critics of Senator Rick Scott, a Florida Republican who chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), resurfaced a past Medicare fraud settlement from his tenure as CEO of a hospital corporation, as his committee reportedly is running short on cash and pulling ads in support of GOP Senate candidates with less than three months until the midterm election.

The NRSC is the primary organization working to raise funds and support Republican candidates in the party's bid to take back the majority in the upper chamber of Congress. Scott has led the committee since January 2021, but The Washington Post reported on Friday that campaign advisers are asking "where all the money went and to demand an audit of the committee's finances" as the NRSC pulls ads and runs low on funds.

Many on Twitter pointed to Scott's past Medicare fraud scandal during his time as CEO of Columbia/HCA. When Scott was deposed in 2000 amid the investigation, he pleaded the Fifth Amendment 75 times.

Columbia/HCA later reached a settlement with the Justice Department of $840 million in 2000, and another settlement of $881 million in 2002, with the combined fines totaling $1.7 billion. At the time, this was the record health care fraud settlement, although it has since been surpassed, according to PolitiFact.
Click to expand...
noting
Gary Legum on Twitter: "Rick Scott oversaw the biggest Medicare fraud in history, so the GOP in its genius put him in charge of its national campaign fund and now is wondering where all its money went. Incredible. (link)" / Twitter
noting
GOP spending under fire as Senate hopefuls seek rescue - The Washington Post - "A cash crunch at campaigns and the NRSC set off a panic as GOP candidates emerged from bruising primaries playing catch-up in polls and advertising"

What Sen. Scott did to the NRSC seems suspiciously close to what he did to Florida Medicare.
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Donors are sending money to Bonespurs instead of sending it to the party.
 
In Michigan, there has been a battle over adding a voter initiative to protect women's rights to choose to the November ballot. The Michigan supreme court has just struck down the GOP's efforts to prevent that from being on the ballot. There is also an initiative to protect voters' rights.

This means it will energize angry women voter turnout. Not good news for the GOP.
 
Drama in Kansas. Right winged ultra conservative Dennis Pyle has just gotten enough signatures to run for governor as an independent. Kansas Republicans are furious with Pyle. Whose scorched Earth politics may well split the GOP vote and result in re-election of present Democratic Governor Laura Kelly.

Nice golem you all created GOP!
 
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