Bad candidates and stolen-election fever might well have cost the GOP control of the Senate in both the 2020 and 2022 elections. The party may have its best shot to take it back in the next election, in 2024, and yet those problems are suddenly looming large again.
Fresh signals in recent days suggest that two of the GOP’s most flawed 2022 candidates are lining up Senate bids.
In Pennsylvania, The Washington Post reports, former gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano is expected to run. And in Arizona, fellow failed gubernatorial candidate and election-truther Kari Lake is taking meetings and saying things that suggest she, too, could get in.
The GOP’s dance with Lake is telling. CNN reported Monday that during a meeting with GOP leaders in Washington in February, officials tried to nudge Lake away from making her would-be campaign about her false claims of voter fraud. But when asked about a potential run on far-right One America News this week, Lake made clear she’s not exactly heeding that advice.
“I am seriously considering a run for Senate,” Lake said, adding: “I’m so dangerous to the status quo that they’re willing to steal the election to stop me. I’m not letting them get away with that.”
Lake added: “All the polling shows that I would win.”
This is false; in fact, the limited public polling we have thus far doesn’t show Lake leading in the general election and suggests she might be less well-positioned than other Republicans.
All of this tracks with what happened in the 2022 election. Indeed, both Lake and Mastriano could lay significant claim to being among the GOP’s most costly nominees.
The data in Pennsylvania is unambiguous. Mastriano lost by 15 points to now-Gov. Josh Shapiro (D), even as the GOP’s other statewide candidate, Senate hopeful Mehmet Oz, lost by just five to John Fetterman. (And Oz was by no means a particularly strong candidate.)
In no other swing state did the Republican Party’s Senate or gubernatorial nominee underperform the 2020 presidential results as much as Mastriano did. His 15-point loss to Shapiro compares to Donald Trump’s one-point loss to Joe Biden just two years prior. The only state that rivals Pennsylvania is Kansas, which featured a moderate incumbent Democratic governor.
Lake’s underperformance isn’t as evident from the 2020 comparison; while Trump lost the state by 0.3 points, she lost by just 0.6 points. But when you dig deeper into the numbers, it’s clear that her candidacy cost the GOP a more winnable seat.
The party had good turnout in the state, but a series of flawed statewide nominees pushed Republican-leaning voters into the Democratic camp. So while state Treasurer Kimberly Yee (R) was winning by double digits, every other statewide GOP candidate for major office lost.
Lake came closer than two other nominees — Senate candidate Blake Masters and secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem — but post-election data suggest her alienation of GOP-leaning voters cost the party dearly. In all-important Maricopa County, a study showed she ceded about 5 percent of voters who otherwise voted mostly Republican, compared to less than 1 percent of mostly Democratic voters who voted for her. Given Lake’s narrow loss, that was likely decisive.
None of which suggests Lake can’t win in 2024. Indeed, she was close in 2022, and with Sen. Kyrsten Sinema switching from Democrat to independent, the 2024 race could be unpredictable. If Sinema runs and takes more votes from members of her former party than the GOP does, the door would swing open wider to Lake or whomever the GOP nominee is.
And Arizona and Pennsylvania might not even be strictly necessary for the GOP. That’s because the map is favorable; each of the eight seats most likely to flip in 2024 is held by a Democrat, and Republicans need to gain just one or two, depending on the results of the presidential race, since the vice president breaks a tie in the Senate. Republicans could win the Senate simply by flipping seats in red states like Montana, Ohio and West Virginia.
But the point stands that Lake’s election-denialism and her strength in a GOP primary would be a headache for a party that has seen how much that can cost it. Indeed, Republicans shifted away from such things after the 2022 election, with Lake being by far the most pronounced exception.
As much as anything, she and Mastriano running and winning primary voters in key races by continuing to push such a message would make turning the page on what has been an ugly chapter that much more difficult.