Sheehy’s 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 — at Trump’s 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.
Rosendale formally announced his Montana Senate campaign to unseat Sen. Jon Tester (D) the next day — only to be blindsided hours later by Trump’s endorsement of Sheehy. Mike Berg, the NRSC’s communications director, promptly posted a meme of dancing pallbearers carrying a coffin inscribed with Rosendale’s campaign logo and the words, “Feb. 9, 2024-February 9, 2024.”
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.
Daines’s predecessor, former NRSC chair Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) liked to say that voters didn’t want “Washington to pick who the candidates are.” Daines has bet the 2024 cycle on the opposite proposition. Rosendale abandoned his Senate campaign after only a week.
“People are sick and tired of losing,” Daines said Tuesday, in an interview with The Washington Post explaining the strategy. “I have always said filing day is more important than Election Day.”
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.).
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 “legitimate rape” rarely leads to pregnancy and Delaware got a nominee who campaigned with the slogan, “I am not a witch.”
The 2022 elections proved a spectacular continuation of that losing theme — with a hapless Georgia candidate, Herschel Walker, who had held a gun to his wife’s head; a struggling Pennsylvania TV doctor nominee in Mehmet Oz; and a mysterious Arizona contender, Blake Masters, who praised the Unabomber as an underrated “subversive thinker.” Even before Election Day, McConnell warned, “candidate quality has a lot to do with the outcome.”
McConnell now proudly praises Daines’s accomplishments. “I think we’ve got a good shot at having the majority,” McConnell said in a recent interview. “Daines is very much in my group of people who feel that you need a quality candidate.”
Democrats still argue that the 2024 Republican field remains problematic. Several of the GOP candidates — in Wisconsin, Montana and Pennsylvania, to name three — are vulnerable to attack…
This article was originally published by a www.washingtonpost.com . Read the Original article here. .
