The closing days of the 2022 midterms have offered Republican political action committees flush with cash an opportunity too good to pass up: owning the libs by making them spend money in otherwise reliably blue seats.
“We are able to play in districts that Biden won by 10-plus points, showing just how fucked Democrats are in two weeks,” a GOP strategist told The Daily Beast.
It’s not without strategic advantage. Republicans insist that upset voters in places like New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Oregon—normally reliably liberal strongholds—are trending in their direction. Inflation, gas prices, and crime have been the driving forces behind multi-million dollar ad buys in districts where total outside spending used to not even cross into six figures, a sign of the GOP’s bullishness and last-minute embrace of expanding the map in the midterms.
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In some races, those issues, particularly crime, have proven to be the party’s main bet to lure back mostly suburban white voters they may have lost in 2020 when former President Donald Trump was at the top of the ticket.
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a bit of mischief at play. Because some of these blue targets come down to what one Republican operative described as “fuck you money” or investments in a district made just to stretch Democrats thin.
A notable case study would be the increasingly tight re-election fight for Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-NY)—who also happens to be chairman of the House Democrats’ chief fundraising arm—where a $4 million surge in PAC spending from the House Leadership Fund, an outside group aligned with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), necessitated a $600,000 cash infusion from Maloney’s own committee.
“If you put $7 million behind a ham-and-cheese sandwich, that sandwich would be competitive in this district,” Maloney, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, recently told The New York Times.
Democratic operatives are still taking the spending spree seriously.
“I think it’s three pieces,” a Democratic strategist told The Daily Beast, also requesting anonymity because they are not authorized to speak on behalf of their campaigns. “Make us play defense where we don’t want to play defense. Expand the map, because you can pick up one or two of these things on the off-chance that it makes Kevin McCarthy look like a genius.”
The third part?
“The last piece is, there are some crazies who think that these seats are actually viable,” the operative added.
For one upstate New York GOP strategist, things haven’t felt this good since the heyday of former Gov. George Pataki, the last Republican to win statewide back in 2002.
“It’s not so much that we anticipate a red wave, it’s more a red-white-and-blue wave where you have independent, center-left Democrats, and common sense voters who just see the Democratic messaging as being too radical,” the New York Republican told The Daily Beast, listing off the usual suspects of inflation, crime, and immigration as top issues.
“They probably could’ve gotten to the finish line in more races if the economy was better,” he added.
Connecticut, a state that voted for President Biden by 20 points, has also seen an uptick in outside spending.
The 5th Congressional District in the western part of the state has drawn in the most outside spending, totalling $7.2 million so far, an astronomical increase from just shy of $68,000 in 2020. Despite the district’s average partisan lean remaining the same after redistricting—still favoring Democrats by an average of 3 points—second term Democratic Rep. Jahana Hayes has become the prime target for Connecticut’s GOP this cycle.
Her opponent, Republican former state Sen. George Logan, was the only Black GOP lawmaker in the state legislature during his time in office,
“Outside group activity is off the charts—not just here but in federal contests,” Ericka Franklin Fowler, a Wesleyan University professor and director of the Wesleyan Media Project, a leading ad tracker, told Connecticut Public Radio.
“I don’t remember the last time, if ever, that the Hartford media market made the top list of media markets.”
In Oregon, the 6th Congressional District has become the hot race for outside spending despite being seen as an easy win for Democrats in a newly drawn seat with precincts that voted for Biden by 13 points in 2020. Republican nominee Mike Erickson—an anti-abortion candidate recently endorsed by ex-Democrat Tulsi Gabbard who allegedly took a woman to an ATM to pay for her abortion in 2001—has been harping on crime as a top issue.
“They wanna take back our streets from the criminals and the liberal politicians who let this happen,” Erickson said of voters in the Beaver State, which he described in a Fox News interview as “a welcome mat to drug users, criminals, homeless camps, and all the crime that goes with it.”
Despite the abortion scandal going back more than a decade in his career, Erickson is running ahead of Democrat Andrea Salinas by an average of more than 4 points, according to FiveThirtyEight’s tracker.
If the GOP consulting class’ bullishness is grounded in anything beyond the tightening polls, it’s not necessarily bearing out in the early vote yet—at least in New York—where Democrats are the only group of registered voters who have increased their turnout rate in early absentee voting, with this cycle outpacing the otherwise high turnout 2018 and even 2020 cycles.
In-person early voting began Oct. 29 in New York.
“Look, in midterm elections, Republicans historically outperform their enrollment disadvantage in New York,” Siena College pollster Steve Greenberg told The Daily Beast. “The question is by how much.”
Greenberg also pointed to the Maloney race as an example.
“They’re going after Maloney in the 17th with a lot of spending,” Greenberg continued. “Congresswoman Stefanik thinks Republicans could win 15 of the 26 seats in New York. That seems illogical to me, but we don’t play these games on paper, we play them on the field of elections.”
The McCarthy PAC has taken a bold approach in the closing weeks, but they think there are enough Democratic incumbents slumping in their reelection fights to justify moving into bluer areas.
“Of the 21 incumbents we’re spending against, we[’ve] got 14 at 47 percent or less,” Dan Coston, president of the McCarthy-aligned PAC, told Politico in a podcast interview Thursday. “We think if you’re at 47 percent or less at this point in the cycle, you’re a sitting duck. Most of them are 45 percent or less. So we feel good about that.”
The Democratic strategist also acknowledged that even in races where the GOP candidate loses but cuts the margin to well below expectations, there’s an upside for McCarthy in his long running, torchered quest to become House Speaker.
“I don’t want to give him too much credit,” the strategist said, “but I don’t think anyone can really confidently say with 100 percent certainty Kevin McCarthy will be the Republican Speaker.”
“So I think he does need to do some of these things,” they continued, “not only to show off his fundraising capacity—which has always been really good, frankly—but also to demonstrate that he’s smart enough and can make plays in places where people don’t expect him to.”
