McConnell Willing to Defy Trump on Senate Races After Midterm Flops
(Bloomberg) -- Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said Monday he won’t simply back candidates aligned with Donald Trump after several of them flopped and cost Republicans the majority in 2022.
The Kentucky Republican’s decision to actively recruit candidates independent of Trump further cements his break with the former president, who is vying for the 2024 GOP nomination.
“We had to work with what we ended up with, and I think candidate quality cost us Arizona, Georgia and New Hampshire,” McConnell said of the 2022 election in an interview Monday at his office in the Capitol.
McConnell touted West Virginia Governor Jim Justice’s recent decision to run for Democrat Joe Manchin’s seat as a preview of what is to come in other battlegrounds.
“We’re gonna get good candidates, and we’ve already got one in West Virginia,” McConnell, who flew to the Mountain State in October to recruit Justice.
Besides West Virginia, McConnell said he’s focused on flipping Democratic seats in Montana and Ohio — all states Trump won twice handily — as well as Pennsylvania.
“We are sort of in a wait-and-see category” on other states, he said.
McConnell said he’s backing David McCormick in Pennsylvania, who lost last year’s primary to Trump-backed Mehmet Oz, an untested celebrity doctor who lost to John Fetterman.
Other Trump-aligned candidates — including Herschel Walker in Georgia, Blake Masters in Arizona and Don Bolduc in New Hampshire — had no history winning elections and underperformed other Republicans in their states.
McConnell said he and the Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with him, only intervened in two primaries last year — in Missouri and Alabama.
“I think we saved those two seats. But elsewhere, if a nominee had an endorsement of President Trump, they were very likely to be nominated,” McConnell said.
But even when the party lands a prized recruit like Justice, contentious primaries risk pitting various GOP factions against one another.
Justice will face off against Representative Alex Mooney, an outspoken conservative who defeated fellow Republican Representative David McKinley last year with Trump’s backing. Trump, who is vying for the GOP presidential nomination, hasn’t endorsed a candidate yet.
In Ohio, two Republicans — state Senator Matt Dolan, whose family owns the Cleveland Guardians baseball team, and Trump-aligned businessman Bernie Moreno — are facing off to run against Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown, a staple of the state’s political scene since 1974 who faces his toughest race yet, with others considering a run.
McConnell acknowledged the field of candidates in Ohio complicates that race. And he noted not all of Trump’s picks were bad, naming winners J.D. Vance of Ohio and Ted Budd of North Carolina.
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