The Republicans’ Remarkably Bad Midterm Campaigns
The New Yorker · Benjamin Wallace-Wells ·
Benjamin Wallace-Wells on the Iran war, the economy, Donald Trump’s dealings with Vladimir Putin, and Vivek Ramaswamy’s extremely offensive ad.
It is at least a little crazy how sharply politics have turned on the Republicans. Last week, prediction markets favored Democrats to win Senate races not just in North Carolina but in Ohio, which Trump won in 2024 by more than ten points, and in Alaska and Texas, each of which he won by thirteen points. Democrats are still underdogs in Kansas, which their party last represented in the Senate in 1939, and in Iowa, but they are drawing close. By Wednesday, when a headline on Axios read “Senate Republicans Fear Mississippi Is in Play,” things had started to feel a little surreal. The Republican predicament was summed up by an apparent A.I. prompt, mistakenly published on the website of Eric Pratt, a nominee for Congress in Minnesota: “The President is not popular, so all messaging should be focused on local politics and needs.”
On this point, most Republican candidates have seemed on message. A Times analysis found that more than ninety-nine per cent of G.O.P. ad spending is now going to spots that do not mention Trump. But even that strategy is backfiring. The campaign of Vivek Ramaswamy, who is running for governor in Vance’s home state of Ohio, paid for an ad in which the estranged mother of his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton, a doctor and the former director of the state health department, denounced her. The ad neglected to note that Acton had been removed from her mother’s care when she was twelve, after her stepfather was indicted on a charge of raping her. Several prominent Ohio Republicans, including Senator Jon Husted, who is up for reëlection, disavowed the ad; Vance dismissed their objections as “whining,” while Trump said that the ad had hit “pay dirt.”
A similar fissure has appeared in some Senate debates. In Minnesota, the G.O.P. nominee, Michele Tafoya, answered the opening question by referring to “a number of areas where I’m going to disagree with the President.” (She also called the killings in her state of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, by federal law-enforcement agents, “devastating.”) In Michigan, the Republican candidate, Mike Rogers, said, a bit testily, that the President’s high-profile tariffs on goods from Canada “were not well thought through.” In Maine, the longtime Republican incumbent, Susan Collins, bragged that she had voted against Trump more often than she’d voted against Joe Biden. Even the Alaska senator Dan Sullivan, who has been a reliable party-line vote for Trump, said that sometimes he will “forcefully oppose” things “in private.”
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