With GOP Senate candidates significantly ahead in West Virginia and Montana, tied in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and surging to within the margin of error in Arizona and Nevada, chances loom large for Republican control, and even domination, of the U.S. Senate for as much as a decade—but only if Republican candidates can successfully stop Democrats from doing what they did in 2022: Construct a last-minute “breakwater” in key states that throws back the GOP Red Wave.
The term “breakwater” comes from a RealClear study of the 2022 election by James Campbell, a professor of political science at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, who showed how, in six to eight states, Democrats had created a barrier just high enough to hold back the Republican trend by leveraging mail-in ballots, mobilizing voters, and injecting huge amounts of ad money in the final weeks of the campaign.
The most potent of those steps was the last. Unprepared Republicans faced a firestorm of attack ads that made them defensive and took attention off the real issue of the campaign—the far-left voting records of Democratic Senate candidates, who, in exchange for not having to face a well-financed left-wing primary challenge, had agreed to vote in lockstep with progressives. This Democratic vulnerability — Trump has called it “the corrupt bargain”—was a dark money deal in which congressional Democrats, held hostage by the left, routinely put the liberal progressive agenda ahead of the views and wishes of their constituents.
But this vulnerability and the whole issue of the Democratic party’s takeover by the far left is one that D.C.-based consultants have steadfastly resisted exploiting. Trained in the Karl Rove tradition of avoiding any philosophical focus and never emphasizing the all-important conservative-vs-liberal comparisons, they prefer instead the role of omniscient campaign adviser who ingeniously finds some personal attack point in the opposition research files with which they can dazzle the political world and get some coverage from the political reporters that they so assiduously cultivate. Though the result here usually is far from felicitous as voters find off-putting the mean-spirited ads and attention is steered away from far more salient left-vs- right issues, ensuring that races are lost to starkly left-wing Democrats even in heavily red states.
The problem here is one of culture. Many of these adviser typesare former Hill staffers who entered the political consulting business with little experience, let alone expertise in public relations or advertising, minimal campaign experience, and no track record of electoral success. They survive by excelling at the Washington game of cultivating their patrons in Senate leadership, getting media mentions by criticizing other Republicans — including their own candidates or Donald Trump for their own failures — and arranging hit pieces with friendly journalists on those who question their practices and tactics. After the 2022 election, for example — which ended with the consultant class spending $40 million in Georgia but failing to stop the election of two decidedly left-wing Democrats — Republican Senator Rick Scott faced such attacks after criticizing the consultants’ methods and fee schedules. Like the GOP Senate leadership who favor them, these consultants are often accused of caring more about their hold on power and fees than winning GOP Senate seats. (Indeed, the Republican leadership under Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is again being accused of shortchanging Republicans in various states only because they fear that they will not support them for leadership positions.)
The good news, however, is the break from all of this led by one conservative group and two Republican senatorial candidates. Their efforts are providing a much-needed blueprint against Democrats’ attempts to hide their extremism with the usual smokescreen of attack ads against their opponents.
For example, Senate candidates Bernie Moreno (R-OH), Eric Hovde (R-WI), and Tim Sheehy (R-MT) have been using terms like “extremist” and “liberal” to make the broader ideological case against their opponents. Sheehy, in particular, has directly confronted smear attacks by enlisting local ranchers in Montana to go on camera and criticize his opponent, Jon Tester, for accepting the defamatory help of national Democrats.
Especially effective has been a group called Frontier for Freedom Action—the same group that, in early September, triggered the anti-Catholic bigotry charge now dogging Harris and other Democrat candidates with a series of TV spots on that subject that ran in five Senate races. This set off a cascade of follow-up charges on the issue by Newt Gingrich, Donald Trump, and J.D. Vance and former Vatican Ambassador James Nicholson. All the is culminated last week with the political hit Kamala Harris took for not attending the iconic Al Smith dinner run by the Catholic Archdiocese of New York.
Now the group is countering this year’s Democrat attempt at constructing a breakwater to the Red Wave with hard-hitting TV and radio ads that although primarily featured in the Arizona Senate race that are a template for all other GOP senate candidate facing a similar flood of attack ads arranged by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and substantially financed by anti-American billionaire George Soros. The TV spot criticizes Democrat candidate Ruben Gallego for his “dark money alliance and corrupt political bargain” with a “Schumer-Soros smear machine” sponsoring millions in attack ads against Gallego’s Republican opponent, Kari Lake and then labels him “extremist liberal Gallego” who wants to become the “puppet senator ofSchumer and Soros.”
Trying to shame the media into doing its job, the TV spot also calls out the Arizona press for giving Gallego a “free ride” and features a stark screenshot of the front page of state’s main paper—The Arizona Republic— while demanding journalists press Gallego on his far-left voting record in Congress and his refusal to disavow Schumer and Soros as well as his “record of anti-Catholic bigotry.”
These ads have been successful doing the basic messaging and achieving the objective the GOP consultant class has never understood. The elements of which are:
1. Inoculate the voters: This new approach warns voters that Democrat ads are coming as part of the hundreds of millions of dollars being spent by lavishly rich progressives and special interest groups trying to save the Democrat candidate from having the public focus his or her own extremist left-wing voting record.
2. Putting Schumer and Soros on the screen. Making them the issue. And then, placing the Democratic candidate in the middle of them. The charge is that Schumer and Soros and the far left are holding the Democrats hostage since he would face a heavily financed left-wing primary challenge if he didn’t make a corrupt bargain and dark money alliance with them and agree to become their “puppet senator.”
3. Constructing a narrative that lets voters understand why the incumbents they usually vote for are not working for them but the far left: Because voters find it hard to believe that an incumbent they know and have been voting for is actually an extremist liberal, the ad explains to them why their own Senate candidate will actually vote against their own and their state’s interest since in a way they have no choice.
4. Putting the Democrats’ voting record on the screen. This one is easy:
5. Asking why Democrats won’t disavow their support from extremists like Schumer with his threats to the Supreme Court and attempts to abolish voter ID
6. Or why won’t Democrat candidates disavow Soros with sponsorship of lawless prosecutors that have cost so many lives?
7. Bring up the failures to respond to the anti-Catholic bigotry problem of the Democrat Party. All the key states have millions of Catholic voters and high numbers of Hispanics who have a historic recollection of Latin American government attacks on their religion.
8. Using the ‘Liberal’ and the ‘Extremist’ word.
The ads use the ‘E’ and ‘L’ words –words that are to American voters probably the worst in the political lexicon.
9. Staying on the offense. The ads show why candidates shouldn’t let attack ads and the hurt feelings of their family and friends force them into defensive ads that only tend to make voters suspicious a candidate is hiding something. Fred Thompson used to say the toughest part of running for office is the time spent on the phone explaining to your mom why the attacks against you aren’t true. After getting elected, candidates can run gauzy TV spots showing them making breakfast for the kids or playing with the family dog. They will also have six years in the Senate to show what pleasant people they really are. But the Schumer-Soros ads show how GOP candidates can keep the other side from controlling their campaign by making them defensive. This doesn’t mean that positive ads, particularly on issue positions, don’t have their place. Only that a principal focus must be the extremist liberal voting record,and the dark money deals with Schumer and Soros.
“Please steal our ad,” George Landrith president of Frontiers of Freedom Action has said to Republican Senate candidates about the approach his group has taken.
Good advice. Because If Republican candidates opt to do so into the final weeks of the 2024 cycle and make the “extremist liberal” label synonymous with the Democrat Party brand, they could smash apart the Schumer-Soros breakwater. And, in letting the Red Wave roll, they may find that their majorities in the House and Senate in January are far greater than ever expected.
Aaron Flanigan is the pen name of a writer in Washington, D.C.
