Six months ago, Monica Wehby was a rising star. Now she’s an also-ran, and the election hasn’t even happened yet.
After releasing one of the most celebrated TV ads of this cycle and snagging a decisive primary win, the Oregon Republican Senate nominee disappeared from the national political scene.
Wehby is one of a host of enormously overhyped candidates in this year’s midterm elections. Now that candidates have entered the home stretches of their races, some of the cycle’s biggest busts are on display from Oregon to Ohio.
Things looked much different back in April. Wehby snagged the national political spotlight when she released a moving ad about performing tricky surgery that saved the life of a premature baby girl.
The ad won universal praise: a National Review headline asked if it was the “best GOP political ad ever” and the Washington Post named it one of the best spots so far. Wehby drew warm praise from the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Sen. Jerry Moran of Kansas, when she went on to win the primary.
“Democrats are now on defense in Oregon,” Moran said upon her win, dubbing her an “exciting candidate.”
That’s not how it turned out. Incumbent Sen. Jeff Merkley leads Wehby by more than 13 percentage points in the RealClearPolitics polling average, and no national political observers think the race is competitive. Wehby is likely to fade from the public consciousness soon after November, another victim of the hype machine.
She’s not alone. Ed FitzGerald, the Cuyahoga County executive and Ohio Democratic gubernatorial nominee, has also seen a bleak contrast between national media and party leaders’ expectations and electoral reality.
Back in May 2013, a reporter with the Northeast Ohio Media Group wrote that FitzGerald “could be the party’s strongest
gubernatorial candidate in at least 16 years — maybe more.” That same month, The Fix blog at the Washington Post listed FitzGerald’s race as one of its top 15 gubernatorial contests, saying he had “ginned up Democratic enthusiasm.”
In February, Democratic Governors Association spokesman Danny Kanner said FitzGerald would have the resources he needed to be competitive and that the race would “be determined in the final eight or nine weeks of the campaign.”
It didn’t work out that way. The last four public polls — taken from Sept. 9 to Oct. 1 — show Republican incumbent Gov. John Kasich with cushy double-digit leads. RealClearPolitics shows him leading by a whopping 22-point average.
And FitzGerald’s campaign has faced a host of struggles, from fundraising flops to a bizarre story about the time he was found in a parked car with a woman other than his wife at 4:30 in the morning.
Now, just two years after President Obama won Ohio by more than 100,000 votes, FitzGerald is poised to face an embarrassing statewide loss by a hefty margin, while Kasich will likely emerge as a Republican hero and potential presidential contender in 2016.
Other candidacies took longer to go south but emerged from September in seemingly inexorable slides. Terri Lynn Land, the Michigan Republican Senate nominee, had a bit of a moment in the beginning of October when Breitbart News called attention to research by Republican pollster Wenzel Strategies showing her race was within the margin of error.
“The race remains a dead heat despite the millions being spent on false attacks on Terri Lynn Land by Gary Peters’ allies, including the radical billionaire Tom Steyer,” said Heather Swift, a spokeswoman for Land.
But “dead heat” is a bit of a stretch. It wouldn’t have been a stretch back in April, when the RealClearPolitics polling average showed the two candidates essentially tied. But since then Peters’ lead has steadily widened, and it’s now at 9 points.
The NRSC recently pulled out of the state. And even if that’s because other groups promised to make up for the committee’s absence, as the Land campaign claimed, things still look bleak for her.
Then there’s John Foust, the Democratic candidate tasked with flipping the House seat that retiring Republican Rep. Frank Wolf is vacating.
If he wins, it will be huge for Democrats — not just because it’s a chance for them to cut their House losses this cycle, but because Foust could block the rise of Barbara Comstock, a member of the Virginia House of Delegates who has deep Washington connections and good fundraising skills.
That race isn’t over, but Foust’s team got some bad news Oct. 9, when Roll Call reported that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee had canceled nearly $3 million in TV ads for their candidate.
So Wehby may be dispirited, but at least she’s not alone: This election cycle has seen plenty of rising stars set to end their races with whimpers instead of bangs.
