Republican groups dedicated to restoring the party’s majority in Congress are wasting no time using President Joe Biden’s much-criticized handling of the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan to undercut Democrats running for Congress.
The National Republican Congressional Committee is targeting House Democrats running for reelection in suburban swing districts, including some who defeated incumbent Republicans in 2018 on the strength of their national security pedigrees. This includes Democratic Reps. Andy Kim of New Jersey, Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, and Sharice Davids of Kansas.
The House GOP campaign arm is using what many political and foreign policy observers are referring to as Biden’s “botched” management of the U.S. pullout from Afghanistan to make a broader argument the president and his Democratic allies in Congress are incompetent leaders whose policies put American national security at risk while causing runaway inflation, rising crime, and breakdown of law and order at the southern border.
Congressional Leadership Fund, the super PAC aligned with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California, echoed the NRCC’s messaging.
“What happened in Afghanistan is the result of failed leadership from Joe Biden and Elissa Slotkin, who backed Biden’s plan even though she knew the disastrous consequences his policy would bring,” Calvin Moore, a spokesman for Congressional Leadership Fund, said in a statement.
AFGHANISTAN DEBACLE SHOWS FOREIGN POLICY SPLIT AMONG GOP 2024 CONTENDERS
Slotkin, 45, is a veteran of the CIA and the Defense Department who worked under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Four years ago, she ousted an incumbent Republican in the 8th Congressional District rooted in suburban Detroit, using her national security bona fides to present herself as a pragmatic Democrat. Trump won her district last November by less than 1 percentage point.
A spokesman for Slotkin did not respond to an email requesting a comment. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee declined to comment for this story.
But Democrats generally accused Republicans of playing politics, noting they had little to say about withdrawing from Afghanistan when former President Donald Trump was driving the policy and negotiating with the Taliban, the terrorist group that provided a haven for the plotters of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Republicans say supporting the pullout is not the same as botching the pullout.
As Taliban forces steamrolled the Afghan army and captured the country, Biden was forced to deploy thousands of more troops to evacuate the U.S. Embassy in Kabul and defend the airport as Americans, Afghans who risked their lives to support the United States, and others in danger of execution by the Taliban boarded planes to safety. The devastating images, compared to the 1975 fall of Saigon when the U.S. was chased out of Vietnam, have alarmed U.S. allies.
Historical trends suggest Republicans were already in a good position to regain the House and Senate, given the Democratic Party only has a thin five-seat majority in the House and a 50-50 split in the Senate, with the Democratic majority made possible only by Vice President Kamala Harris’s tiebreaking vote. An enduring loss of voter confidence in Biden’s leadership brought on by dissatisfaction with the U.S. exit from Afghanistan could compound the Democrats’ existing political challenges.
As groups work to help Republicans recapture the House majority, GOP organizations with the same mission for the Senate moved swiftly to turn the devastating events surrounding the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan policy into an albatross for Democrats on the north end of the Capitol.
Senate Leadership Fund, the super PAC aligned with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, issued a press release Monday arguing Rep. Tim Ryan, the Democrat running for an open Senate seat in Ohio, “owns Biden’s disastrous Afghanistan retreat.” Meanwhile, the National Republican Senatorial Committee highlighted that few congressional Democrats are defending Biden on this issue while charging the president abdicated responsibility for what went wrong.
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On Tuesday, the NRSC circulated a campaign video with scenes from the chaotic evacuation from Afghanistan and clips of Biden saying he is an experienced foreign policy professional and that the withdrawal from the South Asian nation would be orderly and safe.
“The Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely,” the president said in one clip, taken from his comments at a recent news conference.
In an address to the nation Monday, Biden said “the buck stops” with him in terms of responsibility for the drawdown of military troops in Afghanistan. Simultaneously, the president blamed the ousted Afghan government and Trump for negotiating a bad deal with the Taliban as he defended his leadership of the U.S. withdrawal.
