The Republican Party runs Washington but has struggled to police itself, with senior GOP leaders working overtime — but largely underground — to convince suspicious grassroots voters in West Virginia to reject Senate candidate Don Blankenship.
Blankenship lost Tuesday’s closely watched Republican primary, finishing a distant third, but not before putting a scare into Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and President Trump, who issued an eleventh hour plea to West Virginia Republicans via Twitter to rebuff the coal baron.
Blankenship served prison time for his role in an explosion that killed 29 coal miners, and top Republicans feared his nomination would hand another term to otherwise vulnerable Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va. McConnell and his allies were nonetheless forced to be discrete in their bid to derail the flawed and provocative candidate, fearing the Republican base would revolt if they openly campaigned against him.
McConnell’s super PAC, Senate Leadership Fund, was put on the shelf, along with the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the official Senate GOP campaign arm.
Party opposition to Blankenship was instead channeled through a nondescript super PAC called Mountain Families PAC. It’s a stark shift from how McConnell handled worrisome primaries in 2014. In that midterm, he successfully — and proudly — used the Senate Leadership Fund like a hammer to enforce party discipline and eject flawed primary candidates.
“Senate Leadership Fund equals McConnell. In 2014 he was above water and now he’s underwater by 20 to 30 points,” said a Republican strategist active in primary campaigns, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Overall it was a good night for Senate Republicans, as the party crowned three nominees expected to wage strong campaigns against endangered incumbent Democrats running for re-election in red states that went overwhelmingly for Trump a little less than two years ago.
In Indiana, businessman Mike Braun defeated two sitting Republican congressmen and will challenge Democratic Sen. Joe Donnelly; and in Ohio, Rep. Jim Renacci, recruited and backed by the president, dispatched upstart businessman Mike Gibbons and advances to face Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown. And, in West Virginia, Republicans are confident that the newly minted nominee, state attorney general Patrick Morrisey, will fare well against Manchin.
“We look forward to standing shoulder to shoulder with Patrick Morrisey to defeat Joe Manchin this November,” SLF President Steven Law said in a statement. It was the group’s first public comments on the primary in several weeks.
Defending a slim 51-49 majority and chastened by a Democratic upset in a special election for Senate in Alabama in December, McConnell and SLF made a tactical adjustment heading into the spring primaries, most notably in West Virginia, knowledgeable GOP sources confirmed.
In Alabama, SLF and the NRSC publicly went to bat for then-incumbent Sen. Luther Strange, pounding his primary challengers with millions of dollars in attack ads. Unlike 2014, it didn’t work. A complicated mix of issues led to the outcome, but among them, Republican primary voters said, was a resentment of McConnell for intervening in the race.
So they ousted Strange — after Trump endorsed him and campaigned for him, elevating retired judge Roy Moore in his place. After Moore faced credible accusations of sexual misconduct from years ago, Senate Republicans were compelled to disown him. He lost to now-Sen. Doug Jones, D-Ala., giving Democrats their first Senate win in Alabama in a quarter century.
To avoid a repeat of Alabama, Republican leaders purposely said little about Blankenship after he surged to an early lead over Morrisey and runner-up Rep. Evan Jenkins in the primary. All groups with official connections to the party were kept on ice, as Mountain Families PAC did the work of breaking down Blankenship.
Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., the NRSC chairman, even suggested the party would support the provocative candidate if he won the primary.
“I believe whoever the Republican nominee is, we can win,” he said in late April during an interview with the Washington Examiner editorial board.
Republican operatives active in the West Virginia Senate race credited Trump’s tweet for helping to move voters away from Blankenship. But there was also griping about the president’s hesitance to exert his influence as the leader of the Republican Party to manage problematic primaries.
Republican insiders say that McConnell is limited in what he can accomplish in primaries — both because his approval rating among the Republican grassroots has plummeted since 2014, when President Barack Obama was in office, and because Trump simply carries more credibility with the base (his approval rating with GOP voters is near 90 percent.)
But to more effectively stamp out problem candidates, Trump and his team have to get involved early and more forcefully, Republicans say. The president did that in Ohio, when he recruited Renacci and made it clear all the way through that the congressman was his emissary.
Picking a single horse early in the West Virginia campaign, rather than a late tweet recommending that voters choose either Jenkins or Morrisey, might have precluded Blankenship’s initial surge and kept the primary under control from Day One.
“You cannot unite a party without the leader,” a Republican operative said. “Most political operations in a White House try to unite party behind a single candidate, hoping for minimal resistance. Hopefully it works but even when it doesn’t there’s no question about where the party loyalists are in the race.”
