CRANBERRY TOWNSHIP, Pennsylvania — Tom Cotton knows what it’s like to have the media question his ability to defeat Democrats.
It was October 2014, and the national press were having a hard time coming to terms with numbers showing that his challenge to Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AR) was not the statistically tied race they had been expecting.
DOCTOR WHO CLEARED FETTERMAN FOR ‘FULL DUTY’ IN SENATE DONATED TO HIS CAMPAIGN
Then-Rep. Cotton, they wrote, had been dramatically outspent. A cash-flush Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee was swamping his state with money. They claimed he had been outsmarted in the technological game and outmanned in field staff. They even brought out team Obama for his race.
Polling at the time, most of it commissioned by legacy media outlets, showed a tied race for most of the year and a 2-point race in September and October. But hardly a journalist would mention this race without bringing up in the same sentence that his opponent was a Pryor, whose father, David, had held the seat before him. That had to mean something.
Privately, Democrats had hoped to limit their net Senate losses to five seats that year, which would have left them barely in control. This race was key to that hope.
But in the end, it wasn’t even close. Cotton won by a shocking 17 percentage points. His win guaranteed that Mitch McConnell would be the majority leader in the Senate.
Eight years later, Sen. Cotton is here in Pennsylvania, once again trying to pull his party over the finish line for a Senate majority. This time, he is not on the ballot — rather, he is on the road, helping Republican candidates running for the upper chamber.
His events with Dr. Mehmet Oz in western Pennsylvania began with a get-out-the-vote stop in this Allegheny County suburb, followed by a stop at an energy company and some fundraisers in the city. In between, he sat for an interview to discuss the race between Oz and Democratic Lt. Gov. John Fetterman. Fetterman led by double digits as recently as August, but the two are in a statistical tie today.
“Let’s see,” says Cotton, asked where he has been stumping. “There is Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Iowa, Nevada, Georgia, Colorado. I am in Ohio in two days, back to Pennsylvania again this week, then off to North Carolina next week.” He peels off the list of locations almost as quickly as Johnny Cash does in “I’ve Been Everywhere.”
The first thing he likes to do, he says, is talk to the voters and listen to them about what they are concerned about. “I always enjoy hearing what normal Americans across the country have to say, what issues are animating them, what’s driving them in their communities, their states, their regions,” he said.
Here in Pennsylvania, where Republicans hope to hold the seat being vacated by retiring Lehigh Valley Republican Sen. Pat Toomey, Cotton said the concerns voters here told him about echo what he has heard across the country. Their urgency and intensity have increased since he first started hitting the trail this cycle a year ago.
“The inflation issue, for instance, was already top of mind a year ago when Joe Biden and John Fetterman and other Democrats were saying it’s transitory,” he said. “It’s only that much more urgent today as inflation has continued to ravage families’ budgets.”
Concern about crime has also gone through the roof, said Cotton. “Especially in any state like Pennsylvania with one or more large metropolitan areas that are particularly affected by crime, especially like Philadelphia,” where the homicide rate has nearly doubled since 2019. In Pittsburgh, crime has also escalated ever since the 2020 summer of riots. Three people, two of them innocent bystanders, were gunned down in a city neighborhood last week near a known open-air drug market. “And, relatedly,” Cotton added, “our wide-open southern border, as the most recent tragic data has come in that shows we have lost over 107,000 Americans killed by drugs last year, and we’re up to 5 million illegal alien crossings as well.”
All of these issues, Cotton says, underline Joe Biden’s unpopularity, which began with the Afghanistan fiasco last year.
“I would note … that these urgent crises we face were all utterly foreseeable,” he said. “And yet Joe Biden and Democrats in Washington, and John Fetterman, who support the administration’s agenda, have done nothing to address them in the span of a year. They still care more about abortion or climate change or threats to democracy.” But most voters, he continued, “are worried about whether or not they can even make ends meet at the end of the month and whether they can take their kid to a ball game or to a park without worrying about crime. But the Democrats’ activist base and their intellectuals just don’t really care that much, and they’re not affected by those issues.”
Cotton also pointed out that Democrats aren’t campaigning on any of the legislation they have passed in the past two years.
“The reason they’re not campaigning on it is because it’s not popular, because it’s contributed to many of the concerns that normal Americans have,” he said. “Like, spending trillions of dollars that we don’t have as the economy is recovering caused inflation. Inflation is very unpopular. Democrats have nothing to say about it, so they just want to avoid the issue,” he said.
Here in Pennsylvania, Cotton says there are two big reasons why Oz has closed the gap against the sitting lieutenant governor, and they have little to do with Fetterman’s ill health.
“I feel very badly for John Fetterman’s stroke,” said Cotton. “I genuinely do. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, and I do wish him a full and speedy recovery. But John Fetterman’s health and his transparency about his health is the least of my concerns about him serving in the United States Senate. I’m much more concerned, for instance, that he has a record of letting violent criminals out of prison early, and his lack of discussion or offering any policy reforms on the opioid epidemic, inflation, and the border crisis.”
Cotton is off to Ohio next, where he will do a get-out-the-vote event for Republican nominee J.D. Vance in Columbus, and then back to Pennsylvania again. He says this midterm cycle has become an indictment on the Democrats because they have failed the simple questions voters ask themselves when they go to the polls: “Are they satisfied with the real purchasing power of their paychecks being lower than it was two years ago? With streets that are unsafe and that pose the risk of random crime, even murder, open-air drug markets, children being killed with fentanyl? An America that is increasingly looked upon with scorn and disrespect by our enemies in the world?”
The answer, Cotton said, is no, and you don’t need the polls to tell you that. You just need a conversation with voters.
“Most Americans are not satisfied with that state of affairs,” he said. “And if they want a check and balance on this radical ideological agenda in Washington — if they want to pump the brakes on the Biden agenda — the way to do that is to elect people like Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania and Republicans in the House and the Senate across the country.”
