ICYMI: GOP Senate hopefuls adopt a high-risk strategy for November [POLITICO]

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POLITICO: GOP Senate hopefuls adopt a high-risk strategy for November
By Natalie Allison
July 8, 2022

Key Points:

• In many cases, facing their own fiercely competitive general election races, Republicans running this year are largely foregoing appeals to the center, instead doubling down on conservative positions — from opposing popular bipartisan reforms to celebrating the rollback of abortion rights.

• The stark difference in rhetoric and policy positions between those outgoing senators and the Republicans back home running for their seats also illustrates the deeply polarizing approach being taken by a new crop of GOP candidates. It’s a reflection of… the Trumpification of the party.

• Mehmet Oz, the celebrity doctor and television host who won Pennsylvania’s Republican Senate primary last month, has done a 180 from his past support of gun reform proposals like red flag laws – now vowing to “fight against federal gun control schemes.”

• Retiring Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) was one of the leading architects of an infrastructure bill that passed in November with some Republican support. Yet all but one of the GOP candidates in the Senate primary to succeed him bashed the plan. J.D. Vance, who won that race, at the time called the bill “a total disaster for our country.”

• It was the same story in North Carolina. Retiring GOP Sen. Richard Burr also backed the gun bill and infrastructure package. But Rep. Ted Budd (R-N.C.), the nominee to succeed him, opposed both measures in the House and called the infrastructure plan “a liberal trojan horse for a socialist agenda.”

• Oz and Budd’s decisions to remain firmly to the right are riskier in their closely divided states.

• In other top battlegrounds of 2022 where Republican candidates are up against Democratic incumbents — Nevada, Georgia, Arizona and New Hampshire — the GOP contenders are also orienting their positions to a right-wing audience.

• Adam Laxalt, the Republican Senate nominee in Nevada and the state’s former attorney general, has expressed opposition to both measures, as has Herschel Walker in Georgia.

• Several of the GOP standard-bearers have also embraced Trump’s lies about the 2020 election being rigged against him — a position that could repel some undecided voters in the general.

• By contrast, Democrats in many swing-state Senate races this year are trying to appeal to a wider swath of voters.

• In North Carolina, Democratic nominee Cheri Beasley on Thursday launched her second ad in recent months in which she described herself as someone committed to bipartisan solutions and willing to buck her own party. Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) and Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) have taken similar approaches, both releasing ads saying they were willing to take on their own party to fight rising consumer costs.

• States like Arizona and New Hampshire, where the Republican nominees will be decided in August and September primaries, respectively, don’t allow candidates much of an opportunity to ease away from a hyper-partisan message before the November election. While it’s common for candidates competing in a primary to take extreme positions on issues, said Chuck Coughlin, a Republican strategist in Arizona, failing to shift afterward could cost them.

• “You don’t have much time to be able to change your narrative,” Coughlin said. “That’s going to hurt some of these candidates who are so adherent to this right-wing philosophy or this populist philosophy — ‘I’m not going to brook any compromise.’ That’s not going to be helpful to a candidate in the general. Not out here.”

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