Apr.22

electoral-vote.com

Dem 51

   

GOP 49

Republican Senate Candidates Have a Bad Week

Republicans often pick extremely wealthy (and frequently carpetbagging) candidates for the Senate. That saves the NRSC money, since the candidates are able and willing to spend tens of millions of their own dollars on the campaign. But this strategy sometimes comes back to bite them in the rear, especially when the candidate has various skeletons in their closet that come out or the candidate is caught lying or misleading voters. When the Republicans run House members or governors for the Senate, this doesn't happen as much because the candidates have already been vetted. But when they are new to politics, surprises happen. Consider these faux pas from just last week:

• Tim Sheehy (Montana): As we have noted, Sheehy visited Glacier National Park in Oct. 2015. He took his Colt .45 revolver with him in case he met a bear who was a Democrat. His Colt .45 revolver may or may not have fallen to the ground by accident and shot him in the arm. He did go to a local hospital and was treated for an injury he claimed was caused by the gun, which went off by accident, lodging a bullet in his arm. Law enforcement was called and he paid a $525 fine for discharging a firearm in a National Park.
  
  The Washington Post did some investigative reporting about this and confronted him with the findings. He now says that was all a lie and he took the bullet while in Afghanistan and it may have been from a friendly fire ricochet during a firefight. His new story is that the injury in 2015 was due to a fall while hiking. Sheehy now claims he made up the accidental shooting to protect his former platoonmates and he paid a fine for a discharge that never took place. In 2015, he lied to the officer the hospital called, which is a felony. The whole story is murky—except the part about Sheehy saying that he faked the incident and lied to the officer.
  
  Telling the honest truth is not Sheehy's strength. He has bragged about how he grew up in rural Minnesota. Actually, he grew up in a suburb of Minneapolis only 15 minutes from the center of the city. Now that has come out as well. Not a great week for Tim or his reputation as a truth teller.
  
  
• Eric Hovde (Wisconsin): Another rich carpetbagger running for the Senate is Eric Hovde in Wisconsin. He owns a bank in Utah but lives in California. His bank was recently sued because a senior living facility it owns in part apparently has problems with elder abuse, negligence, and wrongful death. Hovde argues that the bank is not responsible for managing a property it seized in a foreclosure in 2021. The other side is probably going to argue that 2021 was 3 years ago. If the bank wanted to keep the property as an investment, it should have put in place a manager who could run it properly and if it didn't want to be in the senior care business, it should have sold it long ago. The suit might not have been relevant to his Senate campaign had he not boasted that owning a senior care facility made him an expert in, well, senior care.
  
  Oops. There is more. Hovde has also said that residents of nursing homes have a five- or six-month life expectancy, so there is no need for them to vote. Until Senator Hovde introduces a bill to deprive nursing home residents of the right to vote, gets it through Congress, has the president sign it, and convinces the Supreme Court to say: "Yup, good point," they can still vote in Wisconsin, and may even do so in large numbers this year. Against Hovde.
  
  
• David McCormick (Pennsylvania): Connecticut resident David McCormick, who is challenging Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA), claimed that he grew up on a family farm in Pennsylvania. He said he grew up poor and his parents were teachers. The New York Times did some digging into his past and that's not exactly true. His family did own a farm in Bloomsburg, PA, but they weren't farmers. His father was president of what is now called Bloomsburg University and they lived in a large house on campus that the school provides to its president. His mother did use the farm—for her hobby of raising Arabian horses. So he certainly did not grow up poor. There is no rags-to-riches story here, as he portrays it. It is more upper-middle-class-to-riches, so he had a pretty good start in life. His folks were not dirt farmers at all. Maybe if he'd written a book called Pennsyltucky Elegy, he'd be able to get away with the phony blue-collar shtick, but he didn't.

There is a fourth rich Republican businessman running for the Senate this year: Bernie Moreno in Ohio. We didn't include his scandal about (apparently) signing up on an adult website looking for "Young guys to have fun with"—because that came out earlier than last week. Plus, we already wrote about it.

By November 6th or 7th, we'll have a pretty good idea of how the plan of running (out-of-state) rich businessmen for the Senate works. But even if all four go down, we don't think the Republicans will abandon the idea. Not having to pay for their campaigns is enormously valuable, and if they win, not having to tell them that cutting taxes for rich people is a priority smooths their transition into the Senate. (V)