In the 2022 midterms, a number of far-right candidates cruised to primary victories with former President Donald Trump’s backing — only to blow key races with a general electorate who viewed them as too extreme.
And now, Republicans are nervously bracing for many of them to run again.
At least four of these candidates who ran, and lost, in 2022 are making it known that they’re interested in running again in 2024 — or have already announced bids. They’re testing the party’s commitment this cycle to emphasize “candidate quality” and offering Democrats a sliver of hope as they navigate a difficult Senate map and a narrow field of swing House races.
Jim Marchant, the failed GOP secretary of state nominee in Nevada, recently launched his campaign to challenge a Democratic Senate incumbent. Kari Lake, who narrowly lost her gubernatorial bid in Arizona last fall and continues to lose her court battles challenging the results, is on the verge of joining him in a Senate bid for 2024.
Many party leaders breathed a sigh of relief Thursday night when Doug Mastriano, a far-right state senator in Pennsylvania who decisively lost his race for governor last year, announced he would not be launching a Senate campaign.
But at the House level, Republicans Joe Kent in Washington and J.R. Majewski in Ohio — two MAGA-aligned candidates who hugged Trump tightly but fell short in districts Republicans were favored in — have already launched their next bids. Others may soon join.
All of these candidates put Trump’s false claims of a stolen election front and center in their campaigns, helping them get through contested primaries but putting them at a disadvantage with independents in the general election. Their defeats have led some party leaders to suggest they may take a more active role in the primary process.
Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, told NBC News in an interview last month that Republicans need to appeal to voters “beyond the Republican base” in order to pull off victories next fall — something he said will in part rely on campaigning on “the future, not looking at the rearview or the past.”
“Winning elections is about addition and multiplication, not subtraction and division,” he said. “And so that’s something that every candidate got to look in the mirror and say, 'Am I a candidate that can first bring the Republican base together and also extend an appeal to independent voters?' That’s the recipe.”
Recently, Lake met with Daines and six other Republican senators to discuss her potential Senate bid, a national Republican strategist said. Daines said he has asked prospective candidates to share with him a plan for how they can win both a primary and a general election.
Daines, who endorsed Trump last month, believes the former president will be helpful with whom he backs or does not support in primaries. But last year, it was Trump who helped elevate many of these candidates through contested primaries with his sought-after endorsement.
Trump’s campaign did not answer requests for comment about whether he would be supportive of some of these same candidates this time around.
Terry Sullivan, who was campaign manager for Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign, said that while many candidates do improve during a second run, there were “a lot of really crappy candidates last time.”
“And if you’re just a fundamentally flawed candidate the first time you run, you’re still a fundamentally flawed candidate the second time you run,” he said, adding, “You’ve always had the weirdo candidates that run no matter what. And the difference now is, they’re kind of given more oxygen than they ever did in the past, and they’re actually winning primaries.”
If anything, what has Republicans most concerned about some of these candidates is, as Daines put it, an insistence on relitigating the 2020 (and perhaps 2022) elections.
That seems unlikely to change. For example, Lake on Tuesday announced she would petition the Supreme Court to hear her latest case seeking to invalidate her 2022 defeat at the hands of Katie Hobbs, then-Democratic Arizona secretary of state.
“I think if Kari could recalibrate her message away from the stolen election claims, she’s got enough raw political talent to make that race competitive,” the national Republican strategist said.
But that was not transferable to other 2022 losers seeking Senate seats this cycle.
