The Political Notebook 10.13.23
Will Lake really get the GOP U.S. Senate nomination by default? Looks like No Labels will have a Republican as its presidential nominee.
The sorry state of the Republican Party in Arizona is illustrated by this: there is not even a decent rumor of a pragmatic conservative candidate willing to challenge Kari Lake in the primary for the GOP nomination for U.S. Senate.
The U.S. Senate, for gawd’s sake. In a still Republican leaning state. And the nomination appears likely to be Lake’s by default.
There’s nothing about Lake as a candidate that should scare off all opposition. She is the most overhyped political figure, at least in Arizona, I’ve ever seen.
She didn’t run away with the Republican nomination for governor in 2022. She beat Karrin Taylor Robson by just 40,000 votes. And Matt Salmon, who was largely running in the same lane as Robson, got 31,000 votes even though he had withdrawn from the race.
Robson spent a lot of money. But, otherwise, she wasn’t a strong candidate. She had a weak public political persona. And she was strategically cross-eyed. She claimed to be the more authentic supporter of Donald Trump, while counting on nevertheless still receiving the anti-Trump and traditional Republican vote. Given that Trump endorsed Lake, it was a strategy that never made any sense.
Robson gave no one any reason to be enthusiastic about her. Nevertheless, she was competitive.
Nothing that has happened since makes Lake a more formidable opponent in 2024. She’s nothing more than a Trump mini-me, just better at it than others.
Her only political asset is that she can dazzle a MAGA crowd. That, and Trump’s endorsement, would certainly make her the frontrunner in a competitive race against a pragmatic conservative for the GOP nomination. But not an inevitable winner.
To win, a pragmatic conservative might have to expand the GOP primary electorate – increasing turnout among non-MAGA Republicans and independents. Expanding turnout is one of the most difficult things to do in politics. But stopping a Trump surrogate from getting the GOP nomination for U.S. Senate might be a cause that could at least provide a chance of accomplishing it.
If a pragmatic conservative were to best Lake for the nomination, he or she would be a prohibitive favorite to win the general – in either a three-way race with independent Kyrsten Sinema and Democrat Ruben Gallego, or a two-way race against Gallego.
That would seem a prize big enough to be worth an uphill race against Lake for the nomination. And making the pragmatic conservative case against Lake in a Republican primary should be reward enough for someone.
The No Labels organization says that it will field a bipartisan ticket if there is a rerun of a Joe Biden and Donald Trump matchup in 2024, but only if it believes that its ticket can actually win.
This has alarmed Democrats, who think such a development would mostly advantage Trump. There’s an organized effort to shame No Labels into abandoning the project and to deny it ballot access in states such as Arizona.
Unlike nearly all of my brothers and sisters in the commentariat, I think a bipartisan unity ticket such as contemplated by No Labels would have a legitimate shot at winning in 2024. I understand that history is against that, big time. However, the electorate’s disgust with both parties and in particular with the prospect of a rematch of dueling octogenarians, one clearly in decline and the other a dangerous demagogue, might make this a history-making moment.
Beyond that, I always thought, if the No Labels ticket came up short, who it would end up hurting most would depend on who was at the top of the ticket. If a Republican was the presidential nominee, it wasn’t clear to me that the unity ticket would drain more votes from Biden.
Former Sen. Joe Lieberman, the founding chairman of No Labels, shares some internal polling supporting that instinct in a Wall Street Journal column.
In the abstract, a bipartisan ticket pulls equally from both of the two major parties. Digging deeper, No Labels polled the results of having a Republican at the top of its ticket in eight battleground states, including Arizona. With a Republican as the presidential nominee, the No Labels ticket pulled more votes from Trump than Biden in seven of them, including Arizona.
A lot would depend on what specific candidates No Labels ends up fielding. But the Lieberman column seems to suggest, quite strongly, that its ticket would have a Republican as the presidential nominee and a Democrat as the vice presidential running mate.
This is not intended as a full-throated endorsement of the No Labels effort. The obscure funding of the enterprise is troubling and its selection of its ticket, if it comes to that, is likely to be a backroom affair.
There is, however, reason to doubt and challenge some of the conventional wisdom about what it is doing and the likely consequences.
Reach Robb at robtrobb@gmail.com.