The Senate Leadership Fund (SLF), a huge fundraising organization affiliated with Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), is a major fund-raising organization affiliated with Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), and is backed by Sen. Ted Cruz, McConnell's biggest critic in the Senate Republican Conference. (Texas) and Sen. Rick. Scott (Florida).
Conservatives have complained that Mr. McConnell has too much control over Senate Republicans' fundraising, and that Mr. Cruz, a longtime critic of Mr. He is expected to be significantly outnumbered by his opponent, Texas Congressman Colin Allred, and his allies.
Some Republican strategists also believe that the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), run by Chairman Steve Daines (Montana), who is a member of Mr. McConnell's leadership team, is targeting incumbents like Mr. Cruz and Mr. Scott. They question whether they are doing enough to protect them.
During this election cycle, the NRSC has been laser-focused on taking down vulnerable Democrats like Sen. Jon Tester (Montana) and Sen. Sherrod Brown (Ohio); They are shifting money to Texas and Florida to put pressure on Mr. Cruz and the Florida senator. Scott.
Last week, Stephen Roe, McConnell's former chief of staff and CEO of the Senate Leadership Fund and One Nation, two major fundraising groups that work with Senate Republican leaders, said: He told the Wall Street Journal he wasn't worried about Cruz or Scott losing.
And he swore: “If things get tough, we’ll be there for them.”
But that doesn't give Mr. Cruz and Mr. Scott much comfort. They are currently the target of a multi-million dollar TV advertising buyout in Texas and Florida. The goal is to encourage Democratic donors to funnel more money into the two Republican-leaning states.
“It has been well known for more than a decade that McConnell has used the SLF to reward allies and punish conservatives since its inception, but President Trump's most powerful allies “That has never been more evident than this year, when two Americans endorsed the SLF.” Sens. Rick Scott and Ted Cruz will have to fight for re-election on their own, conservative strategists say. spoke.
A second Republican strategist said McConnell likes to remind senators how much the SLF helped them on the campaign trail, a subtle message to colleagues to align on specific issues. He said he was sending. Both strategists spoke freely on condition of anonymity.
McConnell offered a harsh reminder of how big a role the group played in the 2018 election when Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) proposed legislation last year that would limit corporate political contributions. .
He told Republican senators at Tuesday's luncheon that they were “center-right” senators who supported Hawley's bill and read out a list of senators who had received significant support from the SLF, according to CNN coverage of the debate. He warned that he would face a “coming” from .
McConnell told The Hill in a sit-down interview in his office in February that he doesn't plan on picking favorites when deciding which candidates to support in an election year. He says his calculations are driven by gaining and maintaining a Republican majority in the Senate.
McConnell was also asked whether the SLF and One Nation should play a bigger role in the Maryland Senate race, in which McConnell personally endorsed popular former Gov. Larry Hogan (R). He said he does not control the spending priorities of these groups.
But many Senate Republicans and strategists say Mr. McConnell exerts significant influence over spending decisions by expressing his preferences while fully meeting campaign finance law requirements. .
Mr. McConnell has raised more than $1 billion for SLF since the group's inception, and Mr. Scott cited Mr. McConnell's huge fundraising contributions when he challenges Mr. McConnell for leadership after the 2022 election. .
But some conservative Senate Republicans say the SLF should do more to support Mr. Cruz.
And the group's spending decisions can sometimes appear to reward senators who work friendly with Senate Republican leadership while downplaying McConnell's critics such as Cruz, he said.
Conservative Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), a critic of McConnell and a longtime thorn in the Senate's Republican leadership, faces independent Evan in a tougher-than-expected re-election race in 2022. At that time, no help was received from the SLF. McMullin.
In the end, Lee won with a difference of more than 10 points.
And the group did not invest in Mr. Cruz's tough 2018 re-election campaign, when he lost to challenger Mr. Johnson, then a member of the House of Representatives. Beto O'Rourke (D-Texas) and his Democratic allies. Cruz won by two points.
That same year, SLF spent millions of dollars (at least $12.7 million) to help Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) defeat Democrat Phil Bredesen in the race for the vacant Senate seat in Tennessee. poured into it. She ended up beating her opponent by nearly 11 points.
Mr. Cruz, meanwhile, led calls for Mr. McConnell to resign as Republican leader earlier this year.
“I think Republican leaders should actually lead this conference and advance Republican priorities,” Cruz told a room packed with reporters at the Capitol in February.
This is the latest of many clashes that Mr. Cruz has had with Mr. McConnell over the years, including a dispute over strategy in 2013 when Mr. Cruz led the effort to repeal Obamacare that triggered a 16-day government shutdown. It goes back to
Now in his second term, the Texas senator is once again embroiled in a close race and finds himself dramatically losing to his Democratic opponent.
In 2018, O'Rourke defeated O'Rourke by convincing voters that Democrats were too left-leaning to represent the state in the Senate. Mr. O'Rourke often enlisted Mr. Cruz's support by speaking without a filter. Democrats may have made a big mistake by supporting universal background checks and a ban on assault weapons, unpopular positions in gun-loving states.
In this year's close Texas Senate race, Allred adopted a more measured media strategy, choosing his media interviews carefully to avoid straying too far from his talking points. That makes it very difficult for Mr. Cruz to drive home the message that Mr. Allred has frequently voted for liberal Democrats in the House.
Conservative allies hope that getting millions more from the SLF and NRSC could help Mr. Cruz's message get through.
A second Republican strategist interviewed by The Hill said the NRSC is so focused on defeating vulnerable Democratic senators in Montana, Ohio, Nevada and Pennsylvania that it has given up on protecting Republican incumbents. He claimed to have lost it.
“I've looked at some Texas polls, and I think that race could be close. Certainly, Allred raised and spent a lot of money. NRSC spent some in Texas. “The SLF has not done so and probably will not,” the strategist added. “The blind spot the NRSC has toward incumbents is a big problem.”
NRSC spokesman Philip Letso rejected that criticism.
“The NRSC's top priority is to protect incumbents, and we will support them to ensure they defeat Mr. Schumer's hand-picked candidates,” he said.
The Senate Republican campaign arm has already spent $5.5 million coordinating TV ads with the Cruz campaign.
An Emerson College poll and The Hill poll released Thursday showed Mr. Cruz leading Mr. Allred by 4 points, 49% to 45%. Other polls show Mr. Cruz and Mr. Allred in a dead heat.
A Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation poll released Monday showed Mr. Cruz leading Mr. Allred by just 3 points, close to the poll's margin of error of 2.83%.
Mr. Cruz's allies have warned that Democrats will raise and spend more money supporting Allred than Republicans will raise and spend to protect Mr. Cruz, leading them by at least 5 percentage points in Texas. They argue that former President Trump, who is expected to win, would be fine with Cruz.
Allred reported that he had raised $41.2 million at the end of June, compared to the $40 million that Mr. Cruz had raised at that point in the election cycle.
Collectively, Mr. Cruz's allies estimate that Republicans will spend between $50 million and $100 million to protect Mr. Cruz, and that Democrats will spend between $100 million and $150 million to unseat Mr. Cruz. There is.
Allred raised an astonishing $1 million in 24 hours after speaking at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. A raucous crowd packed into the United Center chanted, “Defeat Ted Cruz!” when he got off stage.
Mr. Scott, who challenged Mr. McConnell in a fierce leadership race after the 2022 election, also faces a tough race.
An Emerson College Poll and The Hill poll conducted in early September found Scott leading former Rep. Debbie Mucarsel Powell (D-Florida) by just one point. But polls compiled by RealClearPolitics give him an average lead of 4.3 points.
The Mucarsel vs. Powell campaign reported raising $1 million after Emerson vs. Hill polls showed the two sides in a close race.
Her campaign is also expected to benefit from turnout from abortion rights initiatives on Florida's 2024 ballot.
Unlike Mr. Cruz, Mr. Scott has vast personal wealth that he can leverage to strengthen his campaign and spread his message in Florida's expensive media market. According to Finbold.com, he is worth between $270 million and $808 million.
Law, CEO of SLF and One Nation, told the Wall Street Journal last week that Texas and Florida are not of interest to Democrats.
“I think either is fine. This is a presidential cycle. Neither of those states are going to be of interest to Democrats,” he said.
“The reason why I have a certain level of confidence is that both Senator Cruz and Senator Scott have so far demonstrated that they're prepared to raise money, that they're serious about their campaigns, that they're running good campaigns. “Because I've done what I wanted them to do,” he explained.
On Thursday, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee announced it would launch a multimillion-dollar television campaign in Texas and Florida, states that were expected to be closed, shaking up the Senate race map.
