Trump-backed candidates for governor in five additional states, including Arizona, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Michigan, have collectively aired no television advertising since winning their primaries, along with [Doug] Mastriano in Pennsylvania.
To elaborate and clarify: As of Monday, the Republican nominees in six governor’s contests, which are taking place in some of the biggest and most competitive states in the nation, had not released a single general election television advertisement. Since winning her August 2 primary on Tuesday, GOP contender Kari Lake in Arizona has started airing her first TV commercial.
Additionally, each of those six candidates received the support of former President Donald Trump in their respective primary contests.
When you combine those two ideas, you can see the difficulty Republican strategists face: Given the influence the former President still has over the GOP base, candidates supported by Trump are quite likely to win the party’s primary. However, those candidates frequently give the impression of being ill-prepared to manage the kind of professional (and well-funded) operation needed to win over voters in a general election.
Consider Mastriano’s campaign in Pennsylvania as an illustration.
Mastriano gained notoriety and notoriety for being one of the strongest proponents of the delusion that Trump had been cheated out of the 2020 election. He claimed he never went inside the Capitol building on January 6, 2021, but he ordered several busloads of people to join the “Stop the Steal” event.
Mastriano won the Republican primary in May thanks to Trump’s support, the strength of the party’s grassroots, and a crowded field of candidates. However, since being named the nominee, Mastriano has exhibited almost no inclination to modify his campaign to meet the various difficulties presented by a general election. He travels in a sort of safe bubble and speaks mainly to conservative media outlets.
Josh Shapiro, the state attorney general and his Democratic rival, has inundated the airwaves with advertisements portraying Mastriano as being too radical. Shapiro raised $25.4 million from June 7 to September 19, as AWN reported initially on Tuesday. Around $3.2 million was raised by Mastriano within the same time frame.
According to polling, the race’s wealth gap has an effect. In a state that has been so hotly contested in each of the previous two presidential elections, Shapiro has a startling double-digit lead over Mastriano with 53% of the registered voters to his 40%, according to a new Marist survey released on Tuesday.
Similar events occurred in Michigan, where Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer was viewed as being highly vulnerable at the beginning of the 2022 election season. However, Republican candidate Tudor Dixon has watched as Whitmer has dominated television coverage of the contest.
We’ll be airing advertisements at the appropriate moment, but don’t worry, we’ll win, Dixon said in response to a recent question from reporters about how she envisioned winning the race without running marketing.
Because of the inherently Democratic nature of Maryland, Massachusetts, and Illinois, Republican candidates have always had greater odds in those states. However, the huge disparity in funding and ad spending has now pushed them out of the GOP’s reach.
Republicans appear to have an equal chance of winning only in Arizona. And it might be because Lake, a former local TV anchor, already has a strong name recognition and needs less money (and ad time) to present herself to voters.
Of course, Trump may contribute to its resolution or at the very least, its mitigation. He has more than $90 million in his Save America PAC, all of which could be used to support the underfunded campaigns of people like Mastriano and Dixon with advertisements. He hasn’t yet, but last week, his friends created a new super PAC with the intention of backing his endorsed candidates.
His radio silence emphasises how fundamentally self-serving Trump’s endorsement is. When his candidate wins the primary, he wants to write “W” on the board, but he has much less interest in really doing the practical things that will help those candidates win the general election.
Trump supported a candidate in the primary in several of these instances who had no evidence of appealing to voters in general elections and who lacked a track record of successfully raising money and managing a serious and credible campaign. The results of those choices are now being felt by Republicans.