Republicans are pouring money into Senate races in deep-red states, but there’s little sign yet that it’s working, according to a national political reporter who just got back from Kansas.
Elena Schneider, national political reporter for the Washington Sun, appeared over the weekend on MS NOW’s “The Weekend.” A panelist said White House officials had privately written off the House and were already preparing for Democratic-led investigations, but still saw the Senate as “a little bit of a wild card.” The panel then asked Schneider whether Republican spending would be “enough to stop the bleeding” in the upper chamber.
Schneider said she had spent the past several days in rural central Kansas, well outside the Democratic-leaning Kansas City suburbs of Johnson County.
“I was on the ground with Adam Hamilton, speaking to voters who were there showing up in places like Salina and Hutchinson,” she said. “That’s rural central Kansas. And I met voter after voter that are either identified as independent or Republican or voted for both parties. Several Roger Marshall voters who said, we’re voting for Democrats.”
That, she said, helps explain “the sudden rush to throw money at this problem on the Republican side.”
Schneider said Marshall may still survive. He won his seat by 11 points in 2020, which she called “a huge cushion.”
“That is a pretty big way to fall,” she said. “And we chatted with Republicans both in Kansas and here nationally about, you know, you can still win by one even. And that still makes you a winner at the end of the day, even if you’ve fallen by ten points. So I think in some of these places, it may very well be enough.”
Texas is a different story. Schneider pointed to the millions Republicans have already spent there without changing the race.
“There does come a point where there is a saturation point where it just doesn’t [work],” she said. “Voters know what they know. They have their opinions.”
She said the point of flooding red states with cash is to make sure known Republican voters actually show up to vote, and so far that isn’t happening.
“We’ll find out on election day ... in these races where they’re very red states,” Schneider said. “It’s whether or not that money can push those voters out to the polls. But the question is, so far we haven’t seen evidence that that is materializing.”
The segment then played a montage of voters who said they regretted backing President Donald Trump. “I voted for him three times, and he hasn’t done what he said he’s going to do,” one man said.