A remark that NRSC Chair Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) made in early 2025 captures the strategy now being blamed for the Republican wipeout, according to The Washington Sun.
According to insiders, Scott laid out his personal priorities that didn’t match the committee’s mission, and that approach has now come home to roost.
The cycle had just begun when Scott, the newly elected chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, told Republicans in a meeting what mattered most to him. It wasn’t defending the GOP’s Senate majority, the Sun reported.
Three sources with knowledge of the comments told the Sun that Scott said the most important thing to him was his relationship with President Donald Trump. Two of them said he added that he wouldn’t do anything as NRSC chair to jeopardize it.
The Sun called it “an unusual statement from the Republican in charge of winning Senate races,” who is normally expected to fight relentlessly for his candidates. But according to the Sun, the priority was "shared across the party," and it led Republicans to a "historic electoral disaster."
An NRSC spokesperson called the account “categorically false and a 1000% lie.”
Even as Trump’s approval sank to record lows, especially on the economy, voters’ No. 1 issue, Republicans refused to put any distance between themselves and the president, even when their own data suggested they should. Their effort to revive Trump’s 2024 coalition of Latino, working-class and young voters failed badly.
The warning signs had been there for months, the report notes. At a private GOP retreat in Florida in March, Chris Winkelman, who leads the Congressional Leadership Fund, the main House GOP super PAC, warned lawmakers that the midterms, then eight months away, were a growing problem.
“It is entirely possible that we’re going to lose 10 incumbents,” he told members, according to two people in the room.
By Tuesday night, it was clear "his warning hadn’t been nearly dire enough," according to the Sun's reporting. The results, the Sun reported, showed the "startling miscalculation" of a party whose strategy focused almost entirely on embracing Trump, even as the public backlash against him grew into the most severe a president had faced in decades.