On the menu today: A deep dive into the current state of GOP efforts to win back control of the Senate this November, and the best way to reinvigorate a beloved adventure franchise.
The GOP Might Be Missing Its Chance
It’s reasonable to worry that Republicans are blowing their chances of winning control of the Senate this November. A couple of key races appear to be close to lost already; if the latest survey from Public Opinion Strategies is to be believed, the sputtering, momentum-free Ford Pinto that is Mehmet Oz’s Senate campaign in Pennsylvania is now trailing Democrat John Fetterman by a jaw-dropping 18 percentage points, after another poll earlier this month put Oz down by 14 points. (Although, as Nick Gillespie observes, my metaphor doesn’t completely work because Ford Pintos sometimes catch fire.) Oz may be working himself into the Republican Self-Inflicted Defeat Hall of Fame, alongside Christine O’Donnell, Sharron Angle, and Todd Akin.
But it is still mid August, and there are some signs of life for Senate Republican candidates. This morning, I wrote in the Corner about the new Emerson College poll in Ohio showing J. D. Vance ahead of Tim Ryan by three points. That’s not a massive lead, but it’s better than the long stretch of Ryan leads in polls over the past few months. Even a modest Vance lead is closer to what you would expect to see in a state that has shifted from purple to red, in what is supposed to be a good year for the GOP.
(By the way, that same survey showed that in a rematch between Donald Trump and Joe Biden in 2024, Trump would win Ohio, 53 percent to 39 percent. Trump won the state by eight points in 2020. At the presidential level, some of those red states are looking deep crimson these days.)
The collapse of Oz in Pennsylvania makes Georgia look relatively good, as Herschel Walker is still hanging around, even if he’s trailing. There’s no getting around it: Walker is a disappointing candidate who is struggling to improve his communication skills on the trail. But for all those problems, against an incumbent who’s a gifted orator and who gets adoring coverage, Walker is only trailing by around the margin of error in most polls. Georgia is a pretty darn right-leaning state, Biden’s job approval there is at 31 percent, incumbent Republican governor Brian Kemp is probably going to win the governor’s race against Stacy Abrams by a healthy margin, and it’s supposed to be a GOP wave year. Add it all up, and Walker still has a decent shot.
It’s been a while since we’ve had any polls in New Hampshire, but as of early July, likely GOP nominee Don Bolduc was within the margin of error against incumbent Democrat Maggie Hassan. While Hassan’s approval rating is still okay, Biden’s approval rating in the state is abysmal, and so a GOP campaign that relentlessly ties Hassan to Biden and his agenda could put the GOP nominee over the top.
This morning, Politico reports that, “In an eyebrow-raising new survey, the respected Marquette University Law School poll finds incumbent Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) trailing his Democratic opponent Mandela Barnes by seven points.” I’m raising my eyebrows at Politico‘s raised eyebrows. Ron Johnson polled terribly six years ago. Exactly one poll out of dozens had Johnson ahead of Russ Feingold in 2016, and quite a few had Johnson trailing by double digits. Yet somehow Johnson managed to surge near the end and win by three and a half percentage points. Six years earlier, the first time Johnson and Feingold squared off, Johnson took a lead in July and won by about five percentage points. This doesn’t mean Johnson is guaranteed to win in 2022; it just means you shouldn’t put too much stock in reports that Johnson is trailing in the polls.
In a final bit of good news for Republicans, the Missouri Senate race, which would have instantly become a toss-up if Eric Greitens had won the GOP nomination, now looks like an easy lay-up for Eric Schmitt.
But overall . . . yeah, the narrative that Republicans are blowing their chances in what should be winnable races because they nominate deeply flawed, relatively unknown, far-too-Trumpy or extreme candidates has a lot of evidence to support those contentions. Blake Masters has yet to look all that strong against incumbent Democrat Mark Kelly in Arizona’s Senate race, which was expected to be one of the most competitive races of the cycle. The hopes that Joe O’Dea would give incumbent Democrat Michael Bennet a serious run for his money in Colorado have yet to bear fruit. In a year like this, you would think a North Carolina Senate race would be a relatively easy win for Republicans, but that doesn’t appear to be the case yet, and it’s a similar story in Nevada, where incumbent Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto is hanging in there against GOP nominee Adam Laxalt.
None of these races look sewn up by the Democrats yet; it’s late summer, and people may not be paying much attention to the Senate races. Many campaigns contend that people don’t really tune in to the midterm elections until after Labor Day. Like Vance’s campaign, you’ll see more GOP ads, and the Democrats won’t have the airwaves to themselves in certain key markets.
It is also worth noting that some incumbent Republicans whom Democrats hoped to beat are looking strong. In Florida, Marco Rubio is on pace to win by a solid margin, maybe even by a double-digit percentage point. In Iowa, Chuck Grassley continues to be the genial juggernaut; every six years, Democrats talk themselves into believing they have a good chance of knocking him off, and every six years, he metaphorically runs them over with a corn harvester. Two years after Democrats convinced themselves that Lindsey Graham was beatable in South Carolina (he wasn’t), it appears that national Democrats aren’t even bothering to put up a serious fight against Tim Scott. (I notice that a lot of voters seem quite pleased with those allegedly boring “establishment” Republican senators.)
Running for office is hard. It looks easy from the outside; most aspiring political candidates walk around in a self-deluding fog of optimism and narcissism, believing that most people just naturally like them, and if they just go out and say the right things, they will coast to victory. A lot of people figure that their biggest obstacle is name ID, and that once the electorate gets to know them, voters will embrace the candidate in droves.
It very rarely works out that way.
Lots of Pennsylvanians know who Dr. Oz is, and if you put aside the controversies, he has an indisputably impressive life story. Back in 2013, The New Yorker called him “the most trusted doctor in America”:
Oz was a rare find: so eloquent and telegenic that people are often surprised to learn that he is a highly credentialled member of the medical establishment. Oz graduated from Harvard University in 1982. Four years later, he received joint medical and M.B.A. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. He then moved to Columbia and New York-Presbyterian Hospital, where, as a surgeon specializing in heart transplants, he has served as vice-chairman and professor in the department of surgery for more than twenty years. (He still performs operations there each Thursday.) Oz also directs Columbia’s Cardiovascular Institute and Integrative Medicine Program, which he established in 1994, and has published scores of articles on technical issues, such as how to preserve muscle tissue during mitral-valve replacements. He holds a patent on a solution that can preserve organs and one on an aortic valve that can be implanted without highly invasive open-heart surgery.
By 2009, after dozens of appearances on “Oprah,” Oz had become so popular that Winfrey offered him his own show, produced by her company, Harpo. “The Dr. Oz Show” has since won two Emmys and averages nearly four million daily viewers. Certainly, no American physician has greater influence over a larger number of people. Oz has been named one of Esquire’s 75 Most Influential People of the 21st Century, as “the most important and most accomplished celebrity doctor in history.” He ranks consistently in the top ten on the Forbes list of most influential celebrities, and has been included on a similar list of Harvard University alumni. In 2008, Oz received the Ellis Island Medal of Honor.
But none of that means that lots of Pennsylvanians like the idea of him being their next senator.
ADDENDUM: Yesterday, Noam Blum looked at the trend of Hollywood taking established characters and recasting them with actors of a different race than the original, and contended, “I know people instinctively hate these ideas, but give me a rebooted Indiana Jones with John David Washington and Denzel as Henry Sr. where they go find some mystical relic in Africa. Ryan Coogler can direct. At least it’s an entire concept rather than a half-baked race swap.”
I’d argue that, of all the popular movie franchises, the Indiana Jones movies are as much about a tone — grand, sweeping, death-defying old-fashioned pulp action and adventure, exotic locations, ancient history, bits of mysticism and the supernatural — as they are about Indy as a character. I countered, “Denzel is his Indiana Jones’ modern-day archeology professor protege, John David Washington is his most promising grad student, and they’ve found Indy’s old diary in the university archives, where he left a tattered map to the one great treasure he never found. . . .” Call it The Raiders, and establish that this is a spiritual sequel, but not a continuation of Indy’s story.
As for exotic locations, villains, chases, action, thrills . . . hey, I’ve got plenty of ideas. I mean plenty of ideas. I mean, really, plenty of ideas.