Editorial: In praise of Steve Daines’s NRSC

What a difference a few years makes. Following 2022’s red wave that wasn’t, the GOP made a clear-cut effort to muscle its way back in the primaries, helping to avoid some of the pitfalls that had plagued the last cycle, and which handed President Joe Biden and the Democrats one of the better midterm turnouts for an incumbent president in recent memory.

The shift in priorities is embodied best in the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), which Sen. Steve Daines (R., Mont.) has led this cycle. In state after state, the NRSC helped avoid messy primaries that wasted both time and millions of dollars in 2022.

In top pickup opportunities such as Montana and Wisconsin, Republicans outright avoided primaries. In the former, retired Navy SEAL Tim Sheehy cruised to the nomination, but as recently as March, Rep. Matt Rosendale was also in the running. In the latter, rumors that former sheriff David Clarke would jump in the race flew around for months — but Eric Hovde and his mustache are in the driver’s seat now to take on Sen. Tammy Baldwin.

The coup of the cycle is in Maryland, where former governor Larry Hogan, who is more popular than Old Bay in the state, rebuffed effort after effort to challenge the state’s Sen. Chris Van Hollen last cycle. Thanks to a creative recruitment strategy by Daines’s team, Hogan decided to file for the now-open seat on the last possible day.

Since then, the NRSC convinced one of the few credible Republicans in the race to drop out, and watched as Democrats drained their resources in their messy and divisive Maryland primary, which was filled with charges of outright criminal conduct and racism by Democratic Rep. David Trone, who sunk over $60 million of his own money into the race, only to barely clear 42 percent of the vote en route to the most expensive loss in a Senate primary in all of American history. 

While Hogan is not favored by every Republican, “Larry Hogan is running for the U.S. Senate in Maryland, not Mississippi,” Daines said recently.

Even where Daines didn’t fully clear the field, he’s made it clear who the GOP’s preferred candidate is. Look no further than Michigan, where former Rep. Mike Rogers garnered an early Trump endorsement and former Rep. Peter Meijer took one for the team, dropping out well before the primary to pave the way for Rogers.

Just one cycle ago, these developments would have been virtually unheard of. Now, under Daines, they’re happening across the country. Kudos to the chairman.