The Republicans have a candidate problem

The Republicans have a candidate problem
Republicans are worried about Eric Greitens. And rightly so. The front-runner in the Missouri Senate primary faces alarming accusations of violence from his ex-wife. In a sworn affidavit filed yesterday as part of a custody lawsuit, she details multiple allegations of serious physical and psychological abuse.

Greitens was hardly squeaky clean before Monday’s affidavit. He resigned as the state’s governor in 2018 following allegations of sexual assault. The latest accusations have led to calls for him to drop out of the race to fill the vacancy created by Roy Blunt’s retirement….

The Republicans have a candidate problem

Republicans are worried about Eric Greitens. And rightly so. The front-runner in the Missouri Senate primary faces alarming accusations of violence from his ex-wife. In a sworn affidavit filed yesterday as part of a custody lawsuit, she details multiple allegations of serious physical and psychological abuse.

Greitens was hardly squeaky clean before Monday’s affidavit. He resigned as the state’s governor in 2018 following allegations of sexual assault. The latest accusations have led to calls for him to drop out of the race to fill the vacancy created by Roy Blunt’s retirement. Missouri’s other senator, Josh Hawley, yesterday said Greitens should withdraw: “If you hit a woman or a child, you belong in handcuffs, not the United States Senate.”

The GOP alarm isn’t hard to understand. As well as the seriousness of the allegations, there’s the fact that there’s no real path to a Republican Senate majority next year unless a second Republican senator from Missouri is elected in November.

But Greitens’s status as front-runner with potentially fatal baggage only makes him an extreme example of a broader phenomenon. Watching primary contests heat up, it’s hard to shake the feeling that the Republican Party has a candidate problem. And that what should, in theory, be a strong midterm election for the GOP could be undermined by the actual candidates in those races.

While no one in the Ohio Senate primary faces claims as disqualifying as Greitens, the race has, as Bobby Miller writes for the site, descended into a clown show. Witness two candidates squaring off like playground nemeses, nose to nose, calling one another names.

In Georgia, retired NFL superstar Herschel Walker is likely to be the Republican candidate in a crucial fight to oust Raphael Warnock (who, incidentally, was accused by his ex-wife of running over her foot). Early polls give Walker a small lead in the fiercely contested state, but he too faces allegations of domestic abuse and threatening behavior, and comes with a business track record marred by defaults and lawsuits. (In response to the abuse claims, Walker denies breaking the law but has said: “I’m always accountable to whatever I’ve ever done. And that’s what I tell people: I’m accountable to it.”)

While Hawley grills Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson of being too lenient on child pornography offenders, fellow Republican, Florida congressman Matt Gaetz has launched his re-election bid even as a federal grand jury is investigating him for sex crimes, including sex trafficking. Then there’s Madison Cawthorn, the North Carolina congressman busy embarrassing his colleagues by insulting Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.

In some cases, these candidates are jeopardizing crucial races for a party that sometimes sounds like it thinks November’s midterms are a done deal. In others, they leave a general stench around the party that risks doing damage nationwide. Meanwhile, formidable possible candidates with track records and widespread appeal in their home states — like Arizona governor Doug Ducey, for example, or New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu — have decided against Senate runs.

Perhaps none of this will matter. Perhaps the Democrats will continue to make unforced errors and an ill-disciplined, quarrelsome and sometimes amateurish GOP will still manage to triumph. But that doesn’t mean the Republican Party is maximizing its chances of victory.

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The gory details of the Biden-Harris rift

A forthcoming book on the early phase of the Biden presidency contains juicy details of the rift between Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s teams. This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden and the Battle for America’s Future by New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns isn’t out until May, but the authors are drip-feeding behind-the-scenes details from the famously tight-lipped Biden White House. Among those shared with Politico this morning: Biden communications director Kate Bedingfield dismissing complaints from Team Harris that the vice president wasn’t being treated fairly: “In private, Bedingfield had taken to noting that the vice presidency was not the first time in Harris’s political career that she had fallen short of sky-high expectations: her Senate office had been messy and her presidential campaign had been a fiasco. Perhaps, she suggested, the problem was not the vice president’s staff.”

Burns and Harris relay that a senator close to Harris described her frustration during her first year in office as “up in the stratosphere” and called her political decline a “slow-rolling Greek tragedy.”

The authors also report on Jill Biden’s disapproval of her husband’s selection of Harris as vice president after she went after him so vociferously during the primaries: “Why do we have to choose the one who attacked Joe?” she asked one of husband’s close advisors in confidence.

Mrs. Palin goes to Washington?

Could former Alaska governor and Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin be heading to Washington? In an appearance on Newsmax, Palin was asked whether she would consider running to replace Don Young, the long-serving Alaska congressman who died last week. “If I were asked to serve in the House and take his place, I would be humbled and honored and I would in a heartbeat, I would,” she replied.