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With Roger Sollenberger, Political Reporter

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The Big Dig this week… How Republicans lost where they spent the most

While the midterm elections dashed Republican hopes for a “red wave,” the green wave wasn’t much more kind to them either.

The Daily Beast reviewed the most expensive House and Senate races in the country, and found that, with a few exceptions, Republican candidates were on the losing end.

A house divided

Republicans lost three of the five most expensive Senate races, per CRP data, with Democrats clinching the top three—Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona. (The Georgia contest, where Sen. Raphael Warnock received the most votes, is headed to a runoff.)

While Republicans are now projected to win a slim majority in the House—far below their expectations—Democrats took all five of the most expensive races, according to CRP data.

Republicans also came up short in outside spending. The top two outside spending groups of the midterms, per CRP, were super PACs aligned with Republican Senate and House leadership, with their Democratic counterparts coming in third and fourth. The GOP’s Senate Leadership Fund super PAC alone spent nearly as much as its Democratic counterparts combined.

Keystone Cops

Overall, the Senate money wasn’t evenly distributed, with wide gaps across the most expensive races.

The most costly battle overall—Pennsylvania—commanded a total of $374.4 million in spending, according to CRP data. That’s about $90 million more than the second-most expensive race, in Georgia; the tenth-most expensive, Missouri, only saw $65 million in spending—or about 17 percent as much as Pennsylvania.

The Republican Senate victories, however, are notable, because Democratic candidates—who have outraised Republicans this year—put more cash into most of those races, but still lost. Democrats saw this phenomenon in some marquee 2020 contests, where top money draws like South Carolina’s Jamie Harrison and Kentcuky’s Amy McGrath both came up short in the vote count that year.

The two most glaring discrepancies this time around were Val Demings in Florida (raising $72.3 million to Sen. Marco Rubio’s $46.6 million) and Tim Ryan in Ohio, who outraised his opponent J.D. Vance nearly four-to-one.

“Candidate quality”

To some extent, the outcomes reflect widely reported GOP concerns this summer that Senate candidates in critical battleground states were struggling to raise money. Those concerns sparked a political budget crisis, with party leaders fighting over who was to blame and who could help make up the difference as the campaigns headed into the home stretch.

But Republicans fared much worse in the House. While the GOP still eked out a majority, they haven’t won a single seat in the top 10 most expensive races, though two of them still remain too close to call as of this writing. The GOP’s Congressional Leadership Fund outspent its Democratic counterpart $188.1 million to $93.6 million to get there.

The fiscal cliff

The total cost of the 2022 midterms is staggering. The Center for Responsive Politics projected the amount to exceed $16.7 billion—more than double the price tag in 2018. And with that much money on the line, blame spreads quickly.

The disappointment among Republicans has sent a shockwave through party ranks. Republicans now face a leadership crisis in both houses, including internal challenges to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.

And to an extent, the crisis reflects the financial crisis that reared its head this summer. McCarthy, the top fundraiser in the House, now finds his presumed speakership at risk from a fractious, fiscally hawkish Freedom Caucus. And McConnell, aligned with SLF, has survived a challenge from NRSC leader Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL).

But Scott is taking flak, too. On Tuesday, Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Thom Tillis (R-NC) called for an audit of the NRSC’s midterm spending. Scott welcomed the prospect, and said he had worked to reform previous failures since taking over in 2021.

“When that’s your starting point, you work really hard to make sure there are transparent processes, and we are more than happy to sit down with any member of the caucus to walk them through our spending,” he said.

Read the whole story here.

From Roger’s Notebook...

Ex Machina. Midway through his soporific candidacy announcement on Tuesday, Trump’s brand new 2024 fundraising machine lurched to life, sending out the first of what’s sure to be a jillion donor requests. His new joint fundraising committee can accept up to $10,800 from an individual, but only $5,800 of it can be used for his campaign—the rest goes to his “slush fund” Save America leadership PAC. Trump has been bleeding cash amid a barrage of investigations, and has recently struggled to get his small-dollar army to fork over their cash like they once did.

Disclaimer. The FEC is voting this week on new proposed transparency rules for online political advertising, a long-awaited development for government watchdogs. But it’s not a sure thing.

Today, the FEC doesn’t specifically require disclaimers about who paid for and, if applicable, approved online ads—an issue that remarkably has gone unaddressed for decades, despite the rise of social media and other forms of digital promotion. The new rules would require disclaimers not just on websites, but everything that touches the internet, including social media, streaming platforms, apps, and wearables. The rule also applies to paid “influencer” spots, and allows “adapted disclaimers” for formats with space and character limits.

Although it was a bi-partisan effort, GOP commissioner Sean Cooksey expressed reservations about the proposal, as well as what he described as an insufficient public comment period, telling Axios that “Without additional public input—and major revisions—I cannot support increasing government regulation over political speech online.”

Jury’s Still Out. The fate of Jesse Benton, the Republican operative charged last year with funneling Russian money to the 2016 Trump campaign, is now in the jury’s hands. Deliberations began Wednesday, but the panel failed to reach a verdict—a troubling sign for the government, which lost another high-profile political case weeks ago, when Trump associate Tom Barrack was acquitted on foreign lobbying charges.

Benton was convicted and sentenced to probation in connection with a bribery conspiracy in 2016—the same year he’s alleged to have laundered the Russian cash. Trump pardoned him a month before leaving office.

Poetry in motion. A federal judge in Florida has ordered the lawyers who brought Donald Trump’s widely mocked RICO lawsuit against Hillary Clinton and a slate of side actors to pay $66,274 in sanctions and other costs for “basic and obvious” deficiencies.

“Every claim was frivolous, most barred by settled, well-established existing law,” the judge wrote. “These were political grievances masquerading as legal claims. This cannot be attributed to incompetent lawyering. It was a deliberate use of the judicial system to pursue a political agenda.”

The judge also took the unusual additional step of raising the prospect of a Bar investigation. For the lead attorney on the suit—Trump’s former military school classmate, Peter Ticktin—it would be his fourth run-in with the Bar. Ticktin, who has posted a number of amateur poems to his firm’s website, including about a “chopped up mess of Miss Playboy,” has already been forced to stop practicing in the state twice.

More From The Beast’s Politics Desk

The spectacular collapse of the FTX crypto platform has already created collateral damage for dozens of elected officials of both parties. But Sam Brodey and Ursula Perano say Democrats are silent on whether they’ll offload their millions in donations.

Forget Trump—Ted Cruz might be the midterm’s biggest loser. I broke down just how poorly his candidates did last week. Read about how bad it was.

While Democrats beat back election deniers on the national stage, fringe-right Republicans fared better at the state level—with many running unopposed. Kelly Weil kept her eye on those quiet but critical races, and delivers some disturbing news here.

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