GOP begins its midterm triage

| 10:00 pm EDT October 15, 2018
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With three weeks to go before the midterm elections, we’ll see how many House seats the Republican Party will lose, and whether it’ll be enough to hand majority control of the House to the Democrats. But what is clear is that the Republicans will lose House seats. Plenty of them. In fact we’re already seeing the GOP resorting to triage, giving up on some notable House races – including some close ones – in the name of trying to salvage anything it can.

Yesterday, Palmer Report brought you the story of how the big money arm of the Republican establishment is giving up on Dana Rohrabacher, who has been in the House forever. This is noteworthy, because the scant publicly available polling in that race suggests that it’s tied, or that Democratic candidate Harley Rouda is slightly ahead. Is the GOP giving up on Rohrabacher because he’s further behind than we know, or because it fears he’s going to end up indicted for his role in the Trump-Russia scandal? We don’t know yet. But Rohrabacher is far from the only House incumbent the GOP is giving up on.

The GOP is also cutting bait on incumbent Mimi Walters, which is less surprising, as her Democratic challenger Katie Porter is being given a 71% chance of winning by FiveThirtyEight. But still, that race is not necessarily a lost cause with three weeks to go. These are the kinds of races that the Republican moneybags could still try to win if they wanted to sink a bunch of last minute money into them. This alone tells us that the billionaires who typically fund the GOP aren’t willing to write checks as large as the party would like, and tough choices are having to be made.

So what does this tell us? It doesn’t necessarily mean that the Republican billionaires believe their party will lose the House. Instead it means they think the odds are bad enough that they’re not willing to fully open their wallets in the name of trying to make it happen. This has left the GOP trying to figure out how to minimize the bleeding by getting behind certain close House races and not others. This doesn’t mean the Resistance can put their feet up and assume victory. Instead, it’s a sign that it’s time to ramp up canvassing and phone banking, and put the Democrats over the top.