As speculation swirled that Mitch Daniels, Indiana’s 49th governor, might run for Senate, one conservative advocacy group leaped into action to warn him against running.
The Club for Growth spent around $16,000 on an attack ad calling Daniels, who was leaving his post as president of Purdue University, an establishment Republican “clinging to the old ways of the bad, old days.”
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That warning shot, fired in January, was just the beginning of what promised to be a pitched battle if Daniels entered the race. The Club for Growth, an influential conservative group that spent some $100 million in the 2022 cycle, wanted Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN), the former chairman of the Republican Study Committee, to be the Hoosier State’s next senator and was willing to spend upward of eight figures to keep a centrist like Daniels out.
The Club got its way. Less than three weeks later, Daniels ruled out a Senate run after making a trip to Washington, D.C., to speak with Hill Republicans.
It’s not clear the organization influenced Daniels’s decision — he joins a long line of governors to flirt with and then decide against a run for Senate — but the threat set the tone for what could be costly and bruising intraparty fights next year as the GOP finds itself once again deciding between electability and ideological purity in key Senate races.
What is clear is the Club for Growth will be at odds with national Republicans in at least two of those fights.
A familiar situation is already playing out in West Virginia, where Senate GOP leadership is actively courting the state’s term-limited governor, Jim Justice, to challenge Joe Manchin (D-WV) for his Senate seat in 2024.
The appeals are part of a strategy by the National Republican Senatorial Committee to take a more hands-on, and public, approach to candidate recruitment after the party’s lackluster performance in the midterm elections.
Republicans see Justice, who’s twice proven he can win statewide and has one of the highest approval ratings of any governor, as their best shot of defeating Manchin, a surprisingly resilient Democrat who won reelection in 2018 in a state former President Donald Trump carried by 40 points.
But the Club for Growth wants a through-and-through conservative in the seat. The group announced it would go “all-in” for Rep. Alex Mooney (R-WV) last week and committed to spending at least $10 million in the Senate primary.
The move was widely interpreted as an attempt to scare off Justice, who was a centrist Democrat until he joined the Republican Party in 2017. Except in this case, Justice is not expected to bow out.
“I think they’re trying to do the same thing they did to Mitch Daniels to Jim Justice, but I don’t think it will work,” a national Republican strategist told the Washington Examiner. “I don’t think he’s going to be scared.”
Top Senate Republicans quickly coalesced around Banks in barn-red Indiana after Daniels passed on a Senate run. But the GOP could get bogged down in an ugly fight in West Virginia should Justice enter the race.
The governor teased he would announce after the state’s legislative session ended in March, but GOP operatives still expect him to launch his bid in the coming weeks. Mooney announced his run for the seat just days after he won a fifth term to the House of Representatives in November.
Each will carry political baggage into the primary fight.
Mooney, a former Maryland state senator, has been labeled a carpetbagger in previous election cycles and faced ethics investigations for allegedly misusing taxpayer and campaign dollars for personal use, allegations he has strongly denied.
Justice, a wealthy coal magnate and luxury resort owner, has in the past faced scrutiny for his businesses’ delinquency on millions in taxes and fines.
Conrad Lucas, a GOP strategist in West Virginia, says the amount the Club for Growth is promising to spend in the state suggests the primary will get heated.
“I’ve never seen an expensive race that remains pleasant,” he told the Washington Examiner.
But Lucas expects Justice will be able to weather the onslaught of attacks. “The attack ads have run before. He’s Teflon. And people like to say that about different candidates, but I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said.
Mooney has a lot of ground to make up if he wants to challenge Manchin next year. In a poll released last week, Justice held a commanding 55% to 24% lead over Mooney in a head-to-head GOP primary.
It remains to be seen whether he will be viable in a statewide race.
In warning Daniels against a run in Indiana, the Club for Growth dismissed polls showing he had a commanding lead over Banks, pointing out how the group successfully helped defeat Pat McCrory in North Carolina’s Senate race last cycle despite the former governor’s own lead over Ted Budd, the Club’s candidate in the race. It’s invoking McCrory’s loss once again in Justice’s contest.
“Just like Pat McCrory, Jim Justice comes from the big spending, Mitch McConnell wing of the Republican party,” David McIntosh, president of the Club for Growth PAC, said in a statement. “With runaway inflation, Republican primary voters no longer want to elect Senators who will support the out-of-control radical spending like Manchin and Justice, and instead want principled, pro-growth conservatives like Alex Mooney.”
The NRSC is not expected to spend heavily in the contest — that will likely be left to the Senate Leadership Fund, a PAC aligned with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), according to one Republican operative working on Senate races.
But the organization’s focus on recruiting strong candidates so early and so aggressively underscores a desire to avoid the perceived mistakes of the last cycle, in which “candidate quality” is believed to have contributed to losses in battleground states from Arizona to Georgia to Pennsylvania.
Part of the strategy is to signal to donors that national Republicans learned the lessons of the last cycle.
“That’s donor management, more than anything else,” the Republican operative said. “Donors wanted to see some sort of action taken to address the issue of general election candidates that weren’t successful, and I think this is one way of doing it.”
But there is a substantive shift in the willingness of the NRSC to involve itself in what are expected to be competitive primaries.
The next shootout between the Club and Senate Republicans could play out in Montana.
The Republicans who represent the state’s two House districts, Reps. Matt Rosendale and Ryan Zinke, are weighing whether to challenge Democratic Sen. Jon Tester (MT).
But the two have their political downsides — Rosendale lost to Tester by 3 percentage points the last time he was up for reelection in 2018, while Zinke faced mounting ethics scandals in his time as interior secretary in the Trump administration.
The Club for Growth has all but come out in support of Rosendale, a conservative hard-liner known for being one of the last holdouts in Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) speakership election.
But Senate GOP leadership appears chiefly concerned with electability.
Steve Daines, the chairman of the NRSC and Montana’s junior senator, is supportive of two possible candidates, businessman Tim Sheehy and state Attorney General Austin Knudsen, according to a source familiar with his thinking.
Like West Virginia, Montana is a red state with a Democratic senator. Along with Ohio, GOP operatives view the trio as the Republican Party’s best pickup opportunities next year.
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At least for now, the NRSC has no preference in the Ohio GOP primary for Senate. Yet the sheer number of battlegrounds in a 2024 map that heavily favors Republicans means there’s a good chance for intraparty fights elsewhere.
“There’s lots of sort of ‘second-tier’ states that could be on the map,” the GOP operative advising Senate campaigns said. “But certainly West Virginia and Montana, I think, are very likely to be pretty big and expensive clashes.”
