Vice President Kamala Harris and her new running mate will hold a rally in Arizona as part of their tour of electoral battlegrounds, visiting a state where Harris passed over a prominent Democrat in favor of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, a former astronaut and gun control advocate, had been a top contender for running mate.
Meanwhile, former President Donald Trump is visiting Montana for a rally in support of Republican Senate candidate Tim Sheehy. The former president hopes to remedy some unfinished business from 2018, when he campaigned repeatedly in Big Sky Country in a failed bid to oust incumbent Democratic Sen. Jon Tester.
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Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell is expressing confidence that the GOP will be able to win a majority in the November elections because the party has avoided nominating the kinds of weak candidates that have lost tough races in the past.
“What is the key in winning a Senate election in a competitive state? Candidate quality,” McConnell told conservative voters Friday at “The Gathering,” an annual convocation hosted by influential radio host Erick Erickson. “I’m not going to mention names,” McConnell said, “but over the course of 10 or 15 years, in four or five instances, we have not had candidates that appeal to a competitive state.”
The Kentucky Republican was alluding to candidates like Herschel Walker, the controversial 2022 nominee who lost to Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock in a year where Republicans swept all other statewide elections in the state.
Republicans need to net just two additional seats to command a majority in January, and it’s widely presumed that they already will pick up West Virginia, where Democratic-turned-independent Joe Manchin is retiring. Democratic Sens. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Jon Tester of Montana are running in states former President Trump won twice and is expected to win again.
“We need to take the Senate as an insurance policy against what these people will do to the country,” McConnell said. The longest-serving Senate leader in history, McConnell is stepping down from his leadership post in the new Congress that will convene in January.
Vice President Mike Pence confirmed Friday that he’s sitting out the presidential race this November. But he explained his decision with a complex mix of praise and criticism for Republican nominee and former President Donald Trump – and made clear he is not remotely interested in supporting Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.
“I cannot endorse President Trump’s continuing assertion that I should have put aside my oath to support the Constitution, and act in a way that would have overturned the election,” Pence told an assembly of conservative activists hosted by radio personality Erick Erickson.
Trump has argued that Pence should have used his power presiding over the Electoral College to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
“President Donald Trump was not only my president, he was my friend,” Pence said, adding that is “part of what made the way our administration ended much more difficult.”
Pence said multiple times that he was proud of the Trump administration’s accomplishments, and he lauded Trump for his reaction to being nearly assassinated.
But the former vice president was critical of the direction the Republican Party has taken under the former president in his comeback bid. He was especially critical of GOP support for tariffs, a more isolationist U.S. role on the world stage and the move away from calling for a national ban on abortions.
“The fact that we have a platform that made no mention of the national debt, advocated massive taxes at our borders, and abandoning commitments we have to our allies around the world is troubling,” Pence said, explaining the current GOP identity as “a populism unmoored to conservative principle.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, once viewed as Donald Trump’s most threatening GOP presidential primary rival, says Democrats are manufacturing Vice President Kamala Harris’ and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s candidacy “out of whole cloth.”
“This is all manufactured,” DeSantis said at radio host Erick Erickson’s annual conservative assembly, “The Gathering.”
DeSantis, who regularly complained about the national political media during his failed White House bid, reprised the approach Friday, arguing that “corporate media” are exaggerating Democratic enthusiasm since President Joe Biden ended his campaign and endorsed Harris.
“They’re trying to create a cultural phenomenon around this candidate and for her running mate,” DeSantis said.
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