Posted on 11/21/2022 6:32:49 PM PST by lasereye
As chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) had one job: win the Senate majority. Not only did he fail, but he did so in spectacular fashion — through calamitous mismanagement of the NRSC that left Republican candidates under fire without air cover in the final critical months of the midterm elections.
Now Scott is trying to deflect blame for the GOP’s disastrous showing. So, it’s worth reviewing the record of his catastrophic tenure at the helm of the GOP’s Senate campaign arm.
According to the New York Times, by July of this year, Scott’s NRSC had raised $181.5 million — a substantial war chest. But before the fall campaign even got underway, the newspaper reported, he had blown through 95 percent of the money — wasting most of it on consultants, self-promotion and a failed digital fundraising scheme that left the NRSC’s coffers virtually empty. He entered the homestretch with just $23.2 million cash on hand — less than half of what the Democratic senatorial committee had on hand to pummel GOP contenders.
As a result, the NRSC had to cancel $13.5 million in ad buys in August in the critical swing states of Pennsylvania ($7.5 million), Arizona ($3.5 million), Wisconsin ($2.5 million) and Nevada ($1.5 million). Politico reported at the time that “the scale of these cuts is unprecedented.”
And what was Scott doing in August, while his committee was in crisis? According to Axios, he was on vacation in Italy aboard a luxury yacht.
You can’t make it up.
Scott needed to take out $13 million in loans in September just to cover the committee’s operating expenses. He was able to spend just more than $548,534 on three independent expenditures in the entire month of October. The incompetence is stunning.
Indeed, Scott spent so much time and money promoting himself at the expense of GOP candidates that people began calling the NRSC the “National Rick Scott Committee.” The Post reported that Scott had “directed a sizable share of his fundraising as NRSC chair to his own accounts, while shifting digital revenue away from Senate campaigns and buying ads promoting himself.”
After I pointed out on Fox News on Election Day that Scott had burned through most of his money by August, Scott followed me on air and was asked by host Martha MacCallum for his response. He said he did the opposite of what his predecessor did two years ago, when Republicans failed to define now-Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D-Ga.) early on. “I told people … we’re going to invest and define our opponents early,” adding that because they spent money doing so, “we’re in the hunt … to pick up half of the Democrats’ seats right now” — predicting Republicans would win Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, New Hampshire, possibly Washington and Colorado. Instead, he lost a GOP-held seat in Pennsylvania.
As for criticizing previous NRSC leaders, this is laughable. His NRSC is the first in recent memory to raise less and spend less than its predecessor. In 2020, under Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.), the NRSC spent $120 million on independent expenditures on behalf of candidates, while Scott’s NRSC spent a grand total of just $33 million. In 2020, the committee spent $18 million on state-party ground activities, while Scott’s NRSC spent about $6 million.
Scott inherited a cash-positive committee with more cash on hand ($14.4 million) than debt on the books ($9 million). But as of the latest Federal Election Commission filings, Scott is on track to leave incoming chairman Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) $6.3 million in the red, with less cash and more than twice as much debt ($20 million).
Because of Scott’s ineptitude, it fell to Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to rescue the GOP candidates abandoned by the NRSC. McConnell-aligned super PACs invested a whopping $240.7 million in key Senate races, including $119.6 million in three states where Scott’s NRSC pulled scheduled TV ads: Pennsylvania ($56.7 million), Nevada ($25.5 million) and North Carolina ($37.4 million). McConnell-aligned PACs also spent $16.3 million in New Hampshire trying to rescue pro-Trump candidate Dan Bolduc, staying on the air for 17 days after the NRSC pulled out of the race, before finally withdrawing as well. McConnell also spent $32.2 million in Ohio saving J.D. Vance’s struggling campaign and $38 million in Georgia to get Herschel Walker into a Senate runoff — which is the only reason Republicans have a chance of emerging from this cycle without a diminished Senate minority.
Despite his ruinous record, Scott had the chutzpah to challenge McConnell for the job of Senate Republican leader. The captain of the Titanic actually thought he deserved a promotion.
Not surprisingly, his bid failed. The fact he even tried shows a pitiful lack of self-awareness. As Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) put it, Scott apparently wanted “a chance to crash and burn twice in the same year.”
And who nominated Scott for his ill-fated challenge to McConnell? None other than Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who survived by a razor-thin 26,449-vote majority only thanks to the $24.7 million McConnell spent rescuing his floundering campaign. Talk about an ingrate.
Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) have called for an independent review of the NRSC’s expenditures this election cycle. It can’t come soon enough. Senators have a right to know how Scott wasted more than $180 million. In his letter announcing his now-failed bid for leader, Scott declared “no one person responsible for our party’s performance across the country.” That might be true. But no one person did more to ensure that poor performance than Rick Scott.
“ His plan did not specifically call out SS”
It included Social Security. He was forced to admit this in a Fox Sunday interview that I watched. Please don’t bend over to make excuses for GOPestablishment idiots. They don’t care about us, so it’s unseemly for us to act as their toadies andcsycophants
You didn’t read the facts of the article or you are a fool. Who cares what Marc Thiessen is, the article is about Rick Scott being a bumbling idiot. As much as I despise Cocaine Mitch, Rick Scott as leader would be a disaster, and he proved it by running this committee into the dirt.
Graham is not stupid, he knew mentioning abortion would cause the GOP to lose votes. Graham is a traitor.
That said, Rick Scott hasn't proven to be any sort of conservative warrior type since he entered the Beltway. His intentions are generally favorable, but the implementation requires a set of gonads that he just doesn't have. You'd think out of all the tens of millions of people Florida has, we could find a real fighter or two.
Time will tell if he ages into his role. But I'm not holding my breath.
I care who Marc is. He hates Trump and wanted him to lose. Mitch just cost us this Election, in 2020 the 2 GA Senate seats, in 2017 the AL Senate seats.
“ As bad as Scott’s SS tactical blunder was”
Proposing to sunset Social Security isn’t a tactical blunder. It’s a massive failure on policy and philosophy. His plan didn’t call for sunsetting military spending. He considers that too important to tinker with. But by calling for sun setting Social Security he was teiingvthe vast numbers of Americans who depend on that program that it isn’t important to him and the GOP. As Trump said in the 2016 primaries, the Republicans have to stop criticizing and undermining social Sefurity or they’ll never win again.
If Scott had not mentioned SS it would not have mad that much difference. The #1 problem is the cheating. Fla proved that. To your point, SS is untouchable. The GOP cannot even talk about it, that’s just a fact. I remember when Bush floated the idea of letting younger workers voluntarily take a small portion and invest it how they wished. The rats pounced and said he wanted to “gut Social Security”.
MSM piled on with “how come you want to destroy SS” type of questions.
And frankly that may have preserved it for the youth. Same thing for vouchers, the Dems are all over it and their 98% reliable voting base would have been the specific people would benefit from vouchers and choice to get out of the nation's worst inner city schools.
Scott proposed a sunset plan for domestic spending programs. His plan did not exclude social security or Medicare - two programs relied on by tens of millions of seniors. He is an idiot, but his lack of concern about how these programs are important to middle and lower class people, is part of a general GOP tone deafness. Meanwhile, the GOP vows it will never cut a penny from military.
This Republican passive aggressive approach to Social Security is fairly recent. Reagan spoke in support of Social Security. Eisenhower expanded coverage, as did Nixon.
Eisenhower warned that the real danger to rational federal spending policies is the military industrial complex. Todays GOP is owned by that complex.
Bush opened the GOP to attacks that the party is hostile to Social Security , because he used rhetoric that was explicitly hostile. He used a sound bite developed by libertarian Koch Brothers - that Social Security is supported by nothing except “IOUs”. But those “IOUs” are federal treasury bonds. To call them meaningless worthless scraps of paper, which Bush implied they are, is to cal the treasury bonds that are in peoples retirement plans “IOUs”. It’s dishonest, unless you think your own treasury bonds are risky scraps of paper.
Bush didn’t do the GOP any favors.
The funds are not in treasury bonds, they are iou's, kinda like crypto. There is no trust fund.
“ The funds are not in treasury bonds, they are iou’s,”
Not true. Do some reading. Bush simply relabeled bonds as “IOUs”. That’s a fact Jack
I'm well read on the subject. I will try to find a book title for you to read from my collection.
“The special government securities come in two types: short-term certificates of indebtedness, which mature on the following June 30, and bonds with a term of one to 15 years. The short-term certificates and bonds issued to the Social Security trust funds are not traded in the bond market or available to the public. Like other Treasury securities, however, they are backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government. “Notes 6,8
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/110614/how-social-security-trust-fund-invested.asp
It’s ironic that Freepers will complain when the Dems accuse GOP of wanting to gut Social Security, and then Freepers will turn around and argue against social security as you’re doing —- without seeing that they’re just confirming what the Dems are saying
As for labeling the government bonds that social security surpluses are invested in, “IOUs”, the fact is every bond is an iou - including the treasury bonds that private citizens purchase. You own a bond by loaning money to the federal government, which it uses to fund federal spending. The bond is the government saying “iou” - the government pledges its “bond” to repay your loan in full and with interest. Social Security surpluses are lent in the same way, and the social security system is given bonds pledging that congress will repay with interest. If Bush had been honest h he would have called all bonds - public and private - to be “IOUs”, but he was trying to score a dishonest rhetorical point
As for whether Congress might one day refuse to make good in the bonds purchased by the Social Security system, the same risk is run by any private person lends money to the feds by buying a treasury bond. Your repayment depends on Congress fulfilling its iou to you
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.