OH-12: Republicans begin ritual trashing of their nominee ahead of special election
The GOP has begun their ritual of trashing their candidate just ahead of a House special election. This time, Troy Balderson is the guy who gets pre-spun as a weak candidate ahead of his Aug. 7 showdown with Democrat Danny O'Connor. Republicans privately tell the Washington Post's Dave Weigel that Balderson "has underwhelmed his party’s strategists and lagged in fundraising," and that O'Connor "beat him to the general election airwaves and built up his favorable numbers with ads about rejecting [Nancy] Pelosi and wanting to protect health-care coverage."
That's actually pretty mild stuff compared to what some House previous candidates, even ones who ended up winning their races, had to endure. Most notably, Republicans bashed Florida Republican David Jolly's 2014 campaign as a "a Keystone Cops operation, marked by inept fundraising," and they faulted the 41-year-old recently-divorced candidate for campaigning with his girlfriend, who was 14 years younger than him.
Last year, we also heard Republicans complaining about Ron Estes in Kansas' 4th; Greg Gianforte in Montana (and this was before he assaulted a reporter); and Karen Handel in Georgia's 6th, though they weren't quite so mean to them as they were to Jolly. The guy who got it the worst was Pennsylvania's Rick Saccone before the special election in the 18th District that he actually did lose in March race.
As we noted about Saccone, while the GOP did seem to have some very serious anger towards their candidate, Team Red seems to have settled into a pattern of lowering expectations ahead of closely watched races. If they win, they can just go back to crowing how Trump is awesome and how everything is going great, and if they lose, they can try to put all the blame on an extraordinarily awful candidate the way they ended up doing with Saccone. The only poll we've seen in weeks was an O'Connor poll that found Balderson ahead 48-43, so it seems quite likely that, private gripping aside, the GOP is ahead here.
However, O'Connor is up with a new ad that takes aim at the GOP's tax bill, which Team Red once thought would give them a huge lift in November. The narrator frames the race as a choice between Balderson, who backs "a corporate tax giveaway that racks up two trillion in debt, forcing massive tax hikes on our kids or deep cuts to Social Security and Medicare." The spot also quotes the Republican declaring, "I have no problems raising the retirement age." The rest of the ad features footage of O'Connor pledging to stand against any attempts to cut Social Security and Medicare.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/7/17/1780534/-Daily-Kos-Elections-Live-Digest-7-17?t=1531867645318#update-1531867645000