Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has made no secret of his disdain for Donald Trump. He’s all but said the former president’s inflammatory remarks make him unelectable and called him “diminished” after the GOP’s poor showing in the midterm elections.
The feeling is decidedly mutual, with Trump lambasting the senator as an “absolute loser” for not taking a harder line with Democrats in the Senate. He has even leveled racially tinged attacks on McConnell’s wife.
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But as the GOP leader seeks to win back the Senate majority in 2024 and Trump runs for president, the two could find themselves aligned in must-win races.
Trump has already joined establishment Republicans in coalescing around Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) in the Indiana Senate race.
Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT), the head of Senate Republicans’ campaign arm, quickly offered Banks a quasi-endorsement in late January after Mitch Daniels, the former governor of Indiana, declined to run for the seat being vacated by Sen. Mike Braun (R-IN).
Trump’s endorsement came the next day.
But Daines, who works closely with McConnell, offered the clearest sign yet this week that Senate Republicans will be seeking common ground with the former president.
Daines endorsed Trump’s 2024 run on Monday, becoming the highest-ranking Republican to back his White House bid yet. Nine other Republicans have so far voiced support for Trump.
A source familiar with the endorsement emphasized that there is no agreement between Daines and Trump and that the two have a long-standing friendship — Daines is a hunting partner with the former president’s son Donald Trump Jr.
But GOP senators on Capitol Hill responded favorably to the move on Tuesday as a calculated decision that could benefit Republicans in the 2024 elections.
If Trump endorses establishment Republicans’ favored candidate in a GOP Senate primary, it could help them avoid an expensive intraparty fight. Even Trump staying neutral could be beneficial to Senate Republicans.
“Sen. Daines — I appreciate the delicacy of his job. And I’m certainly willing to give him some latitude as he tries to figure out how to navigate that,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), a former chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, told the Washington Examiner.
“I’m sure he’s thought about all the angles. But the goal is to win the majority back, to win elections, and how you get there is not as important to me,” he added.
Republicans were left reeling after the midterm elections, in which they lost a Senate seat despite the twin issues of crime and inflation creating a favorable political environment for the GOP.
Since then, McConnell’s allies have made a point to aggressively recruit Republicans to run in key Senate primaries, concluding that candidate quality cost them the majority in states such as Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Arizona.
The shift, spearheaded by Daines as chairman of the NRSC, marks a sharp contrast from his predecessor, Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), whose hands-off approach to contested GOP primaries contributed to a rift between the campaign arm and McConnell.
Today, the NRSC and the Senate Leadership Fund, a political action committee aligned with McConnell, are operating in lockstep. The minority leader, asked on Wednesday whether he would follow Daines in endorsing Trump in the 2024 election, dodged the question but praised Daines’s leadership of the NRSC and said their focus is on winning a Senate majority in 2024.
Republicans are facing a favorable map this cycle, with 23 of the 33 seats up for reelection next year being held by Democrats. They see Democratic seats in three red states — Montana, Ohio, and West Virginia — as essential to winning but are recruiting candidates in more competitive races like Pennsylvania as well.
In most of these states, it’s too early to say whether Trump and the majority leader will align. But operatives believe McConnell will not hesitate to put aside bad blood if it helps Republicans pick up Senate seats.
“Where the goal of capturing the Senate majority is mutually beneficial, you’ll see more cohesion than anybody would ever think,” one GOP strategist told the Washington Examiner. “The priority is winning general elections. There’s really nothing else.”
Interests are most likely to align in the race to challenge Sen. Joe Manchin (D) in West Virginia, where McConnell has successfully recruited Jim Justice, the term-limited GOP governor who is expected to announce a bid on Thursday evening.
Justice, perhaps the most popular political figure in the state, is a close ally of Trump and, like Daines, hunts with the former president’s sons. He famously switched to the Republican Party at a Trump rally in 2017.
Trump extended Justice his endorsement in his 2020 reelection bid for governor, yet in 2022, he also backed Rep. Alex Mooney, a West Virginia lawmaker Justice will face off against in the GOP Senate primary next year.
The deciding factor in who Trump endorses this cycle could be Mooney’s benefactors. He is being supported by the Club for Growth, an influential conservative group that spent some $100 million in the 2022 cycle.
David McIntosh, the head of the club, was at one time an ally of Trump’s, but their friendship ruptured after they backed different candidates in Senate races last cycle. Trump is reportedly reluctant to endorse candidates supported by him.
The club has already committed to spending at least $10 million for Mooney in the primary.
“Anywhere that you see the Club for Growth on the map, it seems like a pretty good bet that President Trump will be on the other side,” one GOP strategist told the Washington Examiner.
Trump endorsed in several high-profile contests in 2022, walking away with a mixed record in competitive Senate races. His favored candidates won in states like North Carolina and Ohio, but blame was laid at his feet as flawed candidates he had endorsed in Georgia and Arizona helped cost Republicans the majority.
Last cycle, his endorsement record in GOP primaries was viewed as a test of whether he still held sway over the Republican Party.
But with Trump on the ticket in 2024, the former president has an additional incentive to back electable candidates: keeping Republicans who could be a drag on his candidacy off the ballot.
One state where that could help McConnell is Pennsylvania, where establishment Republicans are courting David McCormick to run for the seat held by Sen. Bob Casey (D).
Trump decided against endorsing McCormick in 2022, instead throwing his support behind the failed candidacy of Dr. Mehmet Oz. But he may end up siding with McConnell, or at least staying neutral, this cycle if Doug Mastriano mounts a Senate run of his own.
Trump announced a last-minute endorsement for Mastriano in the 2022 primary as he ran for governor of Pennsylvania. Mastriano, a vocal election skeptic, was handily defeated by Democrat Josh Shapiro in the general election and trailed Trump’s 2020 vote share in the state considerably.
Trump has soured on Mastriano over his 2022 performance, according to Politico, and has privately fretted that a Mastriano candidacy could weigh down his ticket next year.
“I think Trump wants a winner, but also in this case, I think Trump needs a winner,” a Republican operative told the Washington Examiner. “At the end of the day, Trump needs someone that can run with him on the ticket or outperform him, not someone who is going to underperform him by 14 points.”
Some of the same dynamics could be at play in Montana. Last cycle, Trump endorsed Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-MT), the only Republican so far to enter the Senate race for Democrat Jon Tester’s seat in 2024, but he is backed by the Club for Growth and lost his 2018 race against Tester by 3 points.
That could aid establishment Republicans as they eye two possible candidates viewed as more electable: businessman Tim Sheehy and state Attorney General Michael Knudsen.
In some states, a deep bench of ostensibly strong candidates could prevent McConnell world from colliding with Trump. In Ohio, neither the NRSC nor the Senate Leadership Fund has a preference as three Republicans — Matt Dolan, Bernie Moreno, and Frank LaRose — are expected to duke it out in the GOP primary to challenge Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH).
McConnell world may even be open to aligning with Trump in less obvious places. In Arizona, for example, there has been early talk of Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb, who announced a run for independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s seat earlier this month, being a consensus candidate, though the primary field is still taking shape.
The Republican, an ally of Trump who has cast doubt on the integrity of the 2020 election, has some of the same baggage that presumably hurt Kari Lake and Blake Masters in the state last cycle, but one Republican strategist dismissed the idea that it will hurt his election prospects in a general election.
“To the extent that he brings a professional team around him and runs a campaign that’s designed to win, I have not heard anything overly negative about the guy, and if he surrounds himself with smart people, he’s got as good a shot as anybody,” the strategist said.
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Ultimately, the two sides may avoid conflict altogether if Trump decides not to endorse in certain Senate races. Trumpworld is expected to take a less active role in down-ballot races this cycle as the former president runs for a second term.
“It wouldn’t surprise me if they sort of keep their powder dry on a number of these races, just because they’re in the friend-making business right now among Republicans around the country,” the GOP strategist added.
