How the Senate GOP scored a top recruit and widened its path to a majority

Larry Hogan may not be running for Senate this year, but because of a letter he received in early January.

The popular former Republican governor of Maryland had rejected years of pleas and lobbying from a parade of powerful Republicans. But when he received an e-mail letter on Jan. 8 from a lifelong Maryland resident that appealed less to partisanship than to a call to public service, Mr. Hogan responded within an hour — with an invitation via a assistant for a private meeting in Annapolis.

The letter’s author, Darin Thacker, was not a regular voter. He is the chief of staff to the chairman of the GOP Senate campaign arm.

Once Mr. Hogan broke open a locked door, Mr. Thacker quickly informed his boss of his personal outreach, setting in motion a frantic three-week sprint of private meetings and polling. Mr. Hogan finally pulled off a dramatic upset during the racing hours before the Feb. 9 filing deadline. The decision caused a real shock in the Senate landscape, which was already heavily tilted towards Republicans in 2024.

“Without that letter, I don’t think Larry Hogan is in the race,” said Mr. Thacker’s boss, Senator Steve Daines of Montana, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. People close to Mr. Hogan agreed.

Hogan’s recruitment capped months of quiet success for Mr. Daines and Senate Republicans, after more than a decade of recruiting disappointments, failures and outright self-sabotage.

The group’s previous attempts to intervene in primaries have often led to infighting. Attempts to be more hands-off have also backfired. The result is a series of battered, broke and bad candidates who have underscored a years-long power struggle between the party’s right-wing base and the old guard establishment. There was Christine O’Donnell’s denial that she was a witch in 2010, Roy Moore’s denial that he was a sexual predator in 2017, and Herschel Walker’s denial that he paid for a woman’s abortion years ago in 2022.

In 2024, the Republican Party appears to be on the verge of avoiding nasty primaries in several states, including Montana, Pennsylvania and Nevada. Mr. Daines has helped bridge the divide between Republicans and Republicans, especially between the party’s Donald J. Trump bloc and forces aligned with Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader who has not been in a relationship with the former president since 2020 has spoken. Daines was the leading Republican in the Senate in early 2023 to support Trump, forging an important alliance.

Mr. Daines traveled to Mar-a-Lago shortly after his selection as Republican Senate chairman and said he told Mr. Trump that “one of the most important things we can offer you as president in January 2025 is the Republican majority is. Since then, he has had frequent contact with the Trump operation.

Democrats are already running out of room to make mistakes to maintain control of the Senate in 2024. The party currently holds 51 seats and has already functionally lost one when Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat, retired in West Virginia. (His departure came after Republicans successfully recruited the state’s popular Republican governor, Jim Justice, to run against him).

Now Democrats would have to win every remaining competitive race to retain just a bare minimum of 50 seats. The party is defending two seats in red states (Ohio and Montana) and in a slew of presidential battlegrounds (Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania). Maryland is widely seen as a reach for Republicans, but is no longer a state that Democrats can simply ignore.

Currently, no Republican-held Senate seats are considered threatened.

“Obviously the odds are against you if you have to take the lead,” said Justin Barasky, a Democratic strategist who covers Senate races. But he noted that the party “just did that last election” and won one seat in 2022 when widespread losses were expected.

The McConnell team had taken a serious swipe at the previous chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Senator Rick Scott of Florida. He had taken a non-interventionist approach, but had worked closely with the Daines team. Mr. Daines has brought a disarmingly simple philosophy to candidate recruitment.

“It’s about finding candidates who can win both the primaries and the general election,” he said.

In some cases, this formula has translated into strong-arming more extreme candidates. In Pennsylvania, Mr. Daines publicly denounced Doug Mastriano, a failed 2022 candidate for governor, while other Republican senators lobbied the state party to support David McCormick, a former hedge fund executive who lost a 2022 Senate primary.

In others, the strategy of recruiting candidates who can win both primaries and general elections has led to resignation among the Republican base. In Arizona, the party is now backing Kari Lake, who lost a bid for governor and made denying the 2020 election results a central part of her candidacy.

In Ohio, the party has stayed out of the primaries entirely, arguing that all three leading Republicans could topple Sen. Sherrod Brown, the Democratic incumbent, in the increasingly conservative state. Those primaries also have the advantage of taking place very early in the year – March 19 – giving the eventual nominee ample time to campaign against Mr. Brown.

Perhaps the best test case was Montana, Daines’ own state and home to one of the country’s most crucial Senate races: the battle for Senator Jon Tester’s seat. Mr. Tester has proven to be a durable Democrat in a conservative state.

Mr. Daines recruited Tim Sheehy, a former Navy SEAL and business owner, introduced him to the former president at Mr. Trump’s Bedminster property and brought him to a Trump rally in South Dakota. Mr. Sheehy met again with the former president in Nevada the day before Representative Matt Rosendale, a right-wing alternative who Daines’ team had publicly argued was unelectable, entered the race.

Mr. Trump endorsed Mr. Sheehy the next day and immediately deflated Mr. Rosendale’s candidacy. He soon quit the race.

Steven Law, leader of the main Republican super PAC in the Senate, called the approval “a cannonball into the shallow end of the pool.”

“That was decisive,” Mr. Law said, “and 100 percent the result of Senator Daines cultivating that relationship with President Trump.”

The one-two punch of Mr. Hogan’s submission and Sheehy’s endorsement — on the same day — was a cause for celebration at the National Republican Senatorial Committee’s donor retreat at the Breakers hotel in Palm Beach, Florida. Some officials popped champagne.

Mr. Barasky, the Democratic strategist, said Republicans were celebrating far too early.

“They have mistakenly believed that they would solve their candidate quality problems by recruiting candidates with weak or no ties to the state in which they operate,” Mr. Barasky said, referring to Mr. Sheehy and Mr. McCormick.

For Republicans, the tone was set in battleground Indiana, which had one of the first Senate seats of 2024 without a sitting president.

Representative Jim Banks quickly jumped into the race. He was a favorite of the anti-tax group Club for Growth, which often sparred with Republican Senate leadership, and of the Trump family, including former Donald Trump Jr. Indiana Gov. Mitchell E. Daniels, who was considering a run and fit. the model of a traditional recruit, and he made a trip to Washington to discuss a possible run with Mr. McConnell.

That same day, Mr. Daines met with Donald Trump Jr. at the Capitol Hill Club in Washington. (“We fish and hunt together,” Mr. Daines said of their relationship). The message was clearly communicated that month that the party would support Mr. Banks, and Mr. Daniels opted for a run.

Josh Holmes, Mr. McConnell’s top political adviser for many years, said Mr. Daines’ early support for the former president had proven “very smart.”

“To succeed in that job you have to be able to communicate clearly with every constituency in the party, and the largest constituency is Trump,” Mr. Holmes said.

Mr. Holmes was recently a middleman in talks for a McConnell endorsement of Mr. Trump and was also part of Hogan’s recruitment, traveling to Annapolis in the final days before the filing deadline.

Mr. Thacker’s letter, first reported by The Washington Post, was just the beginning. The Senate GOP quickly ordered a poll, which Mr. Thacker took to Annapolis on Jan. 17, that showed Mr. Hogan with a lead, giving Republicans a chance to win a Senate seat for the first time in a generation in Maryland to run.

But Mr. Hogan, who declined to comment through a spokesman, wanted his own pollster to get involved, so the party paid for a second investigation. Still, Mr. Hogan considered his options until the final days.

Mr. Hogan had previously run for president in 2024 on the No Labels ticket, which could have complicated Mr. Trump’s election. The former president is not expected to comment on Mr. Hogan’s Senate candidacy. as Axios reportedalthough Mr. Hogan has sharply criticized Mr. Trump in the past.

Democrats remain convinced that Maryland will not be competitive. David Bergstein, the communications director for the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, noted that Democrats have won every Senate race there for more than four decades. “A vote for Larry Hogan is a vote to put Mitch McConnell in charge of the Senate, and that is a losing argument in this state,” he said.