Politics

Senate Republicans face challenges as they aim to keep their majority

Published

1 year ago

May 6, 2025

Brian Kemp’s decision not to run for Senate isn’t just a setback for Republicans in Georgia. It is the latest sign that the GOP’s prospects across the Senate map are far less certain than just a few months ago.

It could turn worse, too, as President Donald Trump’s tariffs cause global market chaos ahead of next year’s midterms and a cloudy economic picture comes into fuller view.

Republicans are still widely expected to keep the Senate. But after Kemp and former New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu rejected GOP recruitment efforts — and with hardline conservative Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton primarying the establishment Sen. John Cornyn — the GOP is bracing for a more turbulent cycle than once expected.

That’s not to mention other brewing challenges in Louisiana and North Carolina, where MAGA figures are threatening primaries against longtime incumbents.

“Midterm elections [are] generally tough for the party in power,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said in a brief interview. “I’m always worried.”

There is cause for Johnson’s heartburn. A senior Senate GOP campaign official, granted anonymity like others in this story to discuss the situation candidly, acknowledged he would have loved for both Kemp and Sununu run — and for Paxton to have sat out a Cornyn challenge. But this person and others involved in GOP recruitment efforts argued the party hadn’t been counting on either of the governors — and had considered them longshot recruits even amid heavy efforts to court them.

In Texas, the senior Senate GOP campaign hand said there will be a “serious effort” to ensure Cornyn is the nominee. The senator recently brought on former Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio to burnish his MAGA credentials, according to two people familiar with the decision. GOP senators wanted to keep Paxton out of the race, maneuvering to undercut him before his launch and urging Trump to endorse Cornyn, a close ally of leadership and former chair of the Senate’s campaign arm.

It remains unclear if Trump or the White House will ask Paxton to stand down. Advisers in the White House are aware he’s a political liability — and that Texas is an expensive state to campaign in.

Republicans could have another unwanted primary on their hands in Michigan, where Rep. Bill Huizenga is mulling whether to join former Rep. Mike Rogers in seeking retiring Sen. Gary Peters’ seat.

As for Georgia, Republicans are deemphasizing any despair over Kemp by pointing to the growing field of potential candidates emerging from both the House and state government.

Democrats are salivating over the possibility that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) could mount the bid she was already flirting with before Kemp announced his plans. But GOP senators continued on Tuesday to downplay concerns that the MAGA firebrand could tank their chances.

“I’m encouraged by the fact there’s a lot of interest,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Tuesday in response to a question about whether the GOP could flip the seat if Greene is the nominee. “I expect Georgia will be a competitive race. We’ll be close to the end. But I think it’s a race that we can win.”

Democrats see Republicans’ failure to recruit Kemp and Sununu as evidence that even quality GOP candidates do not want to spend a grueling cycle answering for Trump’s policies — particularly surrounding the economic fallout from his tariffs.

Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee spokesperson Maeve Coyle said in a statement that “every GOP candidate will be forced to answer for Trump’s harmful agenda” in 2026, and the party’s “disastrous start to the year” puts Democrats on the offensive, even as they face a tough map.

“Senate Democrats are positioned to win seats in 2026,” she said.

But Democrats have long been facing a bleak outlook at retaking the Senate — one made even darker by a series of retirements. The party has limited pickup opportunities: Just one seat up next year is held by a Republican in a state that former Vice President Kamala Harris won in 2024. And Democrats have four open seats to defend between battleground Michigan and a trio of bluer states.

National Republican Senatorial Committee spokesperson Joanna Rodriguez said in a statement that Republicans broadly “must hold every red seat and chase opportunities in toss-up states like Georgia, Michigan and New Hampshire.” And in Georgia, which Trump won in 2024, “we remain confident a Republican will beat pro-impeachment Democrat Jon Ossoff in 2026.”

Some senators, including former NRSC chair Rick Scott of Florida, suggested Republicans’ recruitment misfires were more telling of how prospective candidates sized up the job in Washington compared to their executive roles back home.

“I don’t think it’s about chances, I think it’s about: they know how difficult this job is,” the former Florida governor said in an interview. Governors “get to be the executive and lead the state. The legislative process is a lot harder, especially up here. I think it probably reflects more how difficult it is to get a result up here.”

And GOP senators defaulted to arguing that Democrats still face a more challenging map.

“I would much rather have the Republican side of this map than the Democrat side of this map,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said in an interview, while acknowledging that it was “unfortunate” Kemp and Sununu passed and that they would have “been very strong candidates.” (Cruz, who won an upset against former Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison in 2012, is so far declining to endorse in the primary in his state.)

Still, multiple Republican senators and operatives acknowledge their overall efforts hinge on the economy as they wait to see how Trump’s tariffs land.

“I don’t think there’s going to be a problem — it depends on the economy, obviously,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, who has been considering a run for governor rather than seek reelection next year, said in an interview. “It depends on how President Trump does in the next 12 months.”

Jay Williams, an Alpharetta, Georgia-based GOP strategist, said his party could face a further darkening outlook.

“I think ultimately it’s going to come down to the economy and at that time, and how scared Republicans are,” Williams said. “If things economically are going well, you’ll get to the social issues [playing more a deciding factor]. If things are really bad economically, I think it’s gonna be tough for Republicans. Like, I don’t know how you slice it any other way.”

Williams added, “Never underestimate Republicans’ ability to pull defeat from the jaws of victory.”

Brakkton Booker and Andrew Howard contributed to this report.

Politics

World Cup fuels ticketing reform demands

Published

7 hours ago

June 21, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Demands are growing for a political reckoning over ticket scams at the World Cup — and beyond.

The National Independent Venue Association and Fan Alliance, organizations representing and advocating for entertainment venues and artists respectively, sent a joint letter to Congress on Thursday, calling on lawmakers to ban speculative and ghost tickets, cases where resellers flog tickets they don’t actually have.

The letter — addressed to Speaker Mike Johnson, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer — includes nearly two dozen accounts of fans who say they were scammed out of thousands of dollars trying to get tickets to the World Cup, which began last week. The groups are also asking fans to share their own stories with elected officials via the Fix the Tix Fan Action Center that launched last week.

“Every one of these stories erodes the public’s faith that consumers should and will be protected from fraud,” NIVA Executive Director Stephen Parker and Fan Alliance founder Donald Cohen wrote. “We urge Congress to work with us to prevent fraud like this in the future and finally enact ticket resale consumer protections that will protect Americans and ensure affordability.”

The letter flagged fans like Dacy Gillespie, who bought World Cup tickets for her sons on Christmas, only to learn on match day — months later — that the seller couldn’t deliver them. And Skylie Shore, who Parker and Cohen said spent well over $6,000 on tickets to the Scotland-Haiti match on June 13, but was forced to wait outside the stadium because she couldn’t access them as fans marched in on gameday.

“These examples reveal a consistent pattern: consumer deception, speculative ticket sales, and broken-hearted American families at the hands of resale ticketing companies like StubHub,” Parker and Cohen wrote.

In a statement, StubHub spokesperson Jack Sterne said that the platform does not allow speculative ticket sales, and blamed FIFA for users’ difficulty in accessing their tickets.

“We understand that attending the World Cup represents a significant investment in time and money, and we take our responsibility to every fan who books through our platform seriously,” Sterne said in a statement. “Many of the issues fans are facing trace back to the event organizer’s technology infrastructure, newly announced transfer restrictions, and a new app that was launched just a month ago.”

In response, FIFA said in a statement that the organization “can guarantee the validity and delivery of tickets purchased through its official platforms” and that FIFA.com/tickets “is the official ticket sales channel” for the tournament.

NIVA and Fan Alliance are urging congressional leadership to place universal price-gouging limits on ticket resale, enact stringent fines on perpetrators and a violation-reporting mechanism for ticket scams, and require secondary ticketing platforms to produce data on ticket fulfillment and consumer complaints.

The groups are not the only ones monitoring for evidence of shady ticket practices. Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway issued a consumer guidance in advance of the tournament, urging match-goers to beware of fraud and promising to hold offenders accountable. And the FBI in May put out a public service announcement, warning fans against purchasing tickets on copycat websites modeled on FIFA’s.

“With the World Cup coming to Kansas City, excitement is high and, unfortunately, so is the potential for fraud,” Hanaway said in her statement. “Missourians should be able to enjoy this once-in-a-generation event without fear of being deceived. My office will hold accountable anyone who seeks to exploit our families, and we stand ready to assist anyone who encounters suspicious activity.”