Live from Music Row Friday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed a top political strategist, Ward Baker in studio to give his analysis on the 2024 senate race and why it’s important.
Leahy: In studio, a very good friend, Ward Baker, a top political strategist in the United States. Ward, just briefly to touch on the presidential primary in 2024, on the Republican side, are they going to do the caucuses in Iowa first?
Ward: Yes. Everything that they’ve talked about so far, Michael on the GOP side, it’s going to be traditional of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada caucus on a Saturday and then it would go into Super Tuesday.
Leahy: That’s significant. And they didn’t follow the lead of the Democrats. And ironically, it looks like setting South Carolina up first on the Democrat side could possibly backfire for Biden.
Baker: I think so.
Leahy: Especially if they follow your advice and have Warnock. (Chuckles) If Warnock is listening, he’s going to say, Ward Baker has a point here. So we’ll see. All right, let’s shift gears now.
Baker: We don’t exactly run in the same circle.
Leahy: No, you don’t. Exactly opposite. But brain power knows no ideology. Right?
Baker: Right. Ward, lay out the 2024 Senate election.
Leahy: Right now, the Senate 51. Fifty-one Democrats, 50 Democrats, and one Independent. Kyrsten Sinema and 49 Republicans.
Baker: When thinking about this is that in 2012, we get smoked. Romney loses. Everyone’s down in the Senate; they thought we were going to win. We came back. We took the majority in 2014. No one thought we could win nine seats, changed the course.
The importance of Senate races is when you look at the board, and you’re looking at races, you choose, congressional races. You can look at, I like Michael Patrick Leahy more than I like Jason. Senate races choose you. So at the end of the day, you have to go in, here’s what we have to do on Senate races.
We can’t have witches, angles, Murdochs, and George Santos-type candidates running because it screws everything up. Not only does it screw it up when you have bad candidates, but if Michael Patrick Leahy or John Doe candidate in this state is a George Santos-type candidate, then the media then goes after everyone else. Do you support them?
Do you agree with them? Was Michael a Super Bowl quarterback? Yes or no? And was George Santos actually at the Battle of the Bulge, yes or no? (Leahy chuckles) On these issues, you have to make sure that you have good candidates so we can’t have any of those things. And so when we look at it, it’s not going to be easy, but it can be done.
Leahy: The map, by the way…
Baker: Favors us.
Leahy: It favors us dramatically more than ever before. How many Democrat seats are up? How many Republican seats are up?
Baker: Overall, there’s 32 up, and there’s 20 Dems that are up. Let’s go through it. Our top opportunities there are some that are not great opportunities. But our top opportunities are West Virginia.
Leahy: Is Manchin going to run again?
Baker: No one knows.
Leahy: He’s a Democrat. Asterisk.
Baker: No one knows what he’s going to do? I think it’s who runs on the other side. I think it’s more about who’s running on the other side. So it’s West Virginia, Montana, Ohio, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, in that order, I think are our best.
Leahy: I completely agree.
Baker: And by the way, Ohio continues to change more and more. They had a great candidate in Tim Ryan who was the Democrat two years ago, who was the last Blue Dog, who was a hunter, and he tried to play that, and he lost. And by the way, he had run and saved money and saved money.
Had $7 or $8 million before he announced. He’d built up this war chest, and his dad was a coal miner. But the demographics and the voting trends of Ohio have changed like they had in Tennessee. Ohio has just taken a little bit longer. We changed before they did. I think Ohio is a top tier. And Sherrod Brown, we’ll get to in a second, is an ultra.
Leahy: He’s a he’s a Democrat.
Baker: Huge liberal.
Leahy: Huge liberal. And the people that I talk to in Ohio say, because he’s been there so long that it’s going to be an uphill battle to beat him.
Baker: It’s too early to see what type of environment we’re going to have, who the president is, and what that looks like. Ohio has to be in play. We have to have good candidates. We have to run a very aggressive offense to put them in the corner and to make them defend their incumbents.
If we’re not recruiting good candidates, then shame on us. We need to challenge more Democrats. Democrats do a great job at this. They are better than we are at this, of putting our people in the corner and making sure we have races.
And oftentimes we don’t challenge them in races. You never know what’s going to happen. So we need to prepare our candidates. Let’s start with Ohio, Michael.
It’s become more Republican-friendly in the last decade. This is a huge pickup opportunity. Brown will not be an easy incumbent to defeat. His wife runs the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which is a liberal newspaper, left wing.
Leahy: We have The Ohio Star up there. We compete with these guys all the time.
Baker: Well, she’s your enemy, Michael. And so she runs it. And so I just find it amazing that he’s a U.S. Senator, and his wife’s running the newspaper. But it’s going to be expensive.
The right candidate can beat Brown, but we have to nominate the right candidate. And we have to realize that what works in Tennessee may not work in Ohio. What works in Ohio may not work in Tennessee.
Leahy: I can tell you exactly; they’re very different states. Ohio and Tennessee. Very different states.
Baker: And when people on national news say, we need the same type of candidate as was said on Fox the other day, running all day. That’s the wrong theme.
Leahy: Fox. Fox. Who are they?
Baker: That’s the wrong theme because when you break it down even further and you look at our great state, which, by the way, our state is doing amazing.
Leahy: It’s the greatest state in the union. It is.
Baker: It is. It’s been here since 1803. 18 three. When you look at but what works in the Tri-Cities doesn’t work in Jackson, what works in Middle Tennessee isn’t the same message in Knoxville. It’s the same thing with these states. And to say we have the same candidate.
We have to have candidates that fit that state to win. Do you want to be in the majority or do you want to be in the minority? Do you want to win or do you want to lose? And that’s what we have.
Leahy: And Ohio has Cleveland and Columbus and Cincinnati and Toledo and Dayton. They’re all different kinds of markets.
Baker: We talked about real quick about Arizona. Arizona is going to be interesting. You have you’ve now got independent Kyrsten Sinema.
Leahy: Krysten Sinema, no longer a Democrat, running as an independent, this Ruben Gallego, so congressman who’s basically Fidel Castro has announced. What are the Republicans going to do?
Baker: You’re going to watch the Dems, including the Dem Senate campaign, try to decide if they’re going to support the eventual nominee, Sinema. What are they going to do? They’re in a little bit of a battle. Do they support the incumbent, who, by the way, many people say,
I don’t always agree with her, but she always lets us know where we are. She’s actually voted more conservative Manchin. She just doesn’t go on TV. She’s still very, very liberal, but she doesn’t promote herself and does that.
So Republicans, if we eat our own there and we beat ourselves up, we need to get a candidate that will be conservative, that will be factual, and that will get out there and talk about the issues.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Ward Baker” by Baker Group Strategies. Background Photo “U.S. Capitol” by Martin Falbisoner. CC BY-SA 3.0.
