Epidemic of Bozo Behavior Strikes Republican Senate Candidates Who Were Supposed to Be Boring

The story of 2022’s Senate races was that Republicans—at Donald Trump’s urging—botched several eminently winnable races by nominating various goofballs (Herschel Walker in Georgia), weirdos (Blake Masters in Arizona), and Dr. Oz-es (Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania). In a word, the GOP had a bozo problem.

The story of this cycle was supposed to be that Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and National Republican Senate Committee Chair Steve Daines of Montana, having seized the wheel back from Trump, were going to use the party’s resources to guide the nomination of more conventional Republican candidates—business owners and military veterans and so forth who had established ties to local political networks and proven histories of acting presentable.

And it was working, up to a point. While loose-cannon MAGA ex-newscaster Kari Lake is poised to win nomination in Arizona, the presumptive nominees in other flippable seats are figures like West Virginia’s Jim Justice (a local coal oligarch and the state’s current governor), Wisconsin’s Eric Hovde (a banking and real estate guy whose father served in the Reagan administration), and Montana’s Tim Sheehy (a Navy veteran who founded a company that fights forest fires). Pennsylvania’s nomination is shaping up to go to David McCormick, a relatively boring hedge fund executive, and Ohio’s primary winner was Bernie Moreno, who’s a bit Trumpy in his positions but is also a polished public figure who was already known for owning luxury car dealerships and being a civic booster in Cleveland. In Michigan, there’s Mike Rogers, a former FBI agent and member in good standing of the Washington national security establishment.

So, is it going to be smooth sailing from here to a Senate majority? Maybe not! In the past week, both Wisconsin’s Hovde and Montana’s Sheehy have gotten involved in some real bozo-like situations.

First, Sheehy. On Saturday, the Washington Post published a report about a suddenly controversial bullet in the candidate’s right arm. Sheehy had said while campaigning that the bullet is there because he was shot during combat in Afghanistan—but the Post found that he told a ranger at Glacier National Park in October 2015 that he’d been hit in the arm by a round from his own handgun when it fell to the ground.

What Sheehy is saying now, though, is that the story he told the ranger was actually a lie. He says that he was in fact wounded in Afghanistan in 2012, but never reported it because he thought he’d been struck by friendly fire and didn’t want his platoonmates to be subjected to an investigation. In 2015, he says, he hurt himself while hiking in Glacier National Park, and subsequently told medical personnel about the old bullet lodged in his arm—requiring him to come up with a cover story to tell the ranger about how it got there because he still didn’t want to rat on the individuals he served with. According to his campaign, the Post’s investigation into the matter is “an attempt to question Sheehy’s service.”

There are a few problems with Sheehy’s current story:

• Sheehy himself published a book in 2023 in which he said he was shot in Afghanistan when a bullet fired by a fellow service member ricocheted into his arm, which raises the question of exactly how committed he really was to preventing anyone from looking into whether he had been hit by friendly fire. (He now says that he was less concerned about the possibility in 2023 than he was in 2015 because more time had passed.)

• The Post spoke to a trauma surgeon who reviewed an X-ray image of the object lodged in Sheehy’s arm and says it appears more likely to have been fired by a low-velocity firearm like a handgun—suggesting that what Sheehy told the ranger was, in fact, true—than to be an assault weapon round that ricocheted off another object.

• Sheehy has not provided any witnesses to his alleged 2015 fall while hiking, released medical records related to the incident, or given permission to the personnel who treated him at the time to discuss their recollections of his injury. (He did connect the Post with a former member of the military who served under him and who says he remembers Sheehy telling him about being struck by friendly fire.)

More to come on this one, perhaps.

Rolling Stone reported in March, meanwhile, that Hovde (the Wisconsin candidate) said in 2017 that if it were up to him, it would be illegal to sell alcohol commercially. That’s a funny thing to have on your record in the beer-saturated forests and plains of Wisconsin, but probably not the kind of thing that really raises voters’ doubts about judgment or character. This, though:

The context of the remark is that an interviewer, Fox News Radio’s Guy Benson, asked Hovde on April 5 whether the 2020 election was “stolen.” Though the candidate declined to use that descriptor, he also said there was evidence that “troublesome” irregularities took place during voting, such as high rates of participation at nursing homes. Whose occupants, he implied, are too feeble—basically already dead, really!—to plausibly cast ballots of their own volition.

Whether or not nurses and health aides conspired to elect Joe Biden—our money is on no—this conflation of physical frailty and mental incompetence might not endear Hovde to his state’s aging population. He and Sheehy are also both relative unknowns in their states who are running against longtime incumbents (Wisconsin’s Tammy Baldwin and Montana’s Jon Tester). Both are trailing in the latest polls. They’ve got minimal margins for error, and would be advised—probably have been advised, by Grandpa Mitch—to get back ASAP to the winning work, in a post-inflationary world of general disgruntlement with Democrats, of being as boring as possible.