Insiders question Senate GOP group’s focus on Montana, big spending

Republican strategists working to flip the Senate are frustrated with GOP party leaders’ strategy and in-house spending, warning that the party may be squandering an opportunity to rack up wins and pad a Senate majority in a year when they benefit from a historically favorable map.

The operatives said the group tasked with winning Senate seats, the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), has focused too intensely on the Senate race in Montana to the detriment of other winnable races — so much so that some have started calling the group the Montana Republican Senatorial Committee. They spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from the national party apparatus.

The NRSC is “obsessively focused on Montana,” one strategist said.

Seven strategists working on Senate campaigns also raised concern about internal spending, from high salaries to expensive dinners listed in the group’s Federal Election Commission (FEC) reports, all while many Republican Senate candidates were being outspent by Democrats on TV advertising over the summer.

“We’re in the middle of a dogfight. Each one of these dollars could go to more television advertising or more mail or door knocking,” said another strategist working on a Senate race.

The NRSC rejected the criticism as the work of disgruntled consultants and pointed to strong fundraising hauls and a novel advertising strategy as proof of its effectiveness. The higher salaries are the result of bringing some highly paid consultants in-house this year, they said, and pricey dinners are par for the course when courting donors.

The committee garnered praise earlier in the cycle for helping avoid some messy primaries — including in Montana — by backing a candidate early. But it is now under immense pressure to deliver a strong performance on Tuesday in red and purple states where their candidates have often trailed Donald Trump.

“We are proud of the work NRSC staff has done this cycle and are focused on winning competitive races during the last week of the campaign,” NRSC spokesman Mike Berg said in a statement.

A focus on Montana

This cycle, Republicans have dreamed not just of winning back the Senate, but of winning big.

The NRSC chairman, Sen. Steve Daines (R-Montana), has urged Republicans to take advantage of “the best map we’ve seen in a decade” to not only grab back the majority but also add several seats as Democrats fight for their political lives in red and purple states.

But the NRSC and other GOP groups have focused on flipping the red state of Montana as the surest path to 51 seats, which some strategists say risks squandering the opportunity to pick up Senate seats in places such as Wisconsin where GOP candidates have been outspent.

Daines and the NRSC’s executive director, Jason Thielman, are both from Montana and have made it a top priority to unseat Democratic Sen. Jon Tester there. The Democrats’ 51-49 advantage now could be reversed if Democrats lose just West Virginia and Montana, and outside GOP groups have also poured money into the race.

Even as polls showed GOP candidate Tim Sheehy pulling away from Tester over the summer and the fall, Republicans stayed all in.

“What is happening in Montana is really pissing off a lot of people in this ecosystem,” said one operative. “They keep spending money in Montana, and to me this feels like the Montana machine making sure that we’re going to spend whatever it takes … to kill Jon Tester 15 times.”

The NRSC has also recently paid for ads in Montana urging voters to oppose a ballot initiative that would replace the state’s party primaries with a single ballot that sends the top four candidates to the general election. That initiative does not affect this year’s Senate race but is seen as a potential headache for Daines when he is up for reelection in 2026. The NRSC has not paid for similar ads in states such as Arizona and Nevada, which also have ballot initiatives on reforming primaries this year.

Berg called the criticism that the committee could be too focused on Montana “absurd” and stressed that the group is also spending significant sums in advertising in battleground states. Sheehy and GOP groups have spent $126 million in the state, compared to Democrats’ $157 million for Tester.

“Right now, Democrats are spending record sums in Montana to smear and destroy Tim Sheehy because it is the most likely seat to give Senate Republicans the majority,” Berg said in written answers to questions for this article. “Of course NRSC is spending money to win the race.”

He defended the ad on the Montana ballot initiative as a way to prevent Democrats from flipping Montana’s Senate seats in the future. “This is an incredibly small investment now to save two Senate seats and hundreds of millions of dollars going forward,” he said.

But some operatives fear that Republicans could lose close “blue wall” races in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania by a percentage point or less due to a lack of adequate investment there. The committee spent about $13 million in joint advertising with Kari Lake in Arizona, a candidate who has often trailed her opponent in the polls, compared to $8.3 million on Dave McCormick in Pennsylvania, according to AdImpact. The committee spent about $9 million with Wisconsin’s Senate candidate, Eric Hovde.

An eye on NRSC spending

These spending decisions have been closely watched by Republican campaign strategists who felt miffed about a new NRSC directive that asked candidates to raise money for the committee to be eligible to receive certain pots of NRSC money. The change was first reported by the NOTUS news website.

Each election cycle, the NRSC shells out a certain amount of money to help Senate campaigns, called coordinated spending, that differs by state. The committee also places “hybrid” ad buys for which it splits the cost with candidates and is able to purchase the ads at the much lower candidate rate. Candidates were told this year they were expected to raise much of the money on their own for the NRSC to qualify for the funds, according to the operatives. The change angered some campaigns, which felt they were being asked to help the NRSC instead of the NRSC helping them.

“You’re essentially telling a candidate to take time off the campaign trail and not only raise money for yourself but for the NRSC,” said one person working on a Senate campaign.

The NRSC hiked pay for its own staff, further angering GOP operatives who felt nickeled-and-dimed by the committee. From the start of 2023 through the first half of October 2024, the NRSC has paid staff over $17.4 million, including lump sum payments to a company that provides retirement and benefits, according to their FEC filings. That’s a 24 percent increase in payroll from the same time in 2022, which totaled $14.1 million. In 2020, payroll totaled $12 million over the same period.

While about half of the payments were routed through a payroll company that provides no details about who received payments, some individuals were directly paid by the NRSC. Their paychecks show huge jumps between 2023 and 2024, which operatives believe is due to large bonuses kicking in. In 2023, Thielman, the NRSC’s executive director, was directly paid an average of about $19,200 a month. So far in 2024, he has received an average of about $30,900 a month. Timothy Edson, the group’s political director, similarly jumped from an average of $11,500 a month in 2023 to $22,300 a month in 2024.

Much of the growth in total payroll can be explained by the NRSC this cycle bringing in-house some roles that used to be paid via contracts, the NRSC said. “The difference between bringing senior positions in-house versus paying vendors is that in-house staff do not have conflicts of interest where double dipping can occur through backroom deals,” Berg said. Senior staffers also took a “pay cut” at the start of the cycle because the committee was millions of dollars in debt, he added.

Spending on food and lodging also jumped from the last cycle — including at fancy venues such as the sushi spot Nobu ($3,915) and the Ritz-Carlton ($13,893). The committee spent over $83,000 this year on travel and food expenses in Nantucket, where they hosted big-dollar fundraisers, compared with just $4,400 in 2022. Overall, the NRSC spent $2.3 million on food and travel costs since the start of 2024, nearly twice its total in 2022. That is separate from the committee’s spending that is marked for events, which explicitly covers the direct costs of hosting fundraisers.

Berg said the food and lodging costs were primarily related to the committee’s fundraising and travel to battleground states. He noted that the committee pays for senators to travel when they fundraise for the NRSC, which also adds to the lodging amount. The Nantucket fundraising event was larger and was attended by more senators than the 2022 event, he said.

“Donors often request meetings at nice restaurants and venues,” Berg said of the restaurant charges.

Assessing ad strategy

GOP insiders also raised questions about the NRSC’s advertising strategy, questioning why the committee has not poured even more money into TV and digital ads, given their strong fundraising performance.

In the 2022 cycle, the NRSC spent $98 million on digital and TV advertising, including joint buys with candidates, while the NRSC reserved or has spent nearly $101 million this time around, according to an AdImpact analysis of projected spending through Election Day.

This does not count $38.6 million in ads reserved through candidates’ joint fundraising committees this cycle. The joint fundraising committee ads, which allow the candidates, the NRSC and sometimes other entities to fundraise together, can buy ads at a far cheaper rate than most outside groups pay, so long as there’s a brief fundraising appeal at the end. Democrats criticize the tactic as a circumvention of campaign finance rules.

While many Senate Republican candidates were dramatically outspent over the summer, many now have had the advantage in advertising over their Democratic opponents for the final weeks of the campaign.

“Republicans have been at parity or have a weight of message advantage in nearly every competitive race in the country for the first time in a decade,” Berg said.

The NRSC has boasted of record fundraising and reported more than $19 million cash on hand in its latest FEC filing. Its Democratic counterpart, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, reported entering the last half of October with $37 million on hand.

Some Republicans involved in Senate races praised the NRSC.

“Any Republican consultant who has the leisure to anonymously attack the NRSC a week before the election is by definition underemployed,” Steven Law, president of the Senate Leadership Fund, a Republican super PAC, said in a statement. “Chairman Daines and his team have run a flawless effort to field high-quality candidates, and their spending strategy has been so brilliant that the Democrats are copying it.”

Ward Baker, who ran the committee in 2016, called GOP operative complaints about the NRSC a “rite of passage.”

“When Chairman Daines, Jason (Thielman), and the team they’ve built retake the Republican Senate Majority on Nov. 5, everyone will forget about this lame attack, and they will be treated as the top-tier operatives they are,” Baker said in a statement.