Hawley aims to reshape Senate GOP with Vance and MastersPolitico, Nov 4, 2022
The Missouri Republican will spend the last days of the election campaigning on behalf of the Ohio and Arizona candidates,
hoping to gain allies against the mainstream wing of the party.
Josh Hawley doesn’t just want to flip the Senate by electing fellow Republicans Blake Masters and J.D. Vance. He wants to bend the entire GOP conference with a bloc of like-minded senators.
The Missouri senator, who helped convince both candidates to run, will go to Arizona on Friday for Masters, Ohio for Vance on Saturday and then finish the campaign on Monday in Missouri for GOP candidate Eric Schmitt.
The senator who led objections to President Joe Biden’s election win foresees a Senate GOP that is more confrontational toward large corporations and tech companies and less focused on Ukraine aid, and he’s convinced Vance and Masters have proven they’ll be allies in that endeavor.
Republicans have criticized aspects of both campaigns, arguing they didn’t do enough fundraising and took hardline positions that resonate better in primaries than in general elections. That only further persuaded Hawley, who said their persistence in the face of GOP reluctance gave him confidence that they “are going to have some backbone when they get to Washington, and are not going to be co-opted.”
“This is just the opening, the warm-up, in terms of the criticism that they’ll get if they stick to their guns. And they’ve shown me that they can,” Hawley said in an interview.
More:
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/11/04/hawley-senate-elections-vance-masters-00065029
