I spoke to Audrey Fahlberg of The Dispatch for a piece on the massive partisan cash gap on what it might mean for the midterms.

That said, a fair accounting of 2020 can’t leave out the fact that Republican super PACs were able to make up for Senate GOP incumbents’ lackluster fundraising hauls.

“The Republican incumbents who withstood the green wave had more than sufficient resources to get their message out,” said Liam Donovan—a lobbyist and former Republican National Committee [sic] staffer—of the 2020 Senate cycle. “The fear for Republican challengers here is that they won’t have that money.”

Donovan added that when money gets spent matters too: Locking in television ads earlier in the race helps introduce the candidate to the electorate long before voting is underway. “If you get the hang of this fundraising thing by mid-October, voters are already voting and the airtime you want in the markets you want is not necessarily left,” he said.

Read the full piece here.

I spoke to Ben Jacobs for his New York Magazine piece on Senator Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and his sudden hot streak after a year of frustration and futility.

To Schumer’s credit, he never wrote Manchin off as a lost cause, putting himself in a position to close the deal. “The fact that it took Schumer lacing up his pumps and hitting the last-second buzzer beater, you have to look at that in its own right,” said Liam Donovan, a veteran Republican lobbyist. “You can question the methods, but the execution in the end is really all that matters.”

Read the full piece here.

I spoke to Maggie Haberman for her New York Times piece with Michael Bender on the general election crosscurrents facing Republican candidates as it relates to Donald Trump.

“The optimal scenario for Republicans is for Trump to remain at arm’s length — supportive, but not in ways that overshadow the candidate or the contrast,” said Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist and a former top aide at the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

Mr. Donovan, as well as consultants and staff members working for Trump-backed Senate candidates, said the former president could be most helpful, if he chose, by providing support from his powerful fund-raising machine.

“A big part of the problem is that these nominees emerged from messy fields where the party has been slow to unify,” Mr. Donovan said. “But to fix what ails, what these G.O.P. candidates need isn’t a Trump rally, it’s a MAGA money bomb.”

Read the full piece here.