I spoke to Sam Stein of the Daily Beast about the down-ballot dynamic in the 2020 Senate races and messaging around the pandemic.

The down-ballot Republican Senate candidates seem aware of those risks. In their ads—many of which were released before the most recent jobs report—they often acknowledge the economic hole the country is facing before spotlighting their efforts to help pull their states out of it. In a spot she released earlier this month, Collins called the current situation an “economic crisis” and touted the work she’s done to expand small business loans. In an ad he put out earlier this month, Gardner described the current landscape as “America’s fragile environment” before going through a list of bills he’s helped pass. And in his most recent spot, Tillis explicitly noted that one million North Carolinians are out of work.

“You absolutely need to be careful not to spike the football in the second quarter of the pandemic, with five months and several jobs reports left to go,” said Liam Donovan, a veteran of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “If people need to be convinced of how great things are, the recovery probably hasn’t caught up to them yet, so effective messaging has to be more circumspect.”

Read the full piece here.

I spoke to Morning Consult‘s Eli Yokley about the Lincoln Project and its decision to take on Leader McConnell.

“Their most obvious success has been leveraging the appetite for this sort of content — and a political press thirsty for this particular narrative — into earned media on the cheap,” said Liam Donovan, a former finance strategist at the National Republican Senatorial Committee, in reference to the Lincoln Project’s broader efforts. He said the group’s messaging could be marginally helpful in discouraging ticket-splitting among Trump skeptics but said “polarization has done the vast majority of that work for them.”

Polling suggests that when it comes to media attention, the Lincoln Project is preaching to the choir. The May 22-26 poll found Democratic voters were more likely than Republicans to say they’d seen, read or heard about the super PAC, 30 percent to 19 percent, and those who backed Hillary Clinton for president in 2016 were more likely than Trump voters to say the same. Overall, 8 percent of voters had heard “a lot” about the group, and another 15 percent had heard “something” about it.

Read the full piece here.

I spoke to Colin Wilhelm of Bloomberg Tax about the next phase of the Congressional Covid response.

“Republicans know CARES was not the end of the congressional response, but they clearly don’t feel the same urgency as their blue state counterparts,” said Liam Donovan, a principal at Bracewell LLP in Washington. “You might think of this ongoing pause as walking away from the legislative bazaar—blithely dismissing what they deem a liberal wish list, winding down the clock, and lowering the price on the inevitable next phase.”

Read the full piece here.