I spoke to Politico‘s Josh Siegel about the impact of the price at the pump and inflation on the midterm outlook.

Meanwhile, the share of Americans who say inflation is their top voting issue has fallen from 37 percent in July to 30 percent, according to a NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll last month.

“The frog has been boiled slowly to the point where the relatively high inflation and high gas prices are just baked in for voters,” said Liam Donovan, a lobbyist with the firm Bracewell who previously worked for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “The bar was lowered to the floor and now it’s hard for Republicans to make hay of it in the same way as they would have before.”

Read the full piece here.

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.

I spoke to Matt Zeitlin for a Grid News story looking at Democrats’ summer political rebound.

The obvious reason is the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, triggering restrictive anti-abortion laws across the country and reactive ballot referendums in states like Kansas and Michigan.

But there’s another story to tell. The combination of gas prices peaking and the Dobbs decision coming down at nearly the exact same time “synced up in the most optimal way imaginable for Democrats,” Republican lobbyist Liam Donovan told Grid.

…

The decline in gas prices “leaves Republicans in a weird spot where they don’t have the same cudgels,” Donovan said, while the Dobbs decision means “they’re on their heels in other respects.”

Read the full piece here.