Establishment Republican strategist Karl Rove attacked highly popular Vice President-elect JD Vance this week for his successful Senate bid in 2022, claiming he was a poor candidate.
Rove’s odd and unprompted insult came in a comment to the New York Times in an article published Thursday about Steven Law stepping down as head of the Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY)-aligned Senate Leadership Fund super PAC:
“There was a candidate running in Ohio who was a terrible fund-raiser and was not a particularly effective candidate and the rest of the Republican ticket is winning by — from 18 to 24 points,” Mr. Rove said. “But JD Vance gets dragged across the finish line by Steven Law.”
In response, senior Trump adviser Chris LaCivita blasted Rove in a post on X, calling him a “gratuitous jackass”:
This is a crappy way to compliment someone - but There is always going to be that one gratuitous jackass spouting BS - some people just can’t help themselves - pic.twitter.com/TCSlgdrocC
— Chris LaCivita (@ChrisLaCivita) December 6, 2024
“This is a crappy way to compliment someone – but There is always going to be that one gratuitous jackass spouting BS – some people just can’t help themselves,” he wrote, sharing a screenshot of the Times article.
Rove’s shot at Vance–who has a +12 percent favorability rating among 18 to 29-year-olds, per a YouGov/Economist poll–comes after Vance slammed Rove as a “slimeball” in 2022, telling then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson that Rove attempted to derail his candidacy by telling donors to back away from him after he earned Trump’s endorsement.
“You know, the slimeball Karl Rove, who shipped a lot of American jobs overseas and got rich in the process and also who sent a lot of Americans to die in stupid conflicts,” Vance said.
“Karl Rove spent a lot of money, he spent a lot of op-eds criticizing my candidacy, he was even calling my donors after Trump endorsed me and encouraging them to drop my campaign.”
He continued [emphasis added]:
In a lot of ways, what this revealed, is that you do have some very corrupt political consultants in the Republican Party who despise their own voters. … A couple of days before the primary — I think we had already kind of locked it up, we were way ahead in the polls — a Republican donor group put two million dollars on TV to attack me, which really didn’t hurt my candidacy against the other Republicans; it actually just hurt me against the Democrats.
My candidacy revealed an incredible amount of corruption in our own party, and I do think that’s one of the things I do have to fight against. Tim Ryan, who I’m running against, is a total fraud, but we also have to fight against the corruption in our own party.
And while Rove hailed Law, saying he has helped Republicans win in every close race in recent years, he neglected to point out that the Senate Leadership Fund (SLF), under Law, reportedly abandoned key Republican nominees in 2022, such as Blake Masters in Arizona and Don Bolduc in New Hampshire.
SLF reportedly canceled $10 million in television ads in Arizona in September 2022 in the home stretch of the election. Masters closed the gap to Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) in polling in October and began showing his first leads in the days before the election, but it proved too late after weeks of early voting. The nearly eight figures in pulled ads undoubtedly hurt Masters’ prospects.
Similarly, SLF reportedly canceled the $5.6 million it committed to help Bolduc in New Hampshire in late October. At the same time, SLF put about a million behind establishment Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) to stave off Trump-backed challenger Kelly Tshibaka in Alaska’s ranked-choice voting Senate race.
With Law stepping down with McConnell, incoming Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) is poised to select his successor, per the Times.
