For months, Republican leaders watched in horror as hordes of their most sought-after midterm recruits passed on running, spooked by what increasingly looked like an electoral beatdown in the making.

But leading GOP officials in recent weeks have seen their fortunes brighten — if only slightly — and the party is now scrambling to take advantage by luring otherwise reluctant candidates back into targeted races across the country. On Friday, they notched their most significant success yet when Rep. Kevin Cramer reversed his earlier decision, and months of waffling, by announcing his challenge to North Dakota's Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp. And in Florida, Gov. Rick Scott now appears almost certain to take on Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson, in another recruiting coup — and sigh of relief — for Republicans.


Their task could not be more urgent. In at least seven of the 10 races in which Democratic senators are defending states won by Donald Trump in 2016, and roughly half a dozen gubernatorial contests, the long-expected GOP front-runners decided not to run in recent months. There’s still time to turn things around, but with the filing deadline in many states creeping up, Republicans' window to field top-flight candidates is closing.

Party officials have feared that pattern — matched with the historic number of GOP retirements in the House — was attributable to a growing Democratic backlash against Trump. So the recent good news, they believe, provides a rare opening.

“Republicans are in a little bit of a better situation than they have been in other potential wave years. But did we know that six or eight months ago, when a lot of these candidates had to really make these decisions about whether they had to run?” asked former Ohio GOP Chairman Matt Borges, skeptically. “I can’t honestly tell you that people are not concerned about this political environment. I think we’re all appropriately concerned about it.”

Aside from North Dakota and Florida, Republicans are closely monitoring machinations in the Missouri Senate race, and pushing to find the right candidate in potentially winnable gubernatorial races from Connecticut to Minnesota.

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Until now, it’s been one bad news story after another for Republicans on the recruitment front.

Not every top-tier choice who declined was formally recruited by party leaders in Washington, but each was widely expected to consider or mount a serious run before they stepped away from the fray, and those switches forced Republicans to retool their game plans in state after state. Furthermore, the absence of a strong front-runner candidate in many of these contests set up a series of uncomfortable GOP primaries the party would have rather avoided.

In Indiana, which Trump won by 19 points, long-favored Rep. Susan Brooks surprised many in January 2017 by passing on a chance to oust first-term Democratic Sen. Joe Donnelly. That triggered a nasty three-way primary between longtime rivals Reps. Luke Messer and Todd Rokita, as well as self-funding state Rep. Mike Braun.

A month after Brooks’ surprise decision, Wisconsin Rep. Sean Duffy did the same, leaving state Sen. Leah Vukmir and Delafield veteran Kevin Nicholson to duke it out in their own escalating primary contest for the right to take on Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin.

The landscape looks similar in two other Midwestern states that unexpectedly voted for Trump in 2016: In Pennsylvania, Rep. Lou Barletta became the front-runner — and the White House’s top hope to replicate Trump’s success in the state — only after the favored Rep. Pat Meehan decided against challenging Sen. Bob Casey. (That was probably a blessing for Republicans, since Meehan later announced he wouldn’t seek reelection amid a sexual harassment scandal.)

In Michigan, Rep. Fred Upton passed on a bid against Sen. Debbie Stabenow after serious consideration, and GOP leaders — including super PAC chief Steven Law, a top ally of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell — even encouraged musician Robert Ritchie (aka Kid Rock) to jump in before he, too, declined.

The list goes on. In Montana, where Trump won by 21 points, Ryan Zinke disappointed some local Republicans by signing up as Trump’s Interior secretary rather than running to unseat Sen. Jon Tester. State Attorney General Tim Fox then passed on a long-expected campaign of his own once it became clear he might have an easier shot at the governor’s mansion in 2020. Now, at least four Republicans are competing for the slot.

In Virginia and Minnesota — battlegrounds where Trump fell short in 2016 — top GOP lawmakers ducked away from the chance to challenge Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and new Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.), as well as Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.).

And in Missouri, Rep. Ann Wagner in July opted against a challenge to Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill despite raising significant campaign cash in early 2017. Her exit then opened the door for state Attorney General Josh Hawley to step in, but some local Republicans who are dissatisfied with his campaign’s early days have now encouraged Wagner to reconsider, frustrating national GOP leaders who had hoped for an easy path to victory in a state that Trump carried by 18 points.

Republicans have avoided the pattern in other key states. Many are confident Florida's Scott will soon announce a Senate bid, and they were happy to see both Rep. Evan Jenkins and state Attorney General Patrick Morrisey run against West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin. In Arizona, Rep. Martha McSally is seen as a strong contender to succeed retiring Republican Sen. Jeff Flake.

Those developments have bolstered party leaders’ confidence that they’ll be able to keep the chamber, especially since they still must defend far fewer seats than Democrats, and many of their targets are in reliably conservative territory.

“No one bats 1.000,” said Rob Jesmer, a former executive director of Senate Republicans’ campaign arm. “But generally speaking, we have a decent slate of candidates.”

Plus, Republican concern over far-right primary challengers to incumbents sponsored by former White House strategist Steve Bannon has faded in recent weeks, freeing them to focus on a handful of targeted races where they can go on offense.

“Democrats want their donors to believe they have a real chance at taking back the Senate, [but] for all the chatter about recruiting, if I look at the landscape, what we’re trying to do is hold the majority, and [we] have the pieces on the board,” said Republican strategist Scott Jennings, who is close to McConnell.

In gubernatorial races, Democrats have had troubles finding top candidates of their own in a handful of high-profile contests, including in Michigan and Wisconsin, while Republicans were relieved to land their first picks in swing states like Ohio and Nevada. But, forced to defend 26 of the 36 governors’ mansions up for grabs in 2018, the GOP’s recruiting shortfalls still outnumber their successes.

National Republicans are now banking on former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty — most recently a bank lobbyist — to run for his old seat, after Hennepin County Sheriff Rich Stanek said in May he would not, leaving a wide-open field. Their chances to keep Maine in Republican hands were decimated after Sen. Susan Collins decided in October to stay in the Senate rather than try to replace Gov. Paul LePage. And a complicated primary has emerged in Pennsylvania — the one Trump-voting state held by a Democratic governor up for reelection this year — after one-time front-runner Rep. Mike Kelly opted in May against a run of his own against Gov. Tom Wolf.

In New York, even though Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s approval rating has fallen, a parade of Republicans has chosen not to challenge him — disappointing Republican leaders eager to make Cuomo sweat before he considers a presidential bid. At the same time, California’s GOP now appears likely to fall short of having any Republicans on the general election ballot for governor or senator — potentially dooming down-ballot GOP candidates there.

GOP leaders are still hoping to field a prominent challenger to Democratic Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo. And they’re similarly trying to ensure Connecticut’s messy primary to replace unpopular outgoing Gov. Dannel Malloy irons itself out after the state Senate’s Republican leader announced he wouldn’t run in August and his state house counterpart did the same last month.

Still, nowhere was the search for a candidate more tortured than in North Dakota, a state Trump won by 36 points. Cramer had entered 2017 as Heitkamp’s top likely challenger, but local Republicans began looking elsewhere late last year as he waffled on a run amid a series of gaffes. Then, when a pair of local leaders passed, they again turned to Cramer, who even met with Trump about a run before declining to jump in last month. The back-and-forth infuriated party leaders who saw Heitkamp’s seat as a no-brainer pickup opportunity.

“North Dakota is a problem, and they feel like he kind of jerked people around a little bit,” said Jennings this week.

Still, the saga was not over yet. On Tuesday, the Washington Examiner published opposition research on state Sen. Tom Campbell — the post-Cramer front-runner — forwarded to the publication by a “party operative.” Shortly after, former state party Chairman Gary Emineth dropped out of the race, saying Cramer would run, after all.

This was news to both local and national Republicans. The last they had heard, Cramer was — again — listening to entreaties from officials begging him to run. On Feb. 9, he told local reporters he was “mildly reconsidering.”

One week later, he was in.

