“Ernst and Gardner are the two best candidates Republicans put forward this year,” says a conservative operative who has been involved in all the Senate races. “They are running in tough states where the Left has been ascendant recently, but they refused to be drawn into the traps and the usual narratives that Republicans often get drawn into.”
In Arkansas, Rep. Tom Cotton is not the natural campaigner that Ernst and Gardner are. But he has a background voters genuinely admire, going from a tiny Arkansas town to the Ivy League to the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. And Cotton has gotten better on the stump by the day; like his fellow candidates in Colorado and Iowa, he just doesn’t fit the ugly image Democrats tried to impose on him.
Republican strategists place Ernst, Gardner, and Cotton at the top of the 2014 roster. But other GOP candidates — some winning, some losing — have run solid campaigns and avoided the horrendous mistakes that hurt the party in years past.
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