This is the point in the 2014 midterm election when each party has to take a hard look at its spending priorities, and redirect its money to the the closest races. And it looks like the National Republican Senatorial Committee has chosen the candidate it’ll cut loose first — Terri Lynn Land of Michigan. David Eggert of the Associated Press reports that the NRSC is canceling $1 million in late October ads that were to run on Land’s behalf. This paves the way for the Democratic candidate, Rep. Gary Peters, to pick up an easy win in the open seat race.
Andrew Prokop is a senior politics correspondent at Vox, covering the White House, elections, and political scandals and investigations. He’s worked at Vox since the site’s launch in 2014, and before that, he worked as a research assistant at the New Yorker’s Washington, DC, bureau.
If you’ve been reading Vox’s Senate forecast roundup, you won’t be surprised by this at all — the most optimistic forecast for Land gave her only a 13 percent chance to win this morning:
Though the Democrats have gotten mostly bad news in the battle for the Senate recently, it's obviously a win for them to be able to put away a once-competitive race. Land's performance has been a major disappointment to Republicans, who initially viewed her as a promising recruit. But after some early awkwardness on the campaign trail and with the press, Land drastically curtailed her campaign schedule, apparently in fear of gaffes. Recently, Dave Catanese of US News had a great roundup of Land's disappearance from the trail, dubbing her "the invisible Senate candidate."
