Former Delaware Republican Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell publicly complained in the final weeks of the campaign that the National Republican Senatorial Committee was not doing enough to help her campaign, which polls all the way to Election Day suggested would fail.
Turns out she may have been on to something. According to NRSC Chairman Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who spoke to The Daily Caller after her defeat was announced Tuesday, the committee had serious doubts about her from the start.
“We were hoping she would be successful, but realistically we knew the numbers were not good,” Cornyn told TheDC. “For every dollar that we put in a place like that we’d have to take it away from Rand Paul or Sharron Angle or Ken Buck. So in the end we had to make those hard decisions.”
Although the NRSC officially supported her, there always appeared to be a hint of reluctancy on the part of establishment Republicans, who viewed the Tea Party-backed candidate with skepticism. The NRSC ended up sinking the maximum donation of $42,000 into her campaign, but not before declining to discuss whether they would support her before the primary election.
O’Donnell’s loss to Democratic candidate Chris Coons was a major blow to Republicans who saw Vice President Joseph Biden’s former Senate seat as a sure thing for Rep. Mike Castle, who fell short in the Republican primaries in September. The pick-up still would not have given Republicans the number of senators needed to assume a majority, but would have served as a symbolic and substantive victory, especially since the GOP won President Obama’s old Senate seat Tuesday night.
When asked if Cornyn personally ever thought O’Donnell actually had a chance to win, even early on, he replied, “I had my doubts.”