National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Rep. Greg Walden (R-OR) doesn’t want to focus on the spats his campaign arm had with now Rep.-elect David Jolly (R-FL).
A day after Jolly won a special election for Florida’s 13th Congressional District Walden got into a spat with MSNBC’s Chuck Todd over previous reporting that said that the NRCC at times fought with the Jolly campaign.
Todd, citing reports that there was “real frustration” between the Jolly campaign and the NRCC asked, “Are you guys going to be able to make up?”
“Chuck, we had a great team on the ground with the Jolly team working together to eke out a very strong win,” Walden responded.
Todd quickly shot back “you called them a Keystone Cops operation, someone in your staff. Somebody in your staff did.”
Then Walden tried to move on from the subject.
“Chuck, let’s not litigate the past, let’s talk about Election Day. That’s the subject, isn’t it?” Walden said before adding that Democrats “are now spinning this is somehow a Republican plus-18 district or something. Come on. What needs analysis is in the end, Republicans won a very crossover district where Barack Obama had won twice. We have a great team, a great partnership with David Jolly.”
Near the end of the campaign Politico reported that things got so heated between Jolly’s campaign and the NRCC over an NRCC ad that the campaign arm threatened to pull out of the race.
“Are you f—ng kidding me?” an NRCC official said in response to criticism of the ad. The official suggested that the Jolly campaign seemed to prefer the NRCC to pull out its funding in the race.
