“House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) is privately telling big-dollar donors that bad candidates for governor and Senate were a top reason the GOP didn’t win more House seats in 2022, emphasizing that quality candidates matter up and down the ticket,” Axios reports.

“The Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to take up former Maryland gubernatorial candidate Dan Cox’s (R) challenge to the timing of officials’ tabulation of mail-in ballots in his election,” The Hill reports.

“An Arizona appeals court has rejected Republican Kari Lake’s challenge of her defeat in the Arizona governor’s race to Democrat Katie Hobbs, denying her request to throw out election results in the state’s most populous county and hold the election again,” the AP reports.

“In a ruling on Thursday, the Arizona Court of Appeals wrote Lake, who claimed problems with ballot printers at some police places on Election Day were the result of intentional misconduct, presented no evidence that voters whose ballots were unreadable by tabulators at polling places were not able to vote.”

A new Stanford Business School study finds that election-denying Republicans in statewide races outperformed their co-partisans in the GOP primary by roughly 2%, while they underperformed in the general election by about 2.3%.

Key takeaway: “The general-election penalty is larger than the margin of victory in battleground states in recent close presidential elections, suggesting that nominating election-denying candidates in 2024 could be a damaging electoral strategy for Republicans.”

“At the same time, it is small enough to suggest that only a relatively small group of voters changed their vote in response to having an election-denying candidate on the ballot.”

A legal group plans to file bar complaints Thursday against four lawyers representing Kari Lake in voter fraud litigation, NBC News reports.

“For two days, Kari Lake traversed this state with a clear message. She falsely claimed the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. She baselessly insisted that votes were rigged against her in her run for Arizona governor last year. And she warned without evidence that future races will be compromised,” the Washington Post reports.

Said Lake: “If you lose, lose with dignity. You shake the other person’s hand and walk away. I didn’t lose, so I’m not doing that.”

“Early last year, the Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg sat for lunch with Rick Caruso, a billionaire mall tycoon who was preparing his run for Los Angeles mayor,” Politico reports.

“Katzenberg told Caruso he understood why he was running. He made clear his support for Congresswoman Karen Bass in the race.”

“And then came the warning: If Caruso took the high road, Katzenberg said that he would, too. But, ‘If you take the low road,’ a person familiar with the conversation recounted, ‘I’m going lower.'”

“The threat was a quintessential demonstration of political power from Katzenberg — one of the country’s premier Democratic donors, and for decades a kingmaker for aspiring politicians. But it also illustrates the nuance with which the former Walt Disney Studios chairman and DreamWorks co-founder was now using his influence.”

“Steve Bannon took election denialism to an unhinged level on his podcast this week, when he didn’t just indulge in the baseless claims of election fraud favored by former President Donald Trump, but went so far as to tell Kari Lake ‘you’re the frickin’ governor of Arizona,’” Mediaite reports.

For those grounded in reality, Lake is not the governor of Arizona.

Amanda Carpenter: “In 2024, nearly half of the Democratic caucus—23 senators—is up for re-election. Of those, eight are considered vulnerable: five in battleground states (Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Virginia) and the other three in solidly red states (Ohio, Montana, West Virginia). Republicans, on the other hand, have only 11 senators up for re-election in the 2024 cycle, and all of them represent states Trump won in 2020…”

“So even though it’s early and elections are unpredictable, the map math is hard to deny: Republicans stand a much better shot of taking control of the Senate than Democrats do of keeping it in 2024.”

Washington Post: “Republican officials in New Mexico knew that Solomon Peña, the man police accused last week of orchestrating shootings into the homes of four Albuquerque Democrats, had served nearly seven years in prison for his role in smash-and-grab thefts before he lost his bid as the GOP nominee for a state House seat.”

“They also knew that Peña was a fervent proponent of the view that the 2020 presidential election was rigged. Authorities said Peña was persuaded that his own election in November had been stolen — despite being defeated by nearly 50 points — and targeted the homes of officials who refused to entertain demands that his loss be reversed.”

“After Peña’s arrest, Republican leaders condemned the attacks, which included a spray of bullets into a 10-year-old’s bedroom, and acknowledged that the former candidate’s criminal history should have been a red flag. There was far less apparent interest in a reckoning over Peña’s beliefs in widespread voter fraud, a false theory pushed relentlessly by former president Donald Trump and his supporters.”

Former Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) “wasn’t on any ballot in 2022, but she was deeply involved in the election anyway through a series of new organizations, millions in GOP-focused donations, and today, a 30-page after-action report on what she says worked for Republicans in Georgia and what didn’t,” the Atlanta Journal Constitution reports.

“Key to Republican wins in 2022, the report says, were a Loeffler-sponsored year-round registration and mobilization effort, messaging about Georgia Republicans’ election law overhaul through Senate Bill 202, and having Gov. Brian Kemp at the top of the GOP ticket.”

“Not mentioned in the report at all is Herschel Walker’s campaign, the lone statewide loss for the GOP.”