(CNN) --
This, from a story in
The New York Times
, is a stunner:
"Along with [Doug] Mastriano in Pennsylvania, the Trump-backed gubernatorial candidates in five other states - Arizona, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts and Michigan - have not aired TV ads since winning their primaries."
To expand, and explain: In six gubernatorial races, in some of the largest and most competitive states in the country, the Republican candidates had not aired a single general election television ad as of Monday, September 26.
In Arizona, Republican candidate Kari Lake released her first television ad since she won the primary on August 2, through Tuesday the 27th.
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And then there's this fact: Every one of those six candidates was endorsed in their party races by former President Donald Trump.
Taking these two pieces of information into account, we see the problem for Republican strategists: Trump-backed candidates are very likely to win the GOP primary, given the influence the former president continues to wield over the party's faithful.
But those candidates often seem ill-equipped to run the kind of professional (and well-funded) operation required to win over voters in a general election.
Take the example of Mastriano's candidacy in Pennsylvania.
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Mastriano rose to fame/infamy as one of the strongest voices pushing the false notion that the 2020 election had been stolen from Trump.
He took several busloads of people to the "Stop the Steal" rally on Jan. 6, 2021, though he said he never entered the Capitol building that day.
Trump's support, coupled with Mastriano's strength among the party's base and a well-attended Republican primary, gave him victory in the May primary.
But since he became the candidate, Mastriano has shown almost no willingness to adapt his campaign to the different challenges posed by the general elections.
He speaks mainly to the conservative media and travels in a kind of protective bubble.
Meanwhile, his Democratic opponent, state Attorney General Josh Shapiro, has flooded the radio with ads, painting Mastriano as too extreme.
As CNN first reported in September,
Shapiro grossed $25.4 million between June 7 and September 19.
Mastriano raised approximately $3.2 million during the same period.
Polls suggest that the budget disparity in the race has had an impact.
A new Marist poll released Sept. 27 shows Shapiro at 53% to Mastriano's 40% among registered voters, a stunning double-digit lead in a state that has been so close in each of the last two races. presidential.
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The story is similar in Michigan, where Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer was considered, at the start of the 2022 election cycle, quite vulnerable.
But Republican candidate Tudor Dixon has sat with her arms crossed as Whitmer defines the race on television.
Asked by reporters recently how he envisioned winning the race without running ads, Dixon replied, "Oh, we'll run ads at the right time, but don't worry, we'll win."
Elections in Maryland, Massachusetts and Illinois have always been more difficult for Republicans due to the fundamentally Democratic nature of those states.
But huge disparities in fundraising -- and advertising spending -- have put this election far out of reach for the GOP.
Republicans appear to have a chance to win in Arizona.
And that may be due to the fact that Lake, as a former local TV anchor, is easily identifiable and therefore needs less money (and advertising time) to present herself to voters.
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Of course, Trump could help solve this problem, or at least mitigate it.
He has more than $90 million in his Save America Political Action Committee, which he could spend on ads to bolster the underfunded Mastriano and Dixon candidacies.
To date, he has not done so, although his allies created a new committee last week to support his candidates.
His lack of advertising activity underscores the inherently self-serving nature of Trump's endorsement.
He wants to celebrate his candidate's victory in the primary, but he's much less interested in doing what it takes to help those candidates win the general election.
In several of these cases, Trump supported a candidate in the primary with much less proven appeal to a general election audience and without a proven track record of being able to raise money and run a serious and credible campaign.
And now Republicans are facing the consequences of those decisions.
Republican candidates midterms