The newly anointed Republican nominee for the Nevada Senate race, Sam Brown, has a curious history with political campaigns: He has run for office in two states.

In 2014, Brown ran for a seat in the Texas House of Representatives, but he lost in the primary and faded into obscurity. But eight years later, he reemerged to run for U.S. Senate in Nevada, only to lose the primary again in 2022. He quickly launched a second Senate campaign, and on Tuesday, he finally secured the GOP nomination to take on Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV) in November in a race that is expected to be highly competitive.

Brown has a compelling story to tell. He is a West Point graduate who was deployed to Afghanistan, where he was severely burned by a fire caused by an improvised explosive device. His recovery from the injury is inspirational, to say the least, and he has built a successful life for himself since his retirement from the military. By any objective measure, he is the kind of candidate with a personal story that voters gravitate toward and reward at the ballot box.

But Brown still carries a major electoral liability. Regardless of his inspiring personal story, he is still very much a carpetbagger who moved to Nevada for the purpose of running for office. And he is not the only one. A number of other Republican Senate candidates have tenuous ties to the states they hope to represent.

Businessman Eric Hovde is the leading candidate to be the Republican nominee for Senate in Wisconsin, and while he grew up in the Badger State, he has spent the better part of the last decade living in California. And in Montana, Republican nominee, businessman, and Navy veteran Tim Sheehy only moved to the state within the last 15 years.

The 2024 Senate elections are a golden opportunity for the Republican Party to not only take control of the upper chamber but to cement control to the point that Democrats will struggle to win it back for quite some time. And National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman Steve Daines (R-MT) has worked hard to prevent nasty and costly primaries that could damage the party’s prospects in November.

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But at the same time, Daines has boosted a number of candidates who can easily be branded as opportunistic carpetbaggers who moved to or moved back to states to run for office. And while this issue is not guaranteed to doom these candidates’ electoral prospects, it is a self-inflicted liability that is already being exploited by the Democratic Party.

Regardless of why these candidates moved to the states they wish to represent in the Senate, they must convince the voters of their respective states that their runs for office are not the fruit of carpetbagging opportunism. Otherwise, the Republican Party will have blown a golden opportunity to win back control of the Senate.