海角大神

The overriding theme of the 2014 primary season, which will come to an end for Republicans with Thursday鈥檚 primary in Tennessee and the primary in Alaska to pick the person who will run against Senator Mark Begich, which is set for Aug. 19, has been the battle between the tea party and the so-called GOP establishment. It鈥檚 a battle that began shortly after the October 2013 government shutdown, when many of the powers-that-be in the Republican Party apparently decided that they were not going to allow tea party forces to dictate the tone of the party primaries in 2014, especially given their history in the past.

On some level, this certainly seems like it was a wise move on the part of party operatives given the events of 2010 and 2012. In those elections, candidates with strong tea party support and little actual political or campaign experience arguably ended up costing the GOP winnable races in states such as Delaware, Nevada, Colorado, and Missouri. Indeed, had it not been for candidates like Christine O鈥橠onnell, Sharron Angle, and Ken Buck the GOP could have very well won a narrow majority in the Senate in the 2010 elections or at least created a situation where the Democratic majority after that election was much narrower than it ended up being. In 2012, a tea party challenge to Senate stalwart Richard Lugar in Indiana resulted in the nomination of Richard Mourdock, who ended up running such a bad campaign in the general election that he lost by nearly 150,000 votes on the same day that Mitt Romney won the Hoosier State by nearly 300,000 votes.聽

Faced with these results, and the damage that the GOP suffered in the wake of a shutdown that was forced by the pressure exerted on the House GOP by tea party groups and their supporters, it was only natural that Republican insiders and groups like the Chamber of Congress would decide that the time had come to challenge the tea party at the primary level, which they largely had not done in the previous two election cycles.

To a large degree, their strategy worked. In the Senate, establishment-backed incumbents聽and candidates defeated their tea party-backed candidates in Texas, Kentucky, South Carolina,聽North Carolina, Georgia, and Mississippi. On Tuesday, we saw Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas beat back tea party candidate Milton Wolf, and Thursday Sen. Lamar Alexander will most likely crush his tea party opponents in Tennessee. In Alaska, tea party-backed Joe Miller is聽trailing both Mead Treadwell and Sean Sullivan in the polling for the GOP Senate nominatio. To the extent that the tea party has seen some success, it has been at the House level, where we鈥檝e seen tea party-backed candidates defeat former House majority leader Eric Cantor in Virginia and Texas Rep. Ralph Hall, who is presently the longest serving Republican member of the House of Representatives. Rep. Justin Amash also beat back a well-financed challenge from Brian Ellis in Michigan鈥檚 Third District.

Based on this, the logical conclusion would seem to be that that establishment has won the battle with the tea party. Judging solely by the number of elections won and lost, I suppose that is an accurate assessment. As Ed Kilgore noted the other day at聽Talking Points Memo, however, the reality is that the tea party has already won regardless of how the primary elections turn out:

Paul Waldman makes a similar argument in The Washington Post's "Plum Line" blog:

Mr. Kilgore and Mr. Waldman are largely correct. To the extent that the Republican establishment has won its battle this year against the tea party, it has done so because the candidates it backed ran better, smarter, better financed and better organized campaigns than their opponents. While there was plenty of rhetoric about candidates like Sens. Mitch McConnell, Thad Cochran, and Pat Roberts not being conservative enough from the tea party groups that opposed them, the reality is that the Republican Party has moved so much to the right at this point that it鈥檚 hard to tell the difference between 鈥渞egular鈥� Republicans and the tea party crowd.

You can see evidence of this in how the GOP has governed since it won the House of Representatives in 2010. There have been numerous showdowns with the president over the budget, one of which resulted in a government shutdown because the tea party insisted on a completely impossible plan to 鈥渄efund鈥� Obamacare. The House has voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act in whole or in part nearly 60 times over the past 3-1/2 years. Despite the fact that many in leadership, and indeed many 鈥渞egular鈥� Republicans know that it is a good idea for the country and the party, immigration reform has died in the House for fear of offending the tea party base. Last week, the House passed a bill that would repeal administrative regulations that granted temporary amnesty to people who were brought to the United States illegally by their parents when they were children, for no good reason other than the fact that its something the tea party base wants. And, of course, the House of Representatives will soon be filing a completely pointless, and likely meritless, lawsuit against President Obama that is quite obviously designed to placate a base that has been talking about impeaching the president virtually since the day he took the oath of office. If these are not signs that the tea party has won, then I don鈥檛 know what would be.

This poses serious problems for the Republican Party, of course, given the fact that public opinion polls show that on a whole range of issues, the tea party is completely out of step with the majority of the American people. In the end, though, the party establishment has nobody to blame but itself. It failed long ago to provide any kind of credible alternative to the harshest, most extreme voices in the party, and now those voices are the voice of the party. The consequences the party suffers will be its own fault.

Doug Mataconis appears on the Outside the Beltway blog at http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/.