The Tea Party is pretty much over for the 2014 midterm elections, with the limited-government movement losing four of Tuesday’s most closely watched races in Republican primaries from Georgia to Idaho.
In its power struggle with the Republican Party’s business- oriented wing, the Tea Party has now captured just one US Senate nomination this year, for an open seat in Nebraska, and has lost any momentum it may have had going into the final, high-profile primary, a Mississippi challenge to Senator Thad Cochran on June 3rd.
It is a turnaround from 2010 and 2012, when untested Tea Party candidates grabbed headlines by winning Republican Senate primaries, only to lose most general elections to Democrats – an outcome party leaders say cost them the chamber’s majority.
“These results are a big step in the right direction,” said Republican strategist Scott Reed, who advises the US Chamber of Commerce.
After the 2012 election, Mr Reed said the chamber’s leadership instructed its political operation to “get more engaged in candidate selection and primaries to identify and support House and Senate candidates that believe in growth, governing and can win in November”.
Intra-party fight Senate or US House candidates aligned with the Tea Party lost yesterday in Georgia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Idaho. Those contests were widely viewed as this year’s pinnacle in the intra-party fight.
Besides selecting candidates with a better chance of winning in November, the business-backed coalition is also seeking to boost candidates who are more steeped in and supportive of an economic agenda, including ensuring that the US does not default on its debt.
Nominating the strongest candidates is essential because there’s little room for error, if Republicans are to secure the net gain of six seats they need to win control of the Senate.
“So far, Republicans are getting the candidates they want for the general election,” said Jennifer Duffy, who studies Senate races as a senior editor for the non-partisan Cook Political Report in Washington. “It was not a good night for the Tea Party.”
The power struggle hasn’t been a total loss for the small- government movement spawned in part by protests to passage of the Affordable Care Act in early 2010.
While Tea Party-aligned candidates have lost individual races this primary season, they have in some cases pushed the winning Republicans to positions that will be used against them by Democrats in the November election.
Ahead of his May 6th primary win, Republican Senate nominee and North Carolina house speaker Thom Tillis joined his primary rivals in saying climate change isn’t an established fact.
“When the establishment runs on our issues, it’s clear that there is a larger cultural shift happening here,” Matt Kibbe, president of Washington-based, small-government advocate FreedomWorks, said. “Constitutional conservatives and libertarians are setting the agenda in the Republican Party.”
Still, the movement has had scant opportunities to celebrate during a primary season in which incumbent Republicans were on alert and better prepared for challengers.
The movement’s highest-profile target, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (72) easily defeated Matt Bevin, a businessman aligned with the Tea Party, in Kentucky’s Republican primary on Tuesday. – (Bloomberg)