The GOP's Delaware Problem
For the better part of two years, Republican operatives have been trying to figure out how to harness the energy of the Tea Party in order to further their electoral goals. After Tuesday, when Tea Party-backed candidate Christine O'Donnell beat Rep. Michael Castle in Delaware's Senate primary, it has become clear that the opposite is happening -- the Tea Party movement is clearly and inexorably taking over the Republican Party.
Earlier this year, Tea Party backers in Maine and Idaho helped install controversial new planks in state party platforms. In Arizona, Nevada, Michigan and elsewhere, Tea Party activists are filling up vacant precinct committee slots, which gives them votes at state conventions. Already, several state Republican chairs are concerned that their jobs are in danger, should they face a Tea Party uprising.
It is ironic that O'Donnell's win would come in the First State, the day before Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele embarked on a 48-state bus tour around the country. The RNC is promoting a new program based on the Democratic National Committee's 50-state strategy, hoping to capitalize on the positive political environment in order to win offices at all levels, in every state. The program is called D2H -- Delaware to Hawaii, encompassing the first state to the 50th.
As Steele travels, he may find a very different Republican Party than the one he took over last January. That may suit Steele just fine; while he's been criticized for not reaching out to some groups, he has made a point to create inroads with Tea Party leaders across the country.
"The Republican National Committee has, for over a year now, been engaged with leadership within the Tea Party movement across the country, and we look forward to continuing that dialogue," Steele said from the RNC's bus, en route to a stop in Charlottesville, Va. "The Tea Party movement, as I've said consistently from day one, are to be taken seriously. They're kindred spirits."
O'Donnell's win "indicates you shouldn't get in the middle of primaries," Steele said. "National leadership has no business dictating the outcome of primaries."
Indeed, the National Republican Congressional Committee and the National Republican Senatorial Committee have been singularly unsuccessful at dictating the outcome of primaries. O'Donnell's win was the latest in a long string of cases in which Tea Party-backed candidates, always more conservative than their establishment rivals, came from behind to pull stunning upsets -- and, in the process, give Democrats better opportunities to win in November. O'Donnell has little chance against Democratic nominee Chris Coons, and while the favorable electoral climate ensures that some Tea Partiers will make it to Washington, she's neither the first nor the last outsider candidate to pose a threat to the party's chances of victory.
The first came a year ago, when a moderate Republican candidate collapsed in the race for New York's 23rd Congressional District while a Tea Party-backed Conservative Party candidate surged amid national attention -- before ultimately losing. Tea Partiers subsequently won GOP Senate primaries in Kentucky, Nevada, Alaska, Utah and Colorado -- all over favored establishment candidates.
Democrats are running well in several of those key states, a position in which they might not have found themselves had establishment candidates won in the first place. That has Republicans worrying about the long term; if GOP primaries persistently go to the most conservative possible candidate, the party will fare poorly once the electoral landscape settles down.
"People in the party have to do some long and deep thinking about how we do better," lamented one top party strategist after O'Donnell's win. The strategist has watched in horror as the party's best-laid plans have gone awry in half a dozen important races this year.
Republicans planning for the future say it is crucial for the party to realize that electoral gains this year do not indicate that the GOP's woes, so evident after the disasters of 2006 and 2008, are fixed. The GOP cannot subsist as the party of the extreme right; instead, it must recognize that a Republican who can get elected in Delaware is going to have a far different outlook on life, and legislation, than a Republican who can win in Alabama.
After the 2008 drubbing, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell acknowledged that the Republican Party was in danger of becoming a regional party if it did not broaden its tent. The seats the party takes in November will not be indicators of progress. In fact, dumping Castle, Trey Grayson in Kentucky, Sue Lowden in Nevada and even Sens. Robert Bennett (Utah) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) shows the party is still shrinking the tent and booting out what purists call "Republicans In Name Only."
As Steele is fond of warning, Ronald Reagan -- the much-revered icon of the modern conservative movement who also happened to help give illegal immigrants blanket amnesty -- could not win a Republican primary today. The question is whether those who can win today will be able to appeal to centrist voters in a general election.
That's a question the Tea Party strategists who have helped so many conservatives take out moderates will soon get to answer.
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