Art credit: illinoisreview.touchpad.com
Allahpunditat Hot Air has this to say about the Tuesday primaries and Tea Party losses:
Outside groups spent $23 million to crush
the tea party in GOP primaries this year
POSTED
AT 4:01 PM ON JUNE 26, 2014 BY ALLAHPUNDIT
To be clear, the $23 million here is on top of the cash spent by
each GOP incumbent’s own campaign. It doesn’t include a dime of what, say,
Mitch McConnell’s operation dropped to defend his seat. This is crony money,
showered on establishment candidates to make sure the gravy train keeps
running.
The scope of the
effort to suppress activist-backed candidates has been broader and costlier
than is widely understood, covering at least 20 House and Senate primaries from
North Carolina to California, and from coastal Mississippi to the outer tip of
Long Island. The loose coalition of establishment forces encompasses two dozen
advocacy groups, industry associations and super PACs that have raised and
spent millions on behalf of Washington’s chosen candidates.
Former Republican
National Committee Chairman Mike Duncan said the “quote ‘establishment’” had
successfully divided up the primary map this year to avoid duplicating one
another’s efforts…
Nearly a third of the
establishment money has come from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The business
lobby’s spending in this year’s toughest primaries has about equaled the $7
million that the conservative Club for Growth and the Senate Conservatives Fund
have spent together on the most fractious elections — excluding races, like the
Senate campaigns in Arkansas and Alaska, where there’s been no meaningful clash
between establishment-sanctioned outside groups and the activist right.
Among other big establishment spenders: Karl Rove’s American
Crossroads, the National Association of Realtors, and the Main Street
Partnership, which vowed months ago to “beat
the snot” out of conservatives in primaries and which used to be
called the “Republican Main Street Partnership” before it dropped the
troublesome “Republican” part. (The NRA also kicked in some money for Thad
Cochran, do note.) What’s galling about this isn’t the amount spent or the fact
that centrists would rise to meet a challenge from the right on ideological
terms. The Club for Growth spends boatloads of money on elections too, after
all. What’s galling, especially in the Cochran/McDaniel race, is the sense of
how transactional the incumbent’s relationship with his money men is. That’s
the real lesson from Mississippi, writes Jay
Cost. There was nothing particularly ideological driving Cochran or the
Mississippi GOP establishment. This was business. As always, as always,
Republicans present themselves as one thing and then behave as something else [emphasis added]:
Cochran is a classic
example of the disconnect. He has been in the Senate for nearly forty years. To
what lasting conservative triumph is his name attached? I cannot think of any,
nor can I think of any fight against the liberal agenda in which he was a crucial
ally. Instead, his claim to fame – as he proudly advertised during the campaign
– was leveraging his seniority to steer government largesse to Mississippi…
Read the rest here.
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