Some fail. Quickly, because my bacon is getting cold.
They argue that it’s critical to start enlisting local conservative activists as allies and to ease the tea party versus Washington dynamic that’s wreaked havoc on the party.
I’ll believe it when I see it. So far, I’m not.
Both strategies produced a handful of unelectable candidates, so senators are gravitating toward a middle ground: engage in primaries so long as they can get some cover on the local level.
The tea party has a better record than the GOP at this point. The bitter Missouri senate primary was not the tea party’s doing, but rather a lack of leadership with the MO GOP. Period.
In his primary race with John Brunner and Sarah Steelman, Akin was seen as the weakest of the three — and he proved that after his comments about “legitimate rape” and abortion devastated his campaign. Instead of being defeated, the highly vulnerable Democrat, Sen. Claire McCaskill, cruised to reelection by 15 percentage points.
Has the author of this article even been to Missouri? I know it’s a popular parlor game to armchair pundit races of states you’ve never visited, whose political dynamics you know nothing about, but man, it’s annoying. Akin was the strongest of the three because he already held federal office and because he won the primary. There’s no magic behind it. The party wanted to split the primary because they were unhappy that he was the frontrunner early on. Are we still litigating this primary? Geebus. HEAD + WALL.
But as the NRSC sat out of the Missouri GOP primary …
Why Akin lost: bad campaign including lack of media prep, GOP junior-high-school-girl-level overreaction, pulled funding. The end.
“We need to do a good job of recruiting; our candidates need more training, keep their foots out of their mouth,” DeMint told POLITICO. “There’s a reason why most politicians talk in sanitized sound bites: Once you get out of that, you’re opening yourself up to get attacked.”
Thank you, Senator DeMint. Co-signed.
