Yesterday was a day of congressional primaries in Indiana, North Carolina, and Ohio. While I don’t care to go into details about each and every one (although if you do, Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post has a good wrap-up), there is an over-riding trend that I do want to take note of. For the past year or so, there has been a lot of talk about what effect the Tea Party movement would have on elections, and more specifically, on Republican establishment candidates. I think most rational people were fairly confident about what this effect might look like, but yesterday, it was largely born out. As Dave Weigel summed it up, “There was a consistent pattern — candidates of or supported by the tea party movement fell short, while keeping the establishment candidates below 50 percent of the vote.”
And there you have it — The Tea Party Effect. These ultra-conservative candidates are, by and large, not even electable in GOP primaries. The vast majority have about zero chance of winning in a general election. What they can do, however, is pull down more moderate, mainstream, electable Republicans with them. The next question becomes, what happens to these defeated Tea Party Republican candidates and their supporters come November?
Their effect on the general election will come in one of two ways. If the Tea Partyer decides to run as a third candidate, they will most certainly, A) come nowhere near winning, and B) siphon valuable votes away from the Republican candidate — maybe enough to affect the outcome of the election.
Even if the defeated Tea Party hopeful does not officially enter the election, their presence may still be felt through the effect they’ve had on the GOP candidate. Quite possibly, an otherwise moderate Republican might have had to tack far to the right in order to counter their Tea Party opponent — think John McCain (but don’t think too long — he doesn’t). Democratic campaigns should be paying close attention to the rhetoric coming from these hotly contested GOP races, because there might be some real good ad fodder there.
In either case, yesterday’s primaries just proved again that the Tea Party movement is not a buoyant balloon, poised to carry the Republican Party to new heights. It really is nothing more than a dead-weight anchor, preventing the GOP from regaining even its previous status as a legitimate, governing party.