Posted on 11/03/2009 12:48:58 PM PST by BGHater
In what could be a nightmare scenario for Republican Party officials, conservative activists are gearing up to challenge leading GOP candidates in more than a dozen key House and Senate races in 2010.
Conservatives and tea party activists had already set their sights on some of the GOP’s top Senate recruits — a list that includes Gov. Charlie Crist in Florida, former Rep. Rob Simmons in Connecticut and Rep. Mark Kirk in Illinois, among others.
But their success in Tuesday’s upstate New York special election, where grass-roots efforts pushed GOP nominee Dede Scozzafava to drop out of the race and helped Conservative Party nominee Doug Hoffman surge into the lead on the eve of Election Day, has generated more money and enthusiasm than organizers ever imagined.
Activists predict a wave that could roll from California to Kentucky to New Hampshire and that could leave even some GOP incumbents — Utah Sen. Bob Bennett is one — facing unexpectedly fierce challenges from their right flank.
“I would say it’s the tip of the spear,” said Dick Armey, the former GOP House majority leader who now serves as chairman of FreedomWorks, an organization that has been closely aligned with the tea party movement. “We are the biggest source of energy in American politics today.”
“What you’re going to see,” said Armey, “is moderates and conservatives across the country in primaries.”
These high-stakes primaries, pitting the activist wing of the party against the establishment wing, stand to have a profound impact on the 2010 election landscape since they will create significant problems for moderate candidates recruited by the national party precisely because they appear well-suited to win in places that are not easily — or even plausibly — won by conservative candidates.
The tensions between the two visions threaten to limit the party’s gains in an election year that is shaping up in its favor.
Party strategists worry that well-funded, well-organized challenges from the right could force Republicans to exhaust precious resources on messy primary fights — or force moderate candidates to adopt more strident positions early on that could haunt them during the final months of the campaign.
“For me, what this says is, we need to take a deep breath and decide whether [moderates and conservatives] work together or not,” said Tom Davis, the former chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. “And if we don’t, it can get very, very ugly.”
Activists contend that the only way back to majority status is to embrace the conservative principles that the party jettisoned during the past decades once it became too enamored of power. To them, the issue is less about ideological purity than about the compromises they see the party’s Washington establishment making and what they contend is a lack of support for conservative candidates who are deemed unelectable by GOP solons.
“New York 23, on some scale, is the first battle of a larger internal Republican debate over how to define the party,” said former Florida House Speaker Marco Rubio, a conservative who is challenging Crist for the Senate nomination. “They want us to vote for their candidates, but they don’t want us to run for office.”
Rubio’s race is one that many on the right point to as the next New York 23, a contest where conservatives and tea party activists are in open revolt about Crist and the national party’s decision to endorse him despite his embrace — literally — of President Barack Obama and his stimulus package during a Florida visit in February.
Rubio has won nearly a dozen county GOP straw polls across the state and is rapidly becoming a darling of the tea party movement.
Everett Wilkinson, an organizer for the Florida Tea Party Patriots, said his group plans to take part in get-out-the-vote activities and other efforts to deny Crist the GOP nomination, despite the fact that Crist leads both Rubio and Rep. Kendrick Meek, the likely Democratic nominee, by a comfortable margin.
To Wilkinson, he’d rather burn the house down if it means saving it.
“We would lose if Charlie Crist got elected or if another person who doesn’t support our policies got elected,” he said. “Our members are actively going to get out there and create awareness of the governor’s actions.”
Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), a leading conservative who has endorsed Rubio, said he viewed the Florida Senate race as distinct from the New York special election. But he agreed with Rubio’s contention that the national party needed to broaden its outlook on candidates.
“I’m not saying our party made a mistake, because there’s a debate within the party over what we should be,” he said. “If we just start looking at who can win — sometimes we might miss a gem in the rough in effect. And I said from the beginning, that’s what I think Rubio is.”
Florida turns out to be one of many states where Senate candidates favored — in one way or another — by the National Republican Senatorial Committee are facing serious pushback from the grass roots.
In almost every situation, the lay of the land is the same. Whether it’s California, Illinois, Connecticut, New Hampshire or Kentucky, the NRSC has found a candidate who appears to be an exceptionally strong general election prospect — either well-known, well-financed or ideologically well-suited to the state’s politics — who is nevertheless meeting with tough resistance at the grass-roots level from activists who believe the conservative cause would be better served over the long term, even if it means the party nominee loses in the short term.
Even in Illinois, where polls shows Kirk would be highly competitive as a general election candidate in a state in which Republicans have been crushed in recent elections, the prospect of picking up the president’s former Senate seat isn’t enough to win over many activists.
“We’re going to work hard as hell to make sure Mark Kirk doesn’t win,” said Evert Evertsen, an Illinois tea party organizer. “Mark Kirk is about as liberal as Arlen Specter was.”
GOP House and Senate incumbents are fair game, too.
In Utah, where Bennett has won reelection by landslide margins since first winning the seat in 1992, disgruntled conservatives are looking to take him down in next year’s state party convention after his Wall Street bailout vote last fall and several other high-profile votes in which he broke with the right.
In the House, Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.) is among a handful of GOP veterans facing primary challenges of varying competitiveness for their departures from conservative orthodoxy.
“It’s kind of like investors in a company saying they’re not going to tolerate it anymore. And that’s what we’re seeing here,” said Eric Odom, executive director of the American Liberty Alliance, a libertarian-oriented group. “We’re already gearing up. This is just the beginning.”
I like that conservative underdog in Florida. There’s a big opportunity!
Wow! My first car was a 4-door ‘55 BelAir just like that one!
BINGO! I'm not sure which one is actually correct... but, I like both!
The way to victory involves:
(1) Outreach to "moderate" voters to convince them that conservatism is what will protect their future, and
(2) Purging the RINOs from the GOP.
That is kind of what I was thinking .... cryin out loud, I have a hard time NAMING a DOZEN conservative congresscritters.
that is a whole manure spreader of Bravo Sierra.
We are where we are is because we have been voting dem lite for the last 25 years ... forced to take the lesser “stench” Yeah ... howz that workin.
Einstein is correct .. keep doing what you are doing and results will not change.
What good does it do to elect someone who will vote with the Republicans any time their vote isn't needed, but will side with Democrats on those occasions where their vote actually matters? When such people run on the Republican ticket, they don't usually identify themselves as Democrats, but sometimes they're honest enough to do so.
I used to think change should be made within the GOP, but fundamentally there's a limit to how far that can go. Both major parties are substantially corrupt, in ways that a fundamentally honest person could not abide. The Republicans can't attack Democrat corruption because their decades-long complicity would also be exposed. A third-party challenger would have no such restriction. It will be interesting to see what Governor Palin has to say in her new book.
Some are both Too Stupid and Traitors.
Some are simply Traitors and know better.
Some are simply Too Stupid.
Regardless they MUST be removed from Office.
—
And Better Yet, we need to Radically Down-Size DC.
Whole Departments need to be eliminated.
Wholesale slashing of the power center and their lobbyists.
Make Congress and Senate telecommute most of the year and put them under the thumbs of those who elected them.
Good.
Now. If only a priary against McCain would gain serious steam.
“Dick Armey BUMP. Conservative to the end”...
Really...Has he changed his position on illegal immigration/amnesty? IIRC, he and his FreedomWorks group, along with RHINO Kay B. Hutchinson, support the touchback, revolving door Pence Plan for amnesty. You know...those “quickie” Ellis Island centers intended so as not to inconvenience the employers of illegal aliens.
Amnesty is coming next. When defining ‘conservative’, folks had better decide NOW on which side of the fence amnesty sits.
Any candidate who works to expose the real corruption behind Cap & Tax, etc. will by his or her actions brand as a liar many politicians of both parties who supported such policies. Do you think anyone could do that within the GOP?
Yeah, is this not how the democratic process happens - with primaries? So now Carvile is on TV ranting and raving about the loss of the big tent. He can go pound sand.
Absolutely! The states need to restructure Washington to make it a bureaucratic administrator. Replace Congress with a Congress of the 50 state governors and then hire a CEO to manage the crats. Take legislative and executive power away from the federal system. Political power needs to live and work at the state level...
So, that will only take about 150 election cycles to purge the House, another 30 to purge the Senate.
360 years.
I hope someone writes the plan down, or it may get forgotten.
And I’ll keep working for conservatism. When conservatism isn’t abundant, I won’t be buying it. When I’ve worked hard for a Cadillac, I’m not settling for a Yugo.
Conservatives have been “settling” for years. Look where it’s gotten us. It’s time to give up that racket. It’s over.
I’m really hoping that Shadegg decides to challenge McCain.
I’d certainly settle for J.D. Hayworth though.
Well, first, Politico is staffed by bumbling rejects from the Washington goosestepping Post.
Second, why the hell would we take advice from the enemy on how to defeat the enemy?
Politico can go stick a thorny rose bush up its metrosexual, poodle-loving arse.
McCain MUST be challenged. JD or someone (or anyone). I can’t believe SC allowed Grahamnesty to go unchallenged. He is such a disgrace for such a great state.
“Really...Has he changed his position on illegal immigration/amnesty? IIRC, he and his FreedomWorks group, along with RHINO Kay B. Hutchinson, support the touchback, revolving door Pence Plan for amnesty. You know...those “quickie” Ellis Island centers intended so as not to inconvenience the employers of illegal aliens.
Amnesty is coming next. When defining ‘conservative’, folks had better decide NOW on which side of the fence amnesty sits.”
I stand corrected on that part of Armey’s background.
You’re right—amnesty is the battle ahead.
Thanks for the post.
(And while I will do my part to fight off the open-borders crowd, I still appreciate Armey’s stand to do battle with the pantywaist Republican party boss crowd.)
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