The Tea Party candidates should have chosen one and endorsed him in order to defeat Graham. They divided the vote and Graham won.
I think it was mainly due to the candidates themselves. The three credible candidates were all problematic. Cash could not raise money (ironically) and had lost a congressional race. Bright had a state legislator position, but unlike McDaniel, screwed up his finances and made some statements that were ill-advised. Mace was billed as the big cahuna (everyone wanted her to run because of her high name ID as the first female citadel graduate), but she stumbled out of the gate had really dismal interviews, was just not ready for primetime.
Unity would have helped, but you really need an ideal candidate or ideal conditions to win. The candidate was gold in Mississippi. The conditions were gold in Virginia. Dave Brat had no help even from national Tea groups, but Cantor was so out of touch, that the genial Brat trounced him.
Neither the conditions nor the candidates were good enough in SC this year unfortunately.
The Tea Party did not help Brat.
Ingraham said on Kelly file that Brat called the Tea Party national and they wouldn’t even return his calls. Laura was on the inside of this campaign.
She said a few TP groups around the state attended his speeches, but door to door Virginia voters were fed up. $200,000 Brat to 5 million Cantor.
Money always wins, but not in Virginia.
Not how it works in SC. They could run as many candidates as possible. They just had to keep Grahamnesty under 50%. Then the challenger with the most votes would go into a run-off with him. They could not gather enough support between them to keep Linda under 50%. Yes, as it was an open primary, maybe having dems cross over and vote for him made that a more difficult task. But obviously, no one caught on and Linda wasn’t making the mistake of reminding everyone just what a liberal amnesty lover s/he really is.