Posted on 08/08/2014 5:44:52 PM PDT by SharpRightTurn
The Tea Party didn’t knock off any incumbent GOP senators this year in primaries, but last night it proved just how riled up voters are against the Washington establishment. Tennessee senator Lamar Alexander won re-nomination last night with just 49.7 percent of the vote. His main opponent, state representative Joe Carr won 41 percent despite an erratic campaign and being ignored by the major national tea-party groups. Alexander was able to convince just enough conservatives to back him with his rallying cry: “I’m not in the shut-down-the-government crowd, I’m in the taking-over-the-government crowd.”
Alexander becomes the third GOP senator in a month to win with only about half the vote. On Tuesday, Kansas’s Pat Roberts won his primary with 48 percent of the vote in a divided field and in late June, Mississippi’s Thad Cochran won a bitterly disputed runoff with 51 percent of the vote. Michael Barone, the author of The Almanac of American Politics, says the story this year is that incumbents “have been prevailing by tenuous margins in primaries that in the pre–tea-party years would almost certainly not have been seriously contested.”
That certainly proved to be the case in two primaries for Congress in Tennessee last night. Representative Chuck Fleischmann won his third primary in a row with a narrow margin. He won 51 percent over Weston Wamp, the son of former congressman Zack Wamp. The race was significant because Wamp ran to Fleischmann’s left and openly appealed for Democrats to vote for him in the open primary.
Both establishment and pro-life Republicans have been hoping for years that Representative Scott DesJarlais would just fade away. In 2012, it was revealed that as a physician DesJarlais had slept with patients, supported his ex-wife’s two abortions and advised a patient with whom he’d had an affair to have an abortion. DesJarlais barely won reelection in 2012. This year he faced a primary from free-spending businessman Jim Tracy, but a recent cancer diagnosis may have generated some sympathy votes for DesJarlais. With all votes counted, DesJarlais currently holds a lead of just 33 votes.
The lesson from this year’s primaries is that incumbency still holds enormous advantages but that even weak challengers have been able to put a scare into many incumbents. Time and time again, the Tea Party came much closer than expected to knocking off key incumbents but failed because the challengers simply weren’t top-shelf candidates.
Resist...resist...resist!!!!! The win goes to those who persist.
I agree. We are shaking things up, making the GOPe nervous. We are not going away and everyone knows it.
Doesn’t matter. Look who kept their Senate nominations.
The only way conservatives will prevail is if all the GOP incumbent senators lose to rats.
Lose/lose for everyone except the rats.
Money. The GOPe had $20 million per race. Citizen candidates could not win against that avalanche of lobbyist graft.
“Money. The GOPe had $20 million per race. Citizen candidates could not win against that avalanche of lobbyist graft.”
It certainly makes it uphill. However, Brat did it. And had Carr gotten the support of the Senate Conservatives Fund and possibly the Club for Growth, though he would have still be outspent, I think Carr would have won. As it was, even though outspent at least 5 to 1, my sense was that Carr was coming on strong toward the end when he had finally gotten free recognition from Laura Ingraham, Sarah Palin, and others.
Congressman DesJarlais didn’t get sympathy votes because of his cancer diagnosis. He’s done a good job as our Representative and many of us want to keep him in place a while longer. Fourth most Conservative voting record in the House isn’t too shabby.
Jim Tracy would never campaign on the issues and ran the same smear campaign as the two dems ran who previously ran against DesJarlais, and they lost.
If Tracy ends up somehow going to DC, we’ll have another RINO in the House. No thanks!
Sure do wish we could have dumped Alexander, though. 51% of us are sick of him.
The Chris McDaniels debacle has done more to energize the Tea Party than 10 wins. The GOP will rue the day they decided to fund racist appeals to Democrats.
I’m with you. I hope that DesJarlais can pull this out. From what I’ve heard about Tracy, he could end up being another establishment lackey for Boehner.
“The Chris McDaniels debacle has done more to energize the Tea Party than 10 wins. The GOP will rue the day they decided to fund racist appeals to Democrats.”
Yes, I think it even opened the eyes of some of the low information Republican crowd to who the establishment people really are. The party really is at war with its conservative base.
A friend of mine said it well at the election party we attended the other night ..... DesJarlais is more of what the Founding Fathers had in mind when the Constitution was drawn up - - a citizen who steps up to the plate to go to DC to represent the people in his district.
Tracy is a power-hungry career politician.
I tend to agree with her.
When they re-drew the districts a couple of years ago, I’d say Tracy had a big hand in making sure Rutherford Co. was part of District 4. It’s part of his State Senate district. He was already planning this run for DesJarlais’ seat back then.
DesJarlais took 10 of the 16 counties in the district. If Rutherford Co. is taken out of the equation, DesJarlais stomped Tracy.
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