Congressional GOP's pandering to the tea party may haunt them in 2016

newsnet5.com ^ | 8/19/14 | Dick Meyer

[cotton1706]

WASHINGTON, D.C. - In a lackluster election year, the one story that seemed to offer decent drama was the "Tea Party versus the Republican Establishment" conflagration.

I am now inclined to think that wasn’t the big story and that the tea party didn’t lose. The tea party did do poorly in elections and is losing support in the electorate.

But the movement is gaining power in Congress anyway. And that is likely to hurt the Republican Party badly down the road. That's the story.

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There is one trend that legitimately scares incumbents: They are winning primaries by smaller margins than usual.

Political scientist Robert Boatright of Clark University has the historical data on margins in Senate GOP primaries:

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One out of every 10 Republicans has finished below 60 percent, the point at which things start looking truly dangerous. Both rates are actually higher than in 2012 or the "anti-incumbent year" of 2010.”

"There's no question that many members are much more concerned with their primaries than when I was first elected," Charlie Dent, a moderate Republican from Pennsylvania said to the National Journal."... And because too many of my colleagues are nervous about their primaries, it's interfering with their better judgment on governance issues. At times, I feel that too many of my colleagues are governing out of fear — or I should say, not governing out of fear."

snip

But tea party clout in Congress is growing. According to Elaine Kamarck of Brookings, “The absence of tools to enforce party discipline, the ubiquity of primary challengers to Republican incumbents and the early suggestion that incumbent margins are shrinking suggest that, in spite of tea party losses they are still having an enormous impact on their party and thus on the entire political system.”

[FlingWingFlyer]

(((YAWN))) It isn’t hurting the commie libs to pander to the communist party.

[Lakeshark]

They haven’t, but that’s the liberal intelligentsia’s view.

What they're trying to do is move the GOP leadership as far to the left as possible, while branding and tarring them as right wing extremists at the same time. It's what they did to W so successfully.

Let's hope they wake up soon, the tactic is devious, evil at the core, and it's working..

[Organic Panic]

These guys LOVE proclaiming the death of the tea party movement. A four year old movement has taken on and won many elected positions. GOP elite have spent millions to defeat primary challengers and only one by one or two percentage points. Were there voices in media proclaiming the democrats are a dead party when they got creamed in 2010?

[RebelTex]

Re. your comment: “Soe news outlet pays this guy for this? I wouldn’t allow this kind of illogical tripe past my desk in a ninth grade composition class.”

Standard liberal propaganda crap!

What did you expect from liberals who spent years working for NPR or BBC or both?

newsnet5.com (website for liberal Cleveland TV station affilliated with ABC)
decodedc is a liberal Washinton DC newsblog whose website is http://www.decodedc.com/ and whose executives and reporters and other staff come from NPR and BBC backgrounds.

Dick Meyer (liberal author of the article)
Dick is chief Washington correspondent for DecodeDC. An experienced writer, reporter and author, Meyer was executive producer for the BBC’s news services in America, NPR’s executive editor and editorial director of CBSNews.com. Meyer also wrote a book on American culture and politics, Why We Hate Us: American Discontent in the New Millennium (Crown Publishing/Random House, August 2008).

[jch10]

What happened to doing the will of the people who sent you to Congress? That’s what an elected official is supposed to do. When they start doing what they wanted and what is politically correct, that’s when we got into so much debt.