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Support for the tea party has dropped to an all-time low, said a new CBS News poll released Wednesday. Just 15 percent of Americans told the pollsters that they are supporters of the tea party movement today, which is less than half the level of support at its peak of 31 percent in November 2010 shortly after the midterm election when the movement fueled a landslide Republican win to take majority control of the House.

At present, every poll has McConnell’s race against Alison Lundergan Grimes, Kentucky’s secretary of state, as a dead heat with Election Day just six months away. Grimes also easily won her Tuesday primary. Her race with McConnell also is expected to be the most expensive congressional race this election cycle, as Republicans try to win a net six seats to take control of the upper chamber. If that happened, McConnell would replace Nevada's Democratic Sen. Harry Reid as the Senate majority leader.

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Some businesses in states with pitched Republican primary fights are turning to a relatively new tool to help ensure the outcome they want: telling employees how they want them to vote. Thanks in part to Citizens United, it's perfectly legal — but it probably doesn't do much good. Bloomberg Businessweek describes the concerted effort by business groups to get their member corporations ready to weigh in on the election — an election, we'll remind you, that has largely been framed as business-versus-Tea Party. The National Association of Manufacturers spent a week in Kentucky, briefing "as many as 10 businesses a...

Matt Bevin seemed like the ideal candidate to challenge Mitch McConnell. The handsome and personable businessman, a father of nine, impressed national conservative groups looking for a chance to knock off the Senate Republican leader. These groups, from the Senate Conservatives Fund to FreedomWorks, the Tea Party Patriots and the Madison Project, invested more than $1 million in the Kentucky GOP primary. Bevin himself spent more than $3 million, including $1 million of his own fortune. And, yet, polls indicate he’s going to get creamed Tuesday.

That’s among likely voters too, although when you’re looking at a lead this big, it doesn’t much matter which slice of adults you’re using. I thought next Tuesday’s primary night open thread would be rip-roaring food-fight fun between “true conservatives” and RINOs. Instead, we’re destined for a snoozer. Note the tea-party numbers, in particular. Bevin never got traction even among his ostensible core constituency.

Jahan Wilcox is the rapid response director at the RNC. He’s charged with responding quickly to attack Democrats and rebut Democrat attacks on the GOP. Last night, Jahan Wilcox responded quickly to Thom Tillis’s victory in North Carolina by declaring that next would be to defeat Matt Bevin, the Republican candidate in Kentucky, who Wilcox called a “fraud.”

March 12, 2014 – In a recent interview with The New York Times McConnell said “I think we are going to crush them everywhere… I don’t think they are going to have a single nominee anywhere in the country… I know this: Politics doesn’t like losers, if you don’t have anything to point to, it is kind of hard to keep it going.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has finally let America know who his true opponents are, and they aren’t the Democrats. When asked about conservative candidates like Matt Bevin, who is challenging him for his Senate seat in...

Between now and the end of June, more than two dozen states will hold primary elections. A major subplot of this year’s midterm elections is the competition between the Republican establishment and the tea party wing of the party. The establishment is fighting back, but has the tea party already won? The general election is still six months off. But Tuesday opens the summer preseason of intraparty contests, which starts with an important primary in North Carolina. Between now and the end of June, more than two dozen states will hold primary elections. After a July break, the preseason will...

The Republican Establishment always says conservative purists would rather lose than compromise. But the opposite is playing out in Nebraska. The moment Ben Sasse got endorsed by the Senate Conservatives Fund, Mitch McConnell went all in for Shane Osborn. Well, Osborn is now toast. He has extremely high negatives, extreme negative poll numbers, and outside groups have just finished him off with an ad blasting his involvement in a made up military memo. That leaves Sid Dinsdale who’d have you know he is a lifelong Republican despite years of significant giving to Democrats. Dinsdale too, however, is behind in the...

30 years ago, a man ran for the Senate because his opponent kept claiming to be for spending cuts while raising spending. His opponent kept claiming to be a conservative, while letting big government grow, even when he was the majority and could stop it. Maybe that candidate needs to be reminded of his own words.

Frustrated with President Barack Obama’s reaction to Russian action in Ukraine, a group of Republican senators said Wednesday they will introduce legislation outlining a more muscular response. “What we’ve seen from the administration is a lot of rhetoric,” Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, the top Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, said on the Senate floor Wednesday morning. The White House has been dealing “with the situation after something bad has already occurred,” he said. Earlier this week, violence flared up in another area of Ukraine that hugs the Russian border, as the new government in Kiev criticized local police...

The Chatter: WAVE exposes Bevin at cockfighting rally, McConnell hit on jobs comments, Grimes finally weighs in on pipeline Republican U.S. Senate candidate Matt Bevin is again struggling to explain his appearance at a cockfighting rally last month after a local news reporter aired Bevin’s remarks at the event in which Bevin had been asked specifically about cockfighting. WAVE 3 News reporter John Boel went to the March 29 cockfighting rally undercover and got Bevin on video speaking at the rally. Bevin was asked a direct question by American Gamefowl Defense Director Dave Devereaux. Devereaux asked Bevin “Will you vote...

EDMONTON — U.S. Sen. Rand Paul made a visit to Edmonton on Wednesday afternoon for a community forum during which he spoke mostly about health care and the economy and how he proposes to fix problems with each. The stop was one of several he made across the state during the week. After addressing about 30 people who turned out to hear him, the senator opened the floor for questions. One constituent asked him why he came out in support of Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Louisville. Paul declined to answer the question publicly, saying he would speak with her in private...

Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes announced that she spoke Wednesday with two of the state House Democratic staffers who raised the allegations of sexual harassment against former state Rep. John Arnold. According to the campaign, Grimes talked with Yolanda Costner and Cassaundra Cooper about issues affecting women in the workplace and asked them what to do with the $250 campaign contribution Arnold gave her campaign last year. And the campaign did confirm that Grimes will keep the contribution from Arnold after the conversation with the two women. The press release reads: Alison Lundergan Grimes also asked their personal...

Matt Bevin, Sen. Mitch McConnell’s primary challenger, told a group of Kentucky voters that American workers are less productive than immigrants. “For those who think that all these fifteen to twenty million [illegal immigrant] people are here just to take advantage of us and ride the system, you’re wrong,” he said at a diner in Jessamine, Kentucky, in March. “Most of them are not… but I’ll tell you what, there are more people like that even proportionally that were born here in this country,” he added.

Anxious Senate Republicans are worried party leaders are focusing too much this election year on ObamaCare and not enough on jobs and the economy. The concern among GOP centrists comes as President Obama and congressional Democrats are crowing about a surge in late enrollments and claiming the political winds are shifting around the Affordable Care Act. A growing rift in the GOP was exposed when a group of Senate Republicans recently struck a bipartisan deal to extend unemployment benefits. Neither Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) nor Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) embraced the agreement. Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.), who spearheaded...

QUOTE FROM HOST: "Tonight I had the honor of co-hosting a conference call with Matt Bevin, candidate for US Senate in Kentucky running against Senate Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in their May 20th Primary. For more information about Matt Bevin, visit www.BevinBrigade.com, follow @MattBevin on Twitter and SHARE this conference call with your family, friends, neighbors and co-workers. To learn more about the desperate tactics on which Mitch McConnell's campaign have spent millions, visit www.MudSlingingMitch.com."

Here is exhibit A of why we don’t trust current Senate leadership to do the right thing if they were to win back the majority; they refuse to block new spending when in the minority. Last week, House leadership decided to pass the “doc fix” bill (H.R. 4302) by voice vote. This bill reimburses healthcare providers for the scheduled 24 percent cut in payments for services rendered to Medicare patients. The bill extends the payments through next March. It also continues some new programs created under Obamacare. They used a hodgepodge of tenuous offsets spread out mainly over the next...

Sen. Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) primary challenger Matt Bevin blasts McConnell for supporting a debt limit increase and launching “false attack ads” in a new ad. ADVERTISEMENT It’s the candidate’s first significant statewide broadcast buy, and will also air statewide on cable, according to his campaign. The ad features Bevin speaking direct-to-camera, declaring “after caving yet again to President Obama on the debt ceiling, all that Mitch McConnell can do is run false attack ads.” A narrator goes on to declare that “thirty years is enough,” and calls McConnell “too liberal” and “too long.” McConnell has attacked Bevin in radio ads,...