I never liked Castle either but the fact is that all states are not the same. Some people here really don’t grasp that concept. The same person who might be able to take a seat in South Carolina and Tennessee might not be able to win in Delaware or New Hampshire. When the balance of power in the Senate is at stake you have to be a little less knee jerk and a little smarter if you want a chance in some states that are not conservative. The end goal was to get control of the Senate so that the real conservatives, there are not enough of them, have a better shot of making things happen than they would under Harry Reid. Sadly some people would rather piss away money and a chance at running the show just to spite a RINO.
Control of the Senate wasn’t in hand under any conditions this year.
I only wish it were that cut and dried. Mitch McConnell is not terribly conservative, or at least has not been, and he's running the show for the Senate Republicans. Had he enough Castles behind him to be majority leader, he would not be leading a conservative charge on anything.
If you hit every ball you swing at, you aren't swinging at enough balls. While this might be a setback in DE this year, it's not an indictment of the Tea Party induced step toward conservative candidates. What it does do is encourage more acceptable yet conservative (and timid) candidates to step up next time knowing that they have a decent chance to win in the primary.
The fact that we got Castle out means something to McConnell, and he's talking a lot more conservative than he used to. McConnell knows that if he personally is to keep running anything, he needs to be in the Senate. And he now knows that just being labeled 'Republican' might not be enough to stay there.
Says who? In retrospect, it wasn't going to happen anyway. And the way the Senate works, 47 is a whole lot better than 41. There now won't be enough RINOs to ever break a filibuster, so some things won't even come up that would have before. Besides that, a fragile majority of 51 that would include scum like castle is worthless, because all it would do is make him a Spector like attention whore. RINOs become the most powerful members in the body with a slim majority. Screw them and anybody foolish enough to support them on the basis of bean counting. Doing what it takes to get your party to a magic numerical position , without concern for the quality of the people themselves, is the road to political ruin.
And How'd those moderates do in WA and CA again? So if a Tea Partier gets blown out in DE and a establishment moderate with worlds of credentials and hundreds of millions to spend gets blown out against a contemptible hag like Boxer in CA, has anything about the relative merits of conservatives vs. RINOs been proven in blue states?
And you're missing the best reasons to toss RINOs out in primaries: to keep future wanna be RINOs on the reservation. Do you think what happened to Castle, Bennet, Murkowski, and a few RINO congressmen might cross the minds of the Maine sisters and those like them in the coming two years when tough votes come up?