What they should have learned after nominating Christine O'Donnell is that losing with someone who represents your passions is still losing. If the TEA Party people had pushed a candidate more qualified and less confrontational than Christine O'Donnell but less liberal than Mike Castle, they might have won a Senate seat in a state that had been steadily Democrat for a long time. We probably wouldn't have wound up with someone who was perfectly conservative on every issue, but we would have picked up an important vote in the Senate for six years.
The REAL lesson from the Delaware Senate race in 2010 is that when the GOP-E doesn’t get the candidate it wants, it will sabotage it’s own party’s chances. That’s what the GOP-E did. They refused to support her campaign to any degree. They ran her down in the media. they even implicitly supported her Marxist opponent.
Christine O’Donnell’s flaws as a candidate could have been dealt with. Every candidate who runs for their first major office needs to have coaching and counsel, but the politically experienced GOP-Ers refused to give her this.
Her conservatism isn’t what killed her run. The GOP-E sabotage did.
And now this same crowd wants conservatives to support the guy that they’ve finagled into the nomination, often by underhanded means? I don’t think so.