The place to focus on conservatives is in the primaries, but once those are over, I think it’s important to vote for whoever is the GOP candidate. Mississippi was appalling, but it would be even more appalling to lose a GOP seat to a Dem, not because the GOPer in this case is any better than the Dem, but because legislative politics is a numbers game.
If the GOP doesn’t have the numbers, there’s nothing even the good people in the House or Senate can do; if it has the numbers, then it is up to the conservatives to push their less conservative brethren to more conservative positions. However, this is going to be slow simply because many of the conservatives are still juniors and do not have enough seniority to be on important committees or be committee chairs.
That will change with time, of course, if we can just patiently keep working in the primaries and convincing the electorate that they should abandon drooling, senile incumbents (Cochran) or good ol’ boys.
And we have to get it together, too. One of the reasons Cochran got to do what he did is that the conservative electorate itself was divided between other candidates. That shouldn’t happen again.
I appreciate your last paragraph, livius. Conservatives are certainly on a learning curve, actually learning while in hand to hand combat with their own Party Establishment as well as Democrat opponents, and other divided primary opponents.
But the rest is sentiment, livius, and old school wing-and-a-prayer stuff that has actually brought us down.
What patience does really, is it bought time for Republicans to increasingly and incrementally be converted to liberals while we dilly dallied and played small ball.
Establishment can not be toyed with. They have to be damaged and defeated, in enough numbers to stop the bleed out of our country. Yes, there is high risk and cost. Yes, it could mean trouble, but we are in desperate times, which call for desperate measures.