Will Sifting Through The Smoldering Ashes Of The Republican Party Help The Democrats Take Back The House Next Year?

So what's left after the Republican shutdown of the U.S. government? A slowdown in economic growth, $150 billion in lost GDP, 900,000 lost jobs and a $24 billion bill to American taxpayers first and foremost. But now Ted Cruz has a million of more names and email addresses on his potential donor list (his phony-baloney petition to repeal the Affordable Care Act). And the bitterness. The Republican Party is filled with inner-directed hatred and mistrust right now. It really is two parties, the mainstream conservatives vs the Tortilla Coast Suicide Caucus. Former Bush speechwriter David Frum says the GOP must expel radical teabaggers from the party. "Right now, tea-party extremism contaminates the whole Republican brand." Over the weekend, the NY Times took a look at how destructive Ted Cruz and his clique have been to the GOP.

Short version: Republican incumbents in non-Confederate swing districts, especially in states like Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Michigan and California, will be struggling to survive next year. If Pelosi gets rid of Steve Israel and appoints a DCCC chair who wants to win, powerful Republican committee chairs and policymakers who Israel gives immunity to, could be challenged and beaten, particularly Fred Upton and Mike Rogers in Michigan, Buck McKeon and Darrell Issa in California, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and John Mica in Florida, John Kline in Minnesota and Paul Ryan in Wisconsin. As of now, the DCCC would rather waste resources in prohibitively red districts like OH-06 (PVI is R+8 and Romney beat Obama there by 13 points) trying to elect conservative garbage like this against a hapless and inconsequential backbencher like Bill Johnson. Every GOP heavyweight mentioned above is in a far bluer district with a more vulnerable and troublesome incumbent-- and Steve Israel ignores them all. The Times is painting a narrative that begs for a fighting DCCC chair-- someone like Keith Ellison or Alan Grayson-- to take advantage of a Republican Party that is falling apart. But Pelosi refuses to budge.

After the budget standoff ended in crushing defeat last week and the political damage reports began to pile up for Republicans, one longtime party leader after another stepped forward to chastise their less seasoned, Tea Party-inspired colleagues who drove the losing strategy.

“Let’s face it: it was not a good maneuver,” Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, the senior Senate Republican and supporter of the deal that ended the showdown, said on Thursday in an interview from his Capitol Hill office. “And that’s when you’ve got to have the adults running the thing.”

…The budget fight that led to the first government shutdown in 17 years did not just set off a round of recriminations among Republicans over who was to blame for the politically disastrous standoff. It also heralded a very public escalation of a far more consequential battle for control of the Republican Party, a confrontation between Tea Party conservatives and establishment Republicans that will play out in the coming Congressional and presidential primaries in 2014 and 2016 but has been simmering since President George W. Bush’s administration, if not before.

In dozens of interviews, elected officials, strategists and donors from both wings of the party were unusually blunt in drawing the intraparty battle lines, suggesting that the time for an open feud over the Republican future had arrived.

“It’s civil war in the G.O.P.,” said Richard Viguerie, a veteran conservative warrior who helped invent the political direct mail business.

…Far from being chastened by the failure to achieve any of the concessions they had sought from President Obama-- primarily to roll back his signature health care law-- the conservative activists who helped drive the confrontation in Congress and helped fuel support for the 144 House Republicans who voted against ending it are now intensifying their effort to rid the party of the sort of timorous Republicans who they said doomed their effort from the start.

“This was an inflection point because the gap between what people believe in their hearts and what they see in Washington is getting wider and wider,” said Jim DeMint, a former South Carolina senator and current Heritage Foundation president, who as a founder of the Senate Conservatives Fund is helping lead the insurgency.

Mr. DeMint, a sort of political godfather to the junior Republican representatives who engineered the health care fight and shutdown, said of his acolytes: “They represent the voices of a lot of Americans who really think it’s time to draw a line in the sand to stop this reckless spending and the growth of the federal government.”

But the party’s establishment leaders now have what they regard as proof that the activist wing’s tactics do not, and will not, work.

“The 20 or 30 members of the House who have been driving this aren’t a majority, and too often the strategy-- the tactic-- was ‘Let’s just lay down a marker and force people to be with us,’” said the senior Republican strategist Karl Rove. “Successful movements inside parties are movements that persuade people,” he added. “The question is, can they persuade? And thus far the jury’s out.”

Unlike in the last two elections when they were caught off guard by grass-roots primary candidates, who went on to lose otherwise winnable races, the establishment’s most powerful elements are going to try to pre-empt another round of embarrassing defeats.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce will decide which candidates to support in the 2014 midterm elections based in part upon whether they voted for the deal on Wednesday to end the shutdown and raise the debt ceiling.

The leading establishment “super PAC” co-founded by Mr. Rove, American Crossroads, has already started a new initiative called the Conservative Victory Project that is quietly working to head off Republican challengers whose victories in primaries, in its determination, would put party seats-- or potential party seats-- at risk of falling to Democrats in general elections.

But the jockeying for supremacy is making some longtime Republican lawmakers uneasy. Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri said the internal squabbles could weaken the party’s ability to wage battles against Democrats.

“You just can’t win these fights over a long period of time if you’re fighting over how to have the fight,” he said.

At its heart, this fight is the latest chapter of a long-running struggle for dominance between a generally pro-business, center-right bloc that seeks to tame but not exactly dismantle Washington, and populist conservatives who call for more extreme measures to shrink government.

Though the election and re-election of Mr. Obama may have radicalized many conservatives, the base’s fury has its roots in the two terms of his predecessor, Mr. Bush, whose expansion of Medicare, proposed immigration overhaul and 2008 bank bailout left many conservatives distraught.

“People just saw a party that had wandered away from its soul,” said Michael A. Needham, the chief executive of Heritage Action, an offshoot of the Heritage Foundation and perhaps now the most influential lobby group among Congressional Republicans.

But the conservatives’ sense of disillusionment with the establishment did not translate into success in the 2008 or 2012 nomination fights. And the divergent reactions to Mitt Romney’s defeat at the hands of Mr. Obama last year reignited a debate from Mr. Obama’s defeat of Senator John McCain in 2008.

Some establishment Republicans argued that the primary season helped drive Mr. Romney to take more conservative positions than he otherwise would have on issues like immigration. Activists voting against him asserted that he lost because he did not truly embrace conservative principles.

…The more important intraparty fight will begin playing out chiefly in Senate primaries next year, with the targeting of incumbents like Mr. Cochran; Mitch McConnell, the minority leader; Lindsey Graham of South Carolina; and perhaps Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Pat Roberts of Kansas.

Their perceived roles as moderating drags on Tea Party-inspired senators like Ted Cruz of Texas and Mike Lee of Utah in the shutdown negotiations has galvanized conservative organizations to elect more such Republicans.

Mr. DeMint said he thought the power of the establishment and its corporate money was waning. “It’s harder to buy influence in Washington now,” he said.

That is certainly true in the House, the bulwark of Tea Party conservatism thanks to the overwhelmingly Republican nature of many of the districts and the less expensive campaigns necessary in them.

Louie Gohmert (Tortilla Coast Suicide Caucus-TX)

As the Republican retreat on the shutdown demonstrated, Mr. Cruz and Mr. Lee are very much outnumbered in the Senate.

“The lesson is, we need more reinforcements,” said Daniel Horowitz, an official with the Madison Project. Groups like his are more reliant on smaller dollar donations than their rivals. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Crossroads, for example, can summon large amounts from donors across the business spectrum, many of whom are expressing concern about the latest turn of events on Capitol Hill and are intent on avoiding nominees like Richard Mourdock of Indiana, who unseated Senator Richard G. Lugar, a longtime veteran, in the primary but lost in the general election after making a damaging comment on rape.

“I have seen the problems in some of these primaries where we’ve knocked off some pretty good candidates and it resulted in nothing for us-- like Lugar,” said Mel Sembler, a Florida real estate developer and former ambassador who helps Crossroads raise money.

Spencer Zwick, the chief fund-raiser for Mr. Romney’s campaign, said individual donors tell him they are eager to help the establishment wing’s cause however they can. “There are a lot of individual donors who were supportive of Mitt’s campaign who are quietly waiting to figure out how they can play, and I think there’s a lot of appetite to make sure that we nominate candidates who can win general elections,” he said.

The Tea Party-aligned groups say they have an established record of winning primaries against Republican rivals with deep corporate backing. “We’ve always been outspent by orders of magnitude,” said Matt Kibbe, the president of FreedomWorks. And they do have some big donors, like the multimillionaire investor Foster Friess, who backed a failed primary challenge to Mr. Hatch in Utah last year and indicated in an interview last week that he would consider new “opportunities to put young, dynamic people in.”

The more money and energy the Republicans waste clobbering each other, the better than chance of Democrats-- or at least Democrats without Steve Israel tied around their necks-- to take back swing districts that unloved GOP mainstreamers now hold. Could the Democrats win a net of 17 seats next year? Without Israel keeping vulnerable reps like Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Dave Reichert, Fred Upton, Buck McKeon and Mike Rogers off the table, the Democrats could almost certainly win over two dozen GOP seats. With Israel in charge of the effort, they'll be lucky to win half that-- not enough to win back the House.

This morning the PPP and MoveOn released polling in two-dozen more Republican-held districts, most of which the DCCC is ignoring, that show GOP incumbents like Ed Royce (CA), Darrell Issa (CA), John Mica (FL), Mario Diaz-Balart (FL), Justin Amash (MI), Scott Garrett (NJ), Leonard Lance (NJ), Steve Chabot (OH), Reid Ribble (WI), Joe Pitts (PA), Steve Stivers (OH), Mike Turner (OH) and several others extremely vulnerable to defeat next year. The choice is Pelosi's. If she keeps Steve Israel, the Democrats will not win back the House. If she jettisons him, she'll be Speaker again.