Republican Civil War: Big Business Intends To Teach Grassroots Activists Who's In Charge

Monday morning, the Washington Post noted that the big money GOP Establishment groups, particularly the Chamber of Commerce and Rove's Crossroads have not opened the financial spigots for the Republican Party to the extent they have in the recent past, "spending dramatically less to help the party ahead of the 2014 congressional elections." And specifically, they are not underwriting extremists and Tea Party candidates. This is a godsend for red state Democratic senators and Senate candidates, especially in states like Louisiana, Arkansas, Michigan, Iowa and South Dakota.

At this point two years ago, the fight for the Senate was in full swing. Pro-GOP groups had spent $11.4 million on 2012 Senate races, twice as much as their Democratic rivals.

But as of last week, pro-Republican groups had spent just $4.8 million on television advertising. None of that money was spent in Iowa, one of a half-dozen states where Democratic retirements have given the GOP hope it hasn’t had in decades.

Much of that spending was in Kentucky where the Senate’s most powerful Republican, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, is fighting challenges from the right and left.

Democratic-leaning groups had spent $3.3 million.

“Unlike previous cycles, we won’t be sending good money after substandard candidates with weak campaigns,” said Jonathan Collegio, a spokesman for the conservative super political action committee American Crossroads.

A year later, the ghosts of high-profile Senate losses, including Missouri, still linger.

By the end of 2011, pro-Republican outside groups, led by American Crossroads and its sister Crossroads GPS, spent more than $1.8 million against Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri. By Election Day, they had spent more than $11.5 million against her.

Along the way, then-U.S. Rep. Todd Akin emerged from a three-way primary, only to implode in August after suggesting publicly that female victims of “a legitimate rape” have the biological capacity to prevent pregnancy.

The party also suffered losses in Republican strongholds of North Dakota and Indiana.

…[E]stablishment-minded groups such as Crossroads have been slow to act, and their absence has caught the tea party’s attention. It’s using the vacuum to strengthen its influence while recruiting like-minded candidates.

“Establishment donors are unhappy. They spent a lot of money and didn’t do well,” said Sal Russo, the Tea Party Express political director.

“We’ve been busy,” he added, noting that his organization has interviewed more than 60 candidates this year across 17 states.

The tug of war between such groups isn’t helping Republicans unify around strong candidates.

Iowa’s Senate contest should be a promising pickup opportunity for Republicans. But some candidates in the crowded field have little proven campaign experience.

Outside spending can be helpful but doesn’t always mean success.

Americans for Prosperity, a group backed by the conservative billionaire Koch brothers, saturated Iowa mailboxes and telephone lines recently to support conservative city council candidates. But they all lost.

Did you catch that phrase from the Rove operative above, "we won’t be sending good money after substandard candidates with weak campaigns?" He who decides which candidate is substandard and which isn't, wields considerable power. The GOP Establishment like to point how teabaggers dragged the GOP to ruin with "substandard candidates" (i.e.- teabaggers) in Missouri (Akin) and Indiana (Mourdock) Senate races. But teabaggers are just as eager to point out that it was Big Business who ruined GOP chances with "substandard candidates" backed heavily by Rove in Wisconsin (Thompson), Montana (Rehberg) and North Dakota (Berg). I'm not sure which side gets the most blame for Ohio, where Sherrod Brown whipped a candidate who is clearly substandard by anyone's measure, Josh Mandel, 51-45%. And next up, someone has to deal with is John Birch extremist and former drug addict Paul Broun in Georgia. Republicans are petrified he can win the primary and lose the general election-- yes, in Georgia. "GOP leaders are vowing to step in. And they're not only training their sights on Georgia. Just as Akin wasn't the only ham-handed GOP nominee-- think Richard Mourdock in Indiana and Christine O'Donnell in Delaware-- Republicans nationwide are on a search-and-destroy mission for candidates they fear could embarrass the party. Party operatives describe the looming battle as an effort that will look less like an all-out assault and more like a series of stealthy precision strikes, because everyone involved acknowledges that any attempt to meddle in a GOP primary is fraught with risk. Rank-and-file conservatives, the kind who pick primary winners, don't like being told what to do."

Democrats can't laugh, of course. Their own election committees, the DSCC and DCCC make the same kind of judgements and those judgments are only as good as the leaders making them. In the case of the DCCC that was catastrophic in 2012 and is proving even worse in the 2014 cycle, where corrupt conservative Steve Israel has adamantly refused to learn any lessons at all from his catastrophic performance in 2012. On the Senate side, Patty Murray did an incredible, even mind boggling job in 2012 but this year the DSCC has the worst leadership in recent memory (Michael Bennet, a fool who allows the staff to walk all over him) and he is already signaling that he's ready to give up on winnable races in South Dakota and Maine. Israel uses the "substandard candidate" description to protect his GOP cronies in blue-leaning districts from grassroots progressives who don't meet his own ideological and extraordinarily low ethical standards.