How Many Senate Seats With The Republican Civil War Cost The GOP Next Year?

I wish I could remember where I read it-- because it was so funny-- but I did come across an assertion that Mitch McConnell doesn't want to be Senate Majority Leader if he has to preside over a bunch of Know Nothing sociopaths that include Steve Stockman (R-TX), Joe Carr (TN), Milton Wolf (KS), Richard Cash (R-SC), Paul Broun (R-GA), Erick Bennett (ME), Chris McDaniel (MS). No need to mention Matt Bevin (KY), for obvious reasons. And then there are GOP extremists in non-Republican-held seats that can't be all that exciting to McConnell either-- Ron Maness in Louisiana, Greg Brannon in North Carolina, Bob Vander Plaat in Iowa, Ken Buck in Colorado, Joe Miller in Alaska…

As yesterday's NY Daily News pointed out, Several Republican senators' reelection efforts are being threatened by conservative challengers. The thing is, all the Republicans being challenged are conservatives, mostly very, very extreme conservatives, like McConnell himself. Steve Stockman may call John Cornyn "a liberal" from now until next November but that doesn't change Cornyn's far right voting record. The mainstream press just doesn't feel comfortable calling the challengers "fascists," "Nazis" or even just "reactionaries." Those words, however, are far more accurate descriptions of the Tea Party challengers than "conservatives." The Daily News does assert the obvious though: "It's a civil war" and it could cost the GOP gains they hope to reap."

Seven of 12 Republican senators up for reelection next year now face serious primary challenges from their right, among them Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) became the latest with last week’s surprise announcement that firebrand conservative Rep. Steve Stockman (R-Tex.) will run against him.

Stockman’s confrontational ways included this campaign bumper sticker last year: “If babies had guns they wouldn’t be aborted.”

The intra-party battle flared again later in the week when Tea Party types groused over the budget deal reached by House and Senate leaders.

The right-wing immediately bashed Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), a chief negotiator and onetime conservative darling, as having sold out by agreeing to insufficient spending cuts. More establishment types hailed the accord, which should avert another government shutdown.

…Mike Murphy, a longtime Republican consultant now also plying his trade in Hollywood, described the internecine battle this way: “It’s the priests versus the mathematicians.”

The priests, he says, are highly ideological, conservative insurgents, while the mathematicians are more pragmatic types who want to expand the party base, toward Latinos, who hate the GOP’s general stance on immigration, and those youthful voters wary of its attitude on social issues like gay marriage.

…Primary fights “eat up resources and time, and they force incumbents even further to the right,” said Jennifer Duffy who handicaps the Senate for the Cook Political Report. “It hurts the GOP collectively because it allows Democrats to attempt to link every Republican to these Tea Party challengers.”

John Feehery, a longtime senior Republican staffer now at the Quinn Gillespie public affairs firm, said other GOP-leaning groups like the National Retail Federation and the Business Roundtable are poised to support the GOP establishment.

If they can decisively defeat Tea Party candidates, they can chart a course aimed at appealing to young and Hispanic voters.

If they don’t, there’s trouble for the party.

“The average American looks at Tea Party candidates and sees them as out of step on many issues and just plain insensitive on others,” Duffy said. “This is what hurts the Republican brand.”

Whether you want to call them "conservatives" or "fascists," a few of the extremists look like they have a shot at winning their primary battles. Most will lose decisively. But in the cases where they do win, one would think the Democratic Party-- at least the state party if not a badly-led DSCC-- would have an alternative recruited and ready to go. There's not much chance, for example, that Maine Republicans will toss out mainstream conservative incumbent Susan Collins for lunatic fringe operative Erick Bennett (best known to Mainers for his obsessive and deranged homophobia. He has the profile of a severely mentally unbalanced Republican closet case.) But if he does manage to beat Collins in the primary-- remember these are the people who nominated Paul LePage-- the Democrats have a plausible candidate already running, Shenna Bellows, you would beat him handily in a general election. Same in Georgia, Kentucky, South Carolina… Plausible Democrats are running in those states-- respectively, Michelle Nunn, Alison Lundergan Grimes, Jay Stamper.

On the other hand, if Stockman beats Cornyn, the Democrats have nothing. And if one of the extremists wins in Wyoming, Tennessee, Misssissippi, Nebraska, or Kansas… it's the same as Texas-- no plausible Democratic candidate to contest the seat. There have been some bad DSCC chairmen in the past but none as patently incompetent as weak and stupid staff-dominated Michael Bennet of Colorado. Patty Murray made it look so easy last year by her masterful performance as chair that the Democrats made two rookie errors. They let her negotiate a budget deal with Paul Ryan and Ryan stomped all over her (no one remembers The Peter Principle?) and they picked one of their least capable members, Bennet, to run the DSCC. He'll do as badly as she did against Ryan this year, rather than as well as she did in 2012 against the NRSC.