Primary Politics: Can the Grassroots Defeat the GOP Establishment in 2014?

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Interesting developments: Matt Bevin is challenging Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in the Kentucky GOP primary.

Checking his biography, I’m glad to see that Bevin is a graduate of Washington & Lee University, a U.S. Army veteran, and a small business owner — exactly the kind of outsider “not a politician” profile anyone would want in a Tea Party candidate. If grassroots conservatives in Kentucky rally behind Bevin, I think we can start chilling the champagne for Mitch McConnell’s retirement party. However, defeating the party’s Senate leader in a primary would be completely unprecedented.

If this is Star Wars, Luke Skywalker and the rebel alliance can’t expect Darth Vader to surrender the Empire without a fight. Or can we?

FLASHBACK MAY 2009:

We were standing outside the Continental Lounge in Rosslyn, Va., while the young Republican operative explained it to me.
“All they care about is getting their chairmanships back, and they don’t care how they get there,” said the operative. “They don’t want to spend any money, so they were looking for a self-funder.”
“They” are Republican senators, and what my friend was explaining was the otherwise inexplicable decision of the National Republican Senatorial Committee to endorse Charlie Crist in the Florida Senate race — 15 months before the primary!

Ah, those heady days of 2009, when the Tea Party uprising was a new and untested force in American political life, when Marco Rubio was 35 points behind Charlie Crist in the polls and supporters of that unknown underdog Marco Rubio were told he had no chance!

Rubio’s role in the “Gang of Eight” has rather tarnished his reputation among conservatives, but thank God he beat Charlie Crist, eh?

Nothing could be more corrupt than the shabby deal whereby John Cornyn, the NRSC and Florida GOP chairman Jim Greer — I pause to spit on the ground — lined up behind Crist in May 2009.

The “Not One Red Cent” rebellion was the first shot of a guerrilla struggle, with the Tea Party grassroots as the ragtag insurgents in a long war for control of the Republican Party that has not ended yet, and won’t end — cannot end — until the rebels have utterly vanquished the Beltway GOP Establishment and their go-along-to-get-along philosophy of bipartisan compromise. There is nothing that the present-day Democrat Party believes in that any patriotic American can endorse, and all talk of “bipartisanship” is anathema.

You cannot defeat Democrats by promising to cooperate with Democrats, and the GOP’s corrupt compromisers must be replaced by a new generation of conservatives who understand a very old idea: Give voters a choice, not an echo, as Phyllis Schalfly said in 1964.

To hell with anyone who says the politics of principle is unrealistic, who argues that it is a “smart” and pragmatic thing for Republicans to position themselves as the “Me, Too” party, promising voters a more efficient Welfare State — Democrat Lite, as it were.

The Democrat are wrong, their liberal policy agenda is bad, and Republicans need not apologize for being the party of Right and Good.

Mid-term elections are always more about the grassroots than are the pursuit of independent “swing” voters that is typical of those gaudy national spectacles of a presidential campaign. Turnout is always lower in the mid-terms. So-called low-information voters — who are usually counted in opinion polls as undecided, “don’t know/don’t care” — can be spurred to vote in a presidential election by emotional appeals to do their patriotic duty as citizens. But it is very difficult to explain to these disaffected and ill-informed people why electing congressmen and senators and state legislators is ultimately important to the future of the country. And it is only in closely contested “swing” states that the parties make any real effort to mobilize voters even in a presidential campaign.

Understanding this factor is crucial to evaluating the stakes in 2014. In a deeply “red” state like Kentucky in a mid-term election, there is comparatively little chance that a bruising primary fight for the GOP Senate nomination will damage Republican prospects in November 2014. If Matt Bevin can somehow mobilize the kind of grassroots support necessary to defeat Mitch McConnell in the primary, Bevin will stomp Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes in the general election the way Godzilla stomped Tokyo.

Conservatives therefore need not listen to any scaredy-cat talk that support for Matt Bevin will endanger Republican hopes for capturing control of the Senate in 2014. The GOP Establishment will encourage such fears, and the liberal media will cheerfully publicize such talk, in exactly the same way the same people claimed that the Tea Party uprising of 2009-2010 was bad for Republicans. Yet the result in November 2010 was a historic landslide victory for Republicans, and if John Boehner doesn’t understand that he owes his control of the House Speaker’s gavel to the conservative grassroots, how better to remind Boehner of this fact than to send his Senate counterpart Mitch McConnell into early retirement?

Simple message for you, Mister Speaker: You could be next.

All of these thoughts were inspired by Erick Erickson’s commentary on his encounter with an NRSC representative at this past weekend’s Red State Gathering  in New Orleans.

What Erick relates is unfortunate on all sides. The NRSC operative was, we may suppose, just following orders, and Erick and I have had more than a few disputes in the past couple of years. But my own position in the fundamental question that Erick addresses hasn’t changed since 2009, when he and I were in 100% agreement: The NRSC should stay the hell out of contested Republican primaries, period.

Set aside any question of ideology, friendship or personal interest, and what it comes down to is this: Either the Republican Party represents an active and organic popular movement — a principled and patriotic opposition to the corrupt agenda of the Democrats — or else the GOP is simply a vehicle of careerist political ambition.

A top-down party controlled by insiders motivated by their narrow private interests cannot expect the kind of committed loyalty that a genuinely principled grassroots movement inspires. For the NRSC to go meddling in a primary — even on behalf of the Senate Minority Leader — is anathema to the kind of grassroots party the GOP must be, if it is ever to defeat the Democrats and become a governing majority again.

If Mitch McConnell wants to be re-nominated as the Republican candidate for Senate in Kentucky, let him spend his own campaign funds and mobilize his own resources for that purpose, and not dishonestly use national party resources against Matt Bevin.

And frankly, I think the spectacle of a contested primary can and should be averted altogether: Mitch McConnell should retire.

No hard feelings, Senator. Cash in your chips and walk away from the table, take up a gig at a think tank or lobby shop, collect your pension and appear on TV as an “elder statesman.” I’m sure Fox News would pay you a nice six-figure salary as a commentator.

There is a quite recent precedent, after all.

Last November, when the Retire #Taxby Chambliss movement began, nobody imagined it might actually happen, but it did, didn’t it?

Is this crazy? Of course it is. But everybody told us we were crazy to imagine that Marco Rubio could defeat Charlie Crist.

Until this morning, I’d never even heard the name Matt Bevin. All I know about him is what I’ve quickly skimmed from his Web site biography, and frankly I don’t give a damn about whatever his political “negatives” might be. This isn’t really about Matt Bevin. It’s not about Mitch McConnell. It’s not about Erick Erickson. This is about America’s future, and we are not a nation built by timid and fearful souls.

Here’s the way I see it: We’re playing Texas Hold ‘Em. It’s been one of those long nights — win a little, lose a little, up and down, never a chance to rake a big pot. The chips are dwindling. No guts, no glory, so if we get any kind of a decent hand, we might as well go all-in.

Folks, as crazy as this may seem, I think that if we will all rally behind Matt Bevin — and rally now — Mitch McConnell will announce by Christmas that he won’t seek re-election to the Senate.

No contested primary, no wasted resources, no hard feelings, just a changing of the guard, and a passing of the torch.

This development will shock the daylights out of the GOP Beltway Establishment, which has “tamed” Marco Rubio and thought they had domesticated the Tea Party movement.

Do we want bipartisan compromise?

Do we want Democrat Lite? Go along to get along?

Not just “no” — hell, no. All in!

 

MATT BEVIN for U.S. SENATE

 


142 comments

  1. I’m not in KY but I’m close enough to get radio from there. I’ll try to help keep you informed of what it looks like on the ground. Right now it looks like McConnell is going for a squash him hard and fast strategy. No pretense of being positive.

  2. Whats wrong with getting behind BOTH Bevin and Mace. She has shown no indication that she would be only slightly better than Miss Shamnisty.

  3. You cannot defeat Democrats by promising to cooperate with Democrats,and the GOP’s corrupt compromisers must be replaced by a new generation of conservatives who understand a very old idea: Give voters a choice, not an echo, as Phyllis Schalfly said in 1964.

    To hell with anyone who says the politics of principle is unrealistic, who argues that it is a “smart” and pragmatic thing for Republicans to position themselves as the “Me, Too” party, promising voters a more efficient Welfare State — Democrat Lite, as it were.

    Pray pardon the self-referential link but I was beating this drum right after the election.

    In short, what the professional pundits are telling us to do is to recreate the New Coke experiment with the Republicans. Make the Republicans “taste” more like Democrats, they say, and everything will be fine. The problem is, history shows that strategy to be a failure.

    First off, we have the history of New Coke itself (many reading this probably lived through it, but for those that didn’t, I’ll summarize it). It was, simply put, an attempt to make Coke taste more like Pepsi, because of a series of Pepsi commercials using a “sip test” where people said they preferred Pepsi. Coke ran their own tests and decided that, yes, people preferred the taste of Pepsi.

    However, Coke forgot one big rule: people rarely buy a product seen as a “knock-off” or “me-too” attempt (there are exceptions, of course). Pepsi drinkers didn’t turn to New Coke, they just kept on drinking their Pepsi. Along with that, Coke faced an infamous revolt from long-time drinkers who didn’t want their Coke changed into something they didn’t like — if they’d wanted a Pepsi-like drink, many argued, they’d switch to Pepsi.

    This impulse to be “me-too Democrat-lite” has been around a very long time, and raises its ugly head every time the Democrats start winning. We need to remember that Reagan won by giving voters a clear difference in (to use his own words) bold colors, not pale pastels.

  4. There is no one size fits all. We have to get the dems out of the majority. Then we have to figure out the Buckley maxium of conservative political action: Who is the most conservative candidate we can nominate who can then go on to win.

    I mean seriously, we can’t find a more conservative guy or gal to run against Lindsey Graham who can win the general? Or did South Carolina suddenly become Massachusetts with palmettos?

  5. My concern is that we see a repeat of what has so often happened recently where an establishment candidate can be eliminated only to elect a Democrat. I also believe that Democrat operatives are engaging in social media encouraging that sort of behavior and making the notion seem more popular than it actually is. Remember, Democrats have no problem with their establishment candidates.

    The thing to understand is that generally speaking fewer than 20% of the people who vote in general elections tend to vote in primaries. A candidate who has only a few hundred activist individuals can sway a primary election with a result that does not at all reflect the desires of the majority of the rank and file of the party. This is a particular problem in blue and purple states where a “true conservative” is not likely to get elected in a general election. Primaryiing Lugar in Indiana elected a Democrat. Primarying the “establishment” Sue Lowden in Nevada who was beating Harry Reid in the polls with Sharon Angle ensured Harry Reid got re-elected. So be darned careful that you aren’t just voting against the establishment candidate just for the sake of it and that you are actually voting FOR someone who can win the statewide election. In California, where I live, I will take even a weak R over a D any day.

    That also reminds me. People who are in states that have adopted this newfangled mechanism of simply sending the top two candidates in a primary on to the general regardless of party means that in many elections here in California we have a choice of two Democrats and no Republicans on the ballot. If you are in a hopelessly lopsided area where there would be no hope of your party’s candidate even appearing on the general election ballot, I might suggest you vote the other party’s primary ballot (allowed in California) and knock the incumbent out that way.

  6. There is no point in McConnell’s remaining in the Senate except to suffer further humiliation. John McCain and his Gang of Eight have killed any chance McConnell had of influencing affairs in DC.

  7. I agree with you, but we still need the research. I seriously doubt we will get McConnell to retire, but it’s worth a shot, and we will still need the SC research to be sure we aren’t spporting someone just as bad as Miss “I’m just like Reagan” Graham.

  8. Voting for, or supporting, the lesser evil, means you are still voting for, or supporting, evil. You may have to take the lesser evil now, but you can’t allow that person to kick back in office and expect to be able to remain there the rest of their adult life as we have gotten in McCain, Graham, and McConnell.

  9. The Institutional Republicans may win the war of candidate selection, but they will then lose their cushy positions in office. I think that the Conservative base is about one more betrayal [or less] from giving up on the Republican wing of the Governing Party. Combine the growing Democrat vote fraud and Conservatives staying home, and McConnell [and others] can compete for those think tank jobs.

  12. I’m not trying to rain on anyone’s parade, but …. being a Reagan Conservative and TP member, I would love to see McConnell go down in flames, to the right candidate. I live in SW Ohio, and believe me, I have my hands full sending Boehner scathing emails on an almost daily basis. At first, I received a reply almost every time, anymore … not so much.
    Anywho, in the local media there is, shall we say, scuttlebutt being revealed about Mr. Bevin that is less than flattering. He is running on a platform of being an honest, conservative businessman with Ky’s best interests at heart. Well, his businesses are located in Connecticut. Several of his businesses have been severely tax delinquent, and one is described as being the most delinquent in its region.
    The most disturbing morsel to come out in the local media is, supposedly, he went to a yet “unnamed”, uberliberal dem congresscritter, asked for and received, the sum of $200,000 in stimulus funds to bailout one of his businesses. Now, I don’t know how this is going to pan out, but let’s hope these allegations are proven to be false or at least exaggerated.
    This is a great site, and I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news, but we all deserve the truth. We have to fully vet our candidates, so “we won’t be fooled again”, haha, couldn’t resist (showing my age now). I will report any updates as I hear them.

  14. He’ll make it up to them by letting them pick Medea Benjamin and three bloggers from Salon to host the rest. Don’t wanna burn any bridges, after all.

  15. I think McConnell will retire after it comes out that he was briefed on the Benghazi gun running to Syria, knew it was the reason for the cover-up by Obama administration, blocked investigations into it and stood by in silence as America, including Kentucky, demanded answers. If Congress’ gang of 8 on intel had not been briefed the gun-running would be illegal. Since McConnell & Boehner have not demanded investigation or even complained Obama overstepped in gun-running, it is safe bet they were briefed as required by law. I do not think this type of scandal would be easy for McConnell to overcome, I pray it isn’t anyway!

  16. I hope you’re not inferring that I’m on the NRSC? Are you even serious? Everything I’ve heard so far has been on local talk radio, so we’ll see if it is true or not.

  17. You’re in SC right? You guys going to get rid of your crazy cousin’s girlfriend next year?

  18. McConnell won’t retire, not when he’s so close to being the majority leader. Did Bennett retire or Lugar? Nope they had to be booted out. Taxby was/is an anomaly of entrenched incumbents. Most would hold on long after death.
    The only way we’ll get rid of McConnell is if he’s booted out in the primary or dies in office Robert Byrd style.

  19. There is no such thing as a perfect candidate. Rhetoric about lesser evil is crap (with a few exceptions). Corrupt, yes. Weak, yes. Compromised, yes. Evil? Evil is a very strong word to use. It applies to certain politicans (Holder for example engages in evil behavior). But use it sparingly.

    For example, Mike Castle was a POS Republican. He was pro choice, generally liberal, and was no republican. He was a terrible GOP politician and some positions he supported were evil.. If you want to call him evil because he supports abortion, fair enough. But understand that is calling a lot of people evil also. Politics is also about persuading people and you catch more flies with honey than vinegar.

    Castle absolutely should have been challenged. Unfortunately Christine O’Donnell (sorry Smitty and Stacy) turned out to be a weak candidate in the general. Yeah, she was treated badly by the MSM, but she also sucked as a candidate. So if you are going to challenge make sure your alternative candidate has the ability to win in the general.

    Your chance to challenge a bad republican like Graham is in the primaries. Make sure we focus our support of the best candidate who can win in the general and let’s hope we primary Graham out. But we also have to get the majority to gain control of the Senate.

  20. “Mitch McConnell should retire.”

    Why?

    I can see where you’ve given a single reason to vote FOR Bevin or AGAINST McConnell.

  21. Really? McConnell talks the talk, but rarely walks the walk. He has capitulated too many times.
    As for Mr.Bevin, we’ll see.

  22. The populists and TEA Party factions better win these primaries, because if we can’t take back the GOP, we won’t have a hope in Hell of taking back our country. (Not original to me, but I can’t remember where I saw this.)

  26. Oh, sorry for the presumption. I really, really, really want Mr.Bevin to turn out to be the candidate we all hope he is. We can’t, in my eyes, do much worse than McConnell. On the same side, we don’t need more of the same.
    It’s very possible that these allegations were floated by the McConnell campaign, as I said, I live just across the river from N.Ky, which has to be carried by any candidate in this race to insure victory, so the propaganda is going to be thick.

  27. I agree, this is a very critical juncture for the very future of our country. Somehow the heat has to be turned up on the IRS, as they are still engaging in the sordid practice of silencing the TPM through intimidation. Makes me want to spit.

  30. No problem; my original statement wasn’t sufficiently clear, so misunderstandings happen.

    If this is the worst they can dredge up about Mr. Bevin, I think he’ll do just fine.

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