By now you’ve probably read all the basics about the stunning defeat of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in VA-07 yesterday (if you haven’t, see J.P. Green’s earlier post). I’ll confine myself to a couple of brief excerpts from my take late last night at TPMCafe about the bigger picture:

For the first post-primary Wednesday this year, I’m not having to poke holes in the pre-ordained MSM narrative for this campaign cycle, The Year of the Republican Establishment, wherein the Great Big Adults of the GOP were supposed to put down the unruly Tea Folk and position their “pragmatic” party perfectly for smashing victories in 2014 and maybe 2016 as well. I’d say the Republican voters of the 7th congressional district of Virginia put that meme to rest for the immediate future.

Ah, but wasn’t Lindsey Graham’s easy win in SC a counter-indicator, showing mainly that Cantor just ran a bad campaign which other Republicans can write off as an anomaly? I don’t think that’s the lesson they’ll take:

It’s unclear yet what Cantor’s demise means in terms of the succession to power in the House GOP. But there’s little question this contest will reinforce the tendency of Republican officeholders everywhere to protect their right flanks with all their might, and that’s a more important victory for “constitutional conservatives” than having Dave Brat in the House.
Interestingly enough, a Republican incumbent initially considered far more vulnerable than Cantor, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, romped to victory yesterday without a runoff over a field of six opponents trying to exploit his RINO reputation. Graham had the same kind of financial advantage as Cantor enjoyed, but also made himself a chief purveyor of red meat to “the base” in his abrasive exploitation of the Benghazi! “scandal,” and more recently, his suggestion that Barack Obama was courting impeachment by his handling of the Bergdahl exchange.
Cantor has been a conspicuous sponsor of the “reform conservative” band of intellectuals encouraging Republicans to think more deeply about a positive governing agenda. He might have done better by emulating Graham and finding some decidedly non-intellectual buttons to push among right-wing activists. That’s a lesson that won’t be lost on Cantor’s soon-to-be-former colleagues in Congress, and on the emerging Republican field for president in 2016.

Sure, running a good campaign is always a good idea, and so, too, are good constituent services, which are qualities Lindsey Graham had and Eric Cantor lacked. But in the end, it was the tribute Graham paid to the ferocious Obama-haters in his party that probably made the difference. He’ll stick around the Senate to torment the administration on every foreign policy issue, while the orphans of the “reform conservative” movement shop their policy tomes around in search of a new patron.

While most of the media attention on June 3 was devoted to Republican primaries, there were plenty of competitive Democratic primaries–especially for the U.S. House–as well. And in an article today for the American Prospect, the co-founders of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, Adam Greene and Stephanie Taylor, stake a claim on the results as part of an big progressive wave:

On Tuesday, in competitive primaries from New Jersey to Iowa to California, voters chose bold progressive Democrats over more conservative and corporate Democrats, handing big victories to the “Elizabeth Warren wing” of the Democratic Party.
Indeed, it was Progressive Super Tuesday. And it is the latest chapter in a larger story we’ve seen play out in American politics since the Wall Street economic wreck.
There’s a rising economic populist tide in America, sweeping into office leaders like Senator Warren, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, and a growing bloc of progressives in Congress.

While I respect the PCCC and what it’s trying to accomplish, I also think there’s danger in exaggerating intra-Democratic divisions, as I explained at Washington Monthly:

[I]f you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail, so Green and Taylor are just doing their jobs by suggesting that four primary outcomes are indicia of the March of Progress. But the examples they cite also indicate that any Struggle for the Soul of the Democratic Party occurring on June 3 was a mite less savage than what we are witnessing on the GOP side.
It’s interesting that Daily Kos Elections didn’t even mention ideology in its brief previews of three of the four races PCCC is claiming as victories of “bold progressive Democrats over more conservative and corporate Democrats” (yes, DKE is preoccupied with the nuts and bolts of campaigns rather than messaging, but if these primaries were waged as “struggles for the soul” I’m reasonably sure they would have mentioned it). It’s probably safe to say that in NJ-12 Bonnie Watson Coleman had a more progressive record and message than Linda Greenstein, but Coleman’s legislative leadership position and a money advantage helped, too. The same is true in IA-1, where Pat Murphy benefited from being a former House Speaker, and narrowly avoided being pushed into a district convention amidst a large field. And in CA-17, it’s not all that clear former Obama administration official Ro Khanna ran against Mike Honda “from the right,” as Green and Taylor put it, though I suppose there are tangible ghosts of the New Dem critique of traditional liberalism in Khanna’s claim that the incumbent wasn’t that interested in Silicon Valley’s needs in Washington. It might be premature to claim a victory for Honda as well, since they’ll have a rematch in November with much higher turnout (though Honda definitely outperformed expectations on June 3).
The most interesting characterization by Green and Taylor was of the third-place finisher in CA-33, Wendy Greuel, as “a former Republican with a history of accepting campaign donations from Big Oil and other special interests.” Greuel lost a general election spot to Ted Lieu, “who stood up for the 99 percent.” Just for grins, I looked at Greuel’s endorsement list, and there nestled among such famous reactionaries as Dolores Huerta and Kamala Harris and even Ed Begley, Jr., was none other than Bill de Blasio.
Now ideological labels are slippery, and Green and Taylor have as much right to define them as anybody else. But I don’t think it’s a terribly good idea for Democrats to emulate Republicans in treating their differences as equivalent in significance and heat to the Thirty Years War. I share the POV that the relative diversity of Democratic opinion is on balance a strength rather than a weakness. And while I admire the efforts of PCCC and others to hold candidates accountable for their views and positions, and agree that progressive accomplishments have sometimes been undone or diminished by wayward Democrats, and also agree that primaries are a perfectly valid venue for getting the best representation possible, the fact remains that treating someone like Wendy Greuel as an ideological leper is just bad politics.

As regular readers know, here at TDS we value intraparty openness and civility as a core principle, even as we encourage Democrats to remain true to their progressive values, policy goals, and loyalty to people in need. Those two impulses should not come into conflict, and won’t if we avoid the twin temptations of ignoring or exaggerating our differences.

The marquee contests in this week’s “Super Tuesday” primaries were Republican Senate contests in Mississippi and Iowa. And though the official score card assigned by much of the MSM was a tie in MS and a clear win in IA for the Republican Establishment, a deeper look suggests deeper problems for the GOP, as I explained yesterday at TPMCafe:

Had Thad Cochran eked out the narrow victory early returns seemed to indicate, the results, along with Joni Ernst’s comfortable win in Iowa, might have finally laid to rest the fears of Beltway Republicans that they are in danger of giving away Senate seats via erratic Tea Party nominees like 2010’s Christine O’Donnell and Sharron Angle and 2012’s Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock. A Cochran win would have been especially gratifying to the GOP Powers That Be, given the strong commitment outside conservative groups made to challenger Chris McDaniel, the state’s fertile ideological soil, and the aging incumbent’s inability to adjust to the savage tone and substance of contemporary conservatism.
But now a deeply wounded Cochran faces a three-week runoff campaign in which many factors — especially turnout — favor his opponent. And with the heavy investment of groups like the Senate Conservatives Fund and the Club for Growth in Mississippi as their best prospect for a Senate RINO “scalp,” it would take a phenomenal effort by the incumbent or a big gaffe by the challenger to change the momentum in this race. When the smoke clears on June 24, Mississippi will likely join Kentucky and Georgia as states where the loss of a Republican Senate seat in November is possible, and the dissipation of GOP resources better spent elsewhere is certain. Beyond that, Republican pols everywhere would know that not even four decades of genial service and effective money-grubbing for a very poor state, or the support of virtually everyone there ever elected to a position above dogcatcher, is enough to survive the ever-rightward tide of the conservative activist “base.”
Looking at Iowa, and more generally the post-primary Senate landscape, a likely Cochran defeat isn’t the only problem facing win-hungry GOP “pragmatists.” Joni Ernst joins North Carolina’s Thom Tillis — and potentially Georgia’s Jack Kingston, if he wins the July 22 runoff — as “Establishment” figures who’ve chosen the easy way to the nomination by adopting the most conservative positions and messages available, thus giving their Democratic opponents important general election talking points. As the king of GOP “pragmatists,” Mitt Romney, showed in 2012, it’s not always so easy to “etch-a-sketch” a new swing-voter friendly persona after spending months rushing to get in front of every movement conservative parade in sight.

Since the smoke cleared in Mississippi Wednesday morning, there have reportedly been agonized conferences involving both local and national Republican poohbahs who aren’t sure whether to go all out for Cochran in a runoff, cut their losses with a reduced financial commitment, or at least instruct Cochran’s campaign to avoid any scorched-earth tactics that might make McDaniel’s general election task more difficult if he’s the nominee. The 2014 primary cycle is not turning out to be a walk in the park for the Republican Establishment after all.

Many progressives hear red-state Democratic candidates distancing themselves from this or that policy of the Obama administration or the national Democratic Party and immediately blame it on cowardice or some sort of sellout to donors. But there’s a fundamental reality about what it takes for a blue candidate to win in a red states that needs to be taken into account. Here’s how I summed it up yesterday at Washington Monthly:

The realities that make this Democratic approach necessary are starkly illustrated by an important Alan Abramowitz article at Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball, showing that the once-abundant share of the electorate willing to vote for a Senate candidate of the same party as a president whose performance they don’t like has steadily dropped since 1980:

[O]ver this time period, voting decisions in these contests have become increasingly influenced by opinions of the incumbent president’s performance. This relationship set a new record in 2012. Ninety percent of voters who approved of President Obama’s job performance voted for a Democratic Senate candidate while 82% of voters who disapproved of the president’s performance voted for a Republican Senate candidate.
This trend portends problems for Democratic candidates in Red states like Georgia and Kentucky. Recent polls put Obama’s approval rating at 44% in Georgia and 34% in Kentucky. Moreover, in midterm elections like 2014, voters who disapprove of the president’s performance tend to turn out at a higher rate than those who approve of his performance.

Now just because the trend is towards a functional “referendum” on the president’s performance in Senate midterms doesn’t mean it’s reached some sort of all-consuming omega point, and there can obviously be circumstances where negative feelings towards non-presidential-party Senate candidates matter more than negative feelings towards the president. It just means the odds of success for candidates like Allison Lundergan Grimes and Michelle Nunn are lower than they would have been in the relatively recent past. Add in the racial dynamics that especially matter in the Deep South–as discussed by Nate Cohn at The Upshot yesterday–and you’ve got what he accurately calls “a narrow path” to victory for Democrats:

In the racially polarized South, where white voters have been trending Republican for more than a generation, the Democratic route to 50 percent is mainly a matter of racial demographics. Democrats must wait for more nonwhite voters to overcome their disadvantage with white voters.
That wait might end soon in Georgia, but not in this November’s election. In the midterm balloting, the share of whites will be around 64 percent of registered voters, down from 72 percent in 2002, when the Democratic senator Max Cleland lost re-election by 7 points. Ms. Nunn will need nearly 30 percent of white voters to prevail. If Mr. Cleland were running today, his 30 or 31 percent of white voters would probably be enough to squeak out a win.
But most Democrats running for federal office in Georgia fall well short of that 30 percent. The next-highest tally was Jim Martin’s 26 percent in 2008, when he lost a close Senate race to Saxby Chambliss, a first-term incumbent Republican running in a disastrous year for the G.O.P.

Now the “narrow path” for both Nunn and Grimes could be widened and smoothed by a rise in the president’s approval ratings, by Republican mistakes, and less visibly by the DSCC’s well-financed efforts to change midterm turnout patterns and thus refute the kind of calculations Cohn is making. But Democrats would be foolish to dismiss the tough terrain, just as Republicans would be foolish to imagine a Senate takeover in 2014 won’t be exceptionally vulnerable to reversal just two years hence.

There are legitimate arguments to be made about how red-state Democrats negotiate that “narrow path,” but the increasingly large role of presidential approval in determining downballot voting behavior means just fighting for the Obama agenda is not likely to be a viable option.

As the earlier staff post notes, the facile MSM take on the May 20 primaries is that the Republican Establishment rode to victory again. But when you look closely at the Senate contest in one key state, Georgia, it’s obvious that no “movement to the center” is underway. Here’s how I analyzed the results and trajectory at TPMCafe today:

One of the two “Establishment” candidates, Jack Kingston, ran a savagely ideological campaign that was on nearly every issue indistinguishable from a Tea Party crusade. He engaged in welfare demagoguery, embraced that hardy grassroots conservative pet rock, the Fair Tax, and bit the Chamber of Commerce hand that was feeding him by assaulting the Common Core education initiative as “Obamacare for Education.” And no one would have been surprised had he painted the National Journal “most conservative record in the race” emblem that was featured in all his ads across the shabby station wagon that this career appropriator and quite wealthy man used to signify his skinflintedness.
He narrowly defeated former Secretary of State Karen Handel — another former “Establishment” figure who was transformed into a fiery ideologue after narrowly losing the 2010 governor’s race — on a sea of money and via the pull of geography. He outspent Handel roughly 5-to-1 — not counting the million or so the Chamber spent on his behalf. Just as importantly, he banked a huge advantage over Handel in and just beyond his southeast Georgia congressional district, and she couldn’t make it up in her metro Atlanta stronghold while competing with three other North Georgia candidates.
One of those, of course, was first-place finisher David Perdue, who spent nearly as much (and also had significant out-of-state Super PAC help) as Kingston, while espousing a stern but generic “hard-core conservative” message, to use his term. If his performance in the primary on Tuesday was especially pleasing to Mitch McConnell, it would have to be tempered by the fact that the Romneyesque former corporate turnaround specialist vowed not to vote for another McConnell term as Majority Leader.
Will Perdue and Kingston now join hands in a genial “Establishment” runoff, sure not to give ammunition to Democrat Michelle Nunn, who has run ahead of both of them in some recent polls? I doubt it. Kingston has already gone after Perdue for alleged support of Common Core (which, of course, Perdue, whose cousin Sonny was a national leader in the initiative, denies) and joined Handel and the rest of the field in blasting the front-runner for a recent reference to the need for more federal revenues (which Perdue did not, amazingly, follow up by immediately intoning an anti-tax-increase oath). And Perdue fans have to worry a bit that their man does have a tin ear and a tendency to unforced errors (he single-handedly lifted Handel into contention by casually disrespecting her — and countless Georgia voters — for failing to go to college).
It will be interesting to see how Georgia Tea Folk line up for the runoff. Herman Cain is already in Perdue’s corner. Late in the night, major Handel backer Erick Erickson said he’d support Kingston. In an unusually long runoff campaign (nine weeks), with both candidates having access to plenty of money, the steady drift-to-the-right that characterized the entire primary field could continue.

So the idea that Republican extremism was taken off the table in this race because Paul Broun and Phil Gingrey lost is not only premature, but flatly inaccurate. The “Tea” label isn’t the exclusive brand of the far right, despite Republican and MSM efforts to claim the GOP is a chastened and disciplined “Establishment” party again.