With a majority of prognosticators (but not all of them) still predicting enough Republican gains to produce a change of control, it’s a good a time as any to look at some of the factors that could turn the trajectory around. I discussed several at TPMCafe yesterday:

What should prudent Republicans fear?
Money. You may find it shocking to learn that Democrats actually appear to have a national money and advertising advantage, at least in Senate races. But it’s true. Here’s how Charlie Cook of the Cook Political Report puts it in his National Journal column:

Perhaps the biggest untold story of this election is how so many Republican and conservative donors, at least those whose last name isn’t Koch, have kept their checkbooks relatively closed. In many cases, GOP candidates are not enjoying nearly the same financial largesse that existed in 2012, and in some races, they are well behind Democrats …
Many Republican and conservative donors appear to be somewhat demoralized after 2012. They feel that they were misled about the GOP’s chances in both the presidential and senatorial races that year, and/or their money was not well spent. In short, they are giving less if at all, and it has put Republican candidates in a bind in a number of places.

As for the Kochs, they haven’t outgunned Democrats as they expected either, as the Washington Post‘s Matea Gold explains:

Led by a quartet of longtime political strategists with close ties to Reid (D-Nev.), Senate Majority PAC has elbowed out other pro-Democratic groups and been on the leading edge of attacks against conservative donors Charles and David Koch. The group has become a fixed center of gravity in the left’s expanding constellation of super PACs and interest groups.
Perhaps most notably, the super PAC has held its own on the air against Americans for Prosperity, a conservative advocacy group that is the primary political organ of a network backed by the Koch brothers and other wealthy donors on the right. By the end of the summer, the two groups had run nearly the same volume of television ads nationwide, according to Kantar Media/CMAG data analyzed by the Wesleyan Media Project.
The “Republicans will get all the breaks down the home stretch” assumption a lot of folks are making could be based on mistaken ideas of GOP financial supremacy.

Turnout. We’ll soon know if the much-discussed $60 million Bannock Street Project of the DSCC, aimed at applying the targeted voter outreach efforts of the 2012 Obama campaign to the enormously critical task of reducing the party’s “midterm falloff problem,” is a myth or a miracle, or (more likely) something in-between. My own guess is that it’s likely to have the greatest impact in states with a previously under-mobilized minority vote (e.g., Arkansas and Georgia), or with an exceptionally strong pre-existing GOTV infrastructure (e.g., Iowa). Polling this year is generally showing a “likely voter” boost for Republicans that’s substantial but not as large as in 2010; reducing it even more — perhaps beneath the polling radar — is the Bannock Street Project’s goal.
Misinformation. It’s alway possible that the impression of a big year for Republicans is based on inadequate information, including spotty or inaccurate polls. That, of course, can cut both ways. FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver suggested this week that polling in Alaska over the last several cycles has consistently over-estimated Democratic performance. But on the other hand, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution survey giving Republican gubernatorial and Senate candidates in Georgia a small lead among likely voters estimated the African-American percentage of the electorate at 24 percent, significantly lower than in 2010, which seems, well, very unlikely. There’s also a very recent polling trend in Colorado, North Carolina, Iowa, and Michigan suggesting that these states may not look as good for Republicans as before, calling into question a general impression of a uniform pro-GOP drift.
Kansas. Nobody handicapping 2014 races as recently as three weeks ago factored in the possibility that Kansas, of all places, might become a sudden GOP sinkhole. Now Sen. Pat Roberts is in real and consistent trouble against independent candidate Greg Orman, as part of what appears to be a self-conscious revolt of moderate Republican voters who are also threatening to throw Gov. (and former Sen.) Sam Brownback out of office. Even if a national GOP intervention saves the Kansas ticket, this is money and effort that was supposed to be expended somewhere else.
And the sudden emergence of Kansas as a battleground raises on other possibility pre-triumphal Republicans should ponder:
Candidate Error. While Republicans avoided nominating a Christine O’Donnell or a Ken Buck this year (Senate nominees who were obviously weaker in a general election than their primary rivals), it’s not clear yet they didn’t unconsciously nominate another Todd Aiken or Richard Mourdock (purveyors of siliver-bullet-disaster gaffes) or Sharron Angle (someone with a rich record of extremist positions that negative ads could exploit). While Iowa Democrat Bruce Braley probably committed the most damaging single gaffe (his remark to Texas lawyers about an “Iowa farmer” chairing the Senate Judiciary Committee in the event of a GOP takeover) of the cycle so far, his opponent, Joni Ernst, seems capable of something just as bad, and also has Angle’s problem of telling wingnuts exactly what they wanted to hear for too long. And until Braley dissed Chuck Grassley, the most gaffe-prone Senate candidate in the country was probably Georgia’s David Perdue, who’s hardly out of the woods himself.

The tendency of Republicans to proclaim victory prematurely may turn modest gains into disappointment, if they aren’t careful.

Assessing the end of the primary season at TPMCafe this week, I noted seven distinct advantages Republicans will carry into November:

With the primaries concluded, political junkies may now devote themselves to a general election in which the overall battleground is tilted towards the GOP thanks to at least seven separate factors: (1) a wildly favorable Senate landscape with seven Democratic seats up in states carried by Mitt Romney in 2012; (2) a House majority entrenched by redistricting, incumbency, and superior Republican “efficiency” in voter distribution; (3) a Democratic “midterm falloff” problem based on eternally lower participation rates in non-presidential years by younger and minority voters; (4) a long history of second-term midterm struggles by parties holding the White House; (5) relatively low presidential approval ratings; (6) an economy perceived by most voters as not-yet-recovering from the Great Recession; and (7) a host of international problems the president will be held accountable for not instantly resolving.

That’s not what you’ll hear after the election, though:

If Republicans meet or exceed expectations, of course, most will cite none of these factors and will instead claim a “mandate” on issues ranging from health care to immigration to “entitlement reform,” and vindication of their conspiratorial accusations about Benghazi! and the IRS. By then, however, we will have fully entered a presidential cycle, and a whole new ball game with many arrows immediately shifting to an opposite direction. So the true legacy of this cycle will only be determined when its influence over the next one is fully absorbed.

That could take us right up to the next election day.

There was good news today from a federal judge in Ohio who halted an effort by the GOP Secretary of State, Jon Husted, to cut back on early voting opportunities. This is the same judge and the same Secretary of State who battled in 2012 when Judge Peter Economus wouldn’t let Husted implement early voting restrictions just prior to the presidential election. But while the results are temporarily the same, the shift in the battleground over early voting may not be positive, as I noted today at Washington Monthly:

In [2012], the state had proposed special provisions to let certain voters (as cynics suggested, Republican-leaning voters like active military personnel) cast ballots early, so it was reasonably easy to label the changes as discriminatory violations of both equal protection requirements and the Voting Rights Act.
The new no-exemptions cutback in early voting is a different matter, and as Ari Berman notes at The Nation, Economus’ ruling enters some uncharted territory:

[T]he courts are split over how to interpret the remaining provisions of the Voting Rights Act in the wake of the Supreme Court gutting a key part of the law last June. This is the first time a court has struck down limits on early voting under Section 2 of the VRA. A Bush-appointed judge recently denied a preliminary injunction to block North Carolina’s cuts to early voting and the elimination of same-day registration, a lawsuit similar to the one in Ohio. A Wisconsin judged blocked the state’s voter ID law under Section 2, while a similar trial is currently underway in Texas.

Indeed, as Rick Hasen notes at Election Law Blog, it’s unclear whether the courts can insist on Ohio preserving its previous early voting rules when some states–most notably New York–don’t allow early voting at all. Barring an intervention by the Supreme Court–which no friend of voting rights should welcome–it appears we will get through the coming election with different standards for different states.
The problem could be resolved, of course, if there existed a Congress willing to (a) repair the Voting Rights Act that was largely disabled by the Supremes in their Shelby County decision last year; and/or (b) set minimum national standards to improve ballot access, as suggested by a bipartisan commission report the political world has already forgotten about.

Occasional wins in the courts aren’t enough absent a national re-commitment to voting rights, and an expectation that states and localities will treat participation in elections as a good thing to be actively encouraged.

It’s natural for people taking a national look at this year’s big political contests to think in terms of battlegrounds for categories of offices, like Senate, House, governors and so on. But when you start laying the various maps on top of each other, it becomes plain that there aren’t an enormous number of places where efficiencies can be obtained by benefiting from the same investments.
I noticed yesterday at Washington Monthly the slight overlap between Senate and House battlegrounds:

When you stare at lists of competitive House races, what stands out most is how little overlap there is with states holding competitive Senate races. The Cook Political Report currently has 38 House seats as highly competitive (either tossups or leans). A grand total of one of them–IA-03–is in a state with one of the barnburner Senate contests. So the money pouring into Senate races is unlikely to have much effect on the balance of power in the House.

Add in highly competitive gubernatorial and control-of-state-legislature contests, and you can find a few states with multiple contests of national interest. Iowa, again, has a state legislative chamber fight. Arkansas has a relatively close gubernatorial race in addition to its pivotal Senate race. Illinois has a close governor’s race and four reasonably competitive House races. Colorado has a close governor’s race to go with its Senate race and possibly a state legislative battle. If New Hampshire’s Senate race tightened up, it could make the Granite State, with two competitive House races and a fight for control of the State House, interesting. And strangest of all, Kansas could wind up with two competitive statewide races (Senate and governor).
Still, when everybody gets around to writing up their November 4 “races to watch” memos, there will be a lot of states listed, and relatively few places where the deal will definitively go down.

Since talk of a primary challenger to the presumed presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton is a topic that won’t go away for a while, it’s probably as worthwhile to think about what a challenger might say as to speculate about his/her identity. It’s a question I discussed today at Washington Monthly. I began by quoting Jonathan Chait:

The 2016 Democratic presidential campaign is beginning to take shape. It’s a highly unusual campaign. Hillary Clinton commands the massive party loyalty of an incumbent, except she’s not an incumbent, so it is possible for another Democrat to challenge her without the campaign necessarily signalling the all-out, you-have-failed opposition of a Gene McCarthy in 1968, Ted Kennedy in 1980, Pat Buchanan in 1992, and so on. The campaign, instead, is likely to center on organized liberals using a candidacy to pressure Clinton not to move too far toward the center.

Now think about how that affects a candidate and his or her campaign. Your goal isn’t power, but influence. You expect activists to give up their time and money not to elect the next president of the United States, but to exceed low expectations. Your success is ultimately measured by how someone else runs her campaign. It’s just not a prescription for excitement.
The precedent I keep thinking about, though it’s not precisely analogous (obviously), is congressman John Ashbrook’s 1972 primary challenge to Richard Nixon. Ashbrook was supported by some very high-profile conservatives (most notably William F. Buckley) who basically didn’t trust Richard Nixon as far as they could throw him, and were particularly worried about his detente policies towards the Soviet Union and China. The Ohioan’s campaign slogan was “No Left Turns,” and his candidacy was transparently not about beating Nixon but about, well, “keeping him honest” (laughable as that phrase may seem in reference to The Tricky One) ideologically.
In the primaries Ashbrook peaked at a booming ten percent of the vote in California, and dropped out, endorsing Nixon. If he had any effect on Nixon’s general election strategy, it was certainly hard to detect.
Now it’s true Ashbrook was no Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders. But he was a respected figure in Congress and in the conservative movement. An awful lot of conservatives who voted for Nixon against him may well have sympathized with his cause. But it’s just hard to convince people to vote for one person in order to influence another. That reality needs to be factored into the talk about a challenge to HRC.

I got some blowback from WaMo commenters who assumed I was trying to discourage the idea of a challenge to Clinton. But that really misses my point: if someone’s going to challenge a candidate like her, with incumbent-level support and name ID, they’d better try to beat her, not just influence her or “keep her honest.” Uphill battles are hard enough with a clear vision of victory. Without one, it will be difficult to raise the flag.

With all the vast attention understandably being paid to the Senate landscape this year, it’s worth remembering there are just as many gubernatorial as senatorial contests in November–36 of each, to be exact. So I offered a quick panoramic view of the gubernatorial scene this year at TPMCafe:

One factor in the relatively small national attention attracted by governor’s races this year has been a surprisingly low number of retirements despite a sour mood of anti-incumbency. Twenty-nine incumbents ran for re-election; four more were term-limited; only three (Linc Chafee of RI, Deval Patrick of MA, Rick Perry of TX) voluntarily retired. One (Hawaii’s Neil Abercrombie) has lost a primary. So there haven’t been as many competitive primaries or close general election races as might normally be the case.
According to the Cook Political Report, only 13 of the 36 races are competitive at present (as defined as tossups or contests “leaning” one way or another): six governorships currently held by Democrats and seven by Republicans. Eleven of these gubernatorial battlegrounds are in states carried by Obama in 2012 (Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Wisconsin), and just two in states carried by Romney (Arkansas and Kansas). Some Democrats would add red Georgia and South Carolina to the competitive contest list; some Republicans think they have an outside chance in blue Massachusetts or Oregon. All in all, six Republican governorships are “mispositioned” in Obama ’12 states, and one Democrat in a Romney ’12 state.
Complicating everything, of course, are uncertain midterm turnout patterns, which tilted significantly Republican in 2010. In terms of national efforts to change these turnout patterns, it’s worth noting there’s not a great deal of overlap between the senatorial and gubernatorial battlegrounds. Only four of the ten states the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee’s Bannock Street Project is targeting with extraordinary resources for voter registration and contact programs have competitive gubernatorial races at the moment (Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia and Michigan). Only five states have both competitive governor’s races and nationally targeted battles for control of state legislative chambers (Arkansas, Colorado, Maine, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin).
The state of gubernatorial races helps provide an antidote to the “Republican wave” assumptions flowing from this year’s wildly slanted Senate landscape. At the moment the odds are low Republicans will make any net gubernatorial gains; they would have reason to be happy if wins in Arkansas and Illinois offset losses in Maine and Pennsylvania. They have a shot in Colorado and Connecticut and maybe even Hawaii, but then Florida, Wisconsin, and yes, Kansas are looking mighty shaky, with several other Republican incumbents not even close to being out of the woods. So don’t let Election Day dawn on you without a close look down the ballot from the obsessively followed Senate races. It matters.

And it’ll matter more in December when the excitement over whatever happens in the Senate has begun to fade.

So the much-discussed Senate Republican primary cycle is coming to a close, and many GOP partisans are congratulating themselves on avoiding disaster via the nomination of another Christine O’Donnell or Todd Akin (though they came close in Mississippi). As we reset our expectations for the general election, however, it still looks to be a very close election when it comes to control of the Senate, as I discussed today at TPMCafe:

[T]here are no signs of a Republican “wave” election; most of the positive trajectory remain attributable to a lucky Senate landscape this particular cycle and to the turnout advantages the older and whiter GOP automatically enjoys in midterms these days. So the assumption many Republicans seem to have that they’ll get all the “late breaks” in close races isn’t really warranted at this point. Nor is the much-discussed “enthusiasm gap” a reliable indicator. As Republican pollster Neil Newhouse warned recently (per the Washington Post‘s Chris Cillizza), the same “gap” existed in 2012:

“The enthusiasm gap was taken to the woodshed by the Obama team’s [get out the vote] efforts,” writes Newhouse. “In a nutshell, the Democrats turned out voters who were ‘unenthusiastic,’ ‘unexcited’ and not ‘energized’ to vote, rendering the ‘enthusiasm gap’ meaningless.”

We don’t know yet whether the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee’s “Bannock Street Project” — a heavy investment in turning the Obama ’12 campaign’s voter targeting and mobilization techniques into a disruption of past midterm turnout patterns — is going to pay off. The impression I get, however, is that it’s a deadly serious enterprise, and potentially crucial in, for example, Arkansas, where African-American turnout has been abnormally low in recent elections. We also don’t know if Republican “independent” groups are going to be as feckless as they generally were in 2012 in spending their considerable resources.
Beyond that, there are obviously idiosyncrasies in individual contests that are difficult to predict but could change everything. North Carolina’s Thom Tillis is uniquely tied to a deeply unpopular state legislature that’s generated as many negative headlines in the state as Congress. Both he and Joni Ernst took dangerously extremist positions in the course of winning their primaries. Tom Cotton didn’t even need a primary to create ideological peril for himself. Ernst and Georgia’s David Perdue have been gaffe-prone. Mitch McConnell, never a beloved figure at home, is a highly visible officer in a despised congressional status quo. Cory Gardner is the rare Republican Senate candidate for whom a strong Latino backlash against the recent upsurge in GOP nativist sentiment could prove a catastrophe.
On the Democratic side, Mary Landrieu has already in her career accomplished something thought near-impossible for a Democrat by winning a post-general-election runoff. And Mark Pryor’s reservoirs of support are such that he didn’t even draw a Republican opponent last time he ran.
So while Republicans can rightly be pleased that they avoided disaster during the Senate primary cycle, it’s far too early for gloating. And if the imponderables between now and November 4 aren’t sobering enough, they can look ahead to the 2016 Senate elections, when the landscape shifts sharply in the opposite direction and a far less favorable presidential electorate shows up at the polls.

It will be interesting to see if Republicans can manage to avoid the irrational exuberance that convinced so many of them in 2012 that Mitt Romney would be the 45th president.

There’s been a lot of hype the last week over a New York Times Magazine piece by Robert Draper suggesting that the Republican Party and the nation might be ready for a long-awaited “libertarian moment” via a Rand Paul presidential candidacy. Here’s an excerpt of my critique of the hypothesis at TPMCafe:

[T]o the extent there is something that can be called a “libertarian moment” in the Republican Party and the conservative movement, it owes less to the work of the Cato Institute than to a force genuine libertarians clutching their copies of Atlas Shrugged are typically horrified by: the Christian Right. In the emerging ideological enterprise of “constitutional conservatism,” theocrats are the senior partners, just as they have largely been in the Tea Party Movement, even though libertarians often get more attention.
There’s no universal definition of “constitutional conservatism.” The apparent coiner of the term, the Hoover Institution’s Peter Berkowitz, used it to argue for a temperate approach to political controversy that’s largely alien to those who have embraced the “brand.” Indeed, it’s most often become a sort of dog whistle scattered through speeches, slogans and bios on various campaign trails to signify that the bearer is hostile to compromise and faithful to fixed conservative principles, unlike the Republicans who have been so prone to trim and prevaricate since Barry Goldwater proudly went down in flames. The most active early Con-Con was Michele Bachmann, who rarely went more than a few minutes during her 2012 presidential campaign without uttering it. It’s now very prominently associated with Ted Cruz, who, according to Glenn Beck’s The Blaze has emerged as “the new standard-bearer for constitutional conservatism.” And it’s the preferred self-identification for Rand Paul as well.
What Con-Con most often seems to connote beyond an uncompromising attitude on specific issues is the belief that strict limitations on the size, scope and cost of government are eternally correct for this country, regardless of public opinion or circumstances. Thus violations of this “constitutional” order are eternally illegitimate, no matter what the Supreme Court says or who has won the last election.
More commonly, Con-Cons reinforce this idea of a semi-divine constitutional order by endowing it with — quite literally — divine origins. This is why David Barton’s largely discredited “Christian Nation” revisionist histories of the Founders remain so highly influential in conservative circles, and why Barton himself is welcome company in the camps of Con-Con pols ranging from Cruz and Bachmann to Rick Perry and Mike Huckabee. This is why virtually all Con-Cons conflate the Constitution with the Declaration of Independence, which enabled them to sneak both Natural and Divine Law (including most conspicuously a pre-natal Right to Life) into the nation’s organic governing structure.
What a lot of those who instinctively think of conservative Christians as hostile to libertarian ideas of strict government persistently miss is that divinizing untrammeled capitalism has been a growing habit on the Christian Right for decades. Perhaps more importantly, the idea of the “secular-socialist government” being an oppressor of religious liberty, whether it’s by maintaining public schools that teach “relativism” and evolution, or by enforcing the “Holocaust” of legalized abortion, or by insisting on anti-discrimination rules that discomfit “Christian businesses,” has made Christian conservatives highly prone to, and actually a major participant in, the anti-government rhetoric of the Tea Party. Beyond that, the essential tea party view of America as “exceptional” in eschewing the bad political habits of the rest of the world is highly congruent with, and actually owes a lot to, the old Protestant notion of the United States as a global Redeemer Nation and a “shining city on a hill.”
So perhaps the question we should be asking is not whether the Christian Right and other “traditional” conservatives can accept a Rand Paul-led “libertarian” takeover of the conservative movement and the GOP, but whether “libertarians” are an independent factor in conservative politics to begin with. After all, most of the Republican politicians we think of as “libertarian”–whether it’s Rand Paul or Justin Amash or Mike Lee–are also paid-up culture-war opponents of legalized abortion, Common Core, and other heathenish practices. As Heather Digby Parton noted tartly earlier this week:

[T]he line between theocrats and libertarian Republicans is very, very faint. Why do you think they’ve bastardized the concept of “Religious Liberty” to mean the right to inflict your religion on others? It appeals to people who fashion themselves as libertarians but really only care about their taxes, guns and weed. Those are the non-negotiable items. Everything else is on offer.

And then there’s the well-known but under-reported long-term relationship of Ron and Rand Paul with the openly theocratic U.S. Constitution Party, a Con-Con inspirational font that no Republican politician is likely to embrace these days.

To the extent that the Republican Party becomes identified with Con-Con systematic hostility to government, it’s not a creed that’s going to appeal to millennials or even to serious secular libertarians. Even if there’s a “libertarian moment” in the GOP, and that’s highly debatable, it will be the Christian Right’s hour.

In discussing the strategic and tactical differences within the GOP that exist despite agreement over policy and ideology, there’s something underneath the surface that always concerns me: the steady growth of a meta-ideology on the Right that is not at all new, but is rapidly emerging from the shadows. It generally calls itself “constitutional conservatism,” and I addressed its basic nature (not for the first time, but more definitively) yesterday at the Washington Monthly:

I do worry that the still-emerging ideology of “constitutional conservatism” is something new and dangerous, at least in its growing respectability. It’s always been there in the background, among the Birchers and in the Christian Right, and as as emotional and intellectual force within Movement Conservatism. It basically holds that a governing model of strictly limited (domestic) government that is at the same time devoted to the preservation of “traditional culture” is the only legitimate governing model for this country, now and forever, via the divinely inspired agency of the Founders. That means democratic elections, the will of the majority, the need to take collective action to meet big national challenges, the rights of women and minorities, the empirical data on what works and what doesn’t–all of those considerations and more are so much satanic or “foreign” delusions that can and must be swept aside in the pursuit of a Righteous and Exceptional America. I don’t think at this point “constitutional conservatism” has taken over the GOP, but its rhetoric and the confrontational–even chiliastic–strategy and tactics it suggests are becoming more common every day, even among hackish pols who probably don’t think deeply about anything and would sell out the “base” in a heartbeat if they could get away with it. Some of the moneyed interests bankrolling the GOP and the conservative movement probably just view all the God and Founders talk as a shiny bauble with which to fool the rubes, but others–notably the Kochs–seem to have embraced it as a vehicle for permanent domination of American politics. This is the real “struggle for the soul of the GOP” that’s worth watching, far more than the tempests in a Tea Party Pot in this or that primary.

The Con-Con self-identification has grown like topsy in just the last four years. It bears careful watching, because those who espouse this radical ideology will not be subdued by sweet reason, their own party’s “discipline,” or even temporary setbacks. They’re playing a long game, and a dangerous game.

In the course of writing a column for TPMCafe arguing that GOP “Establishment” wins in this year’s Republican Senate primaries disguised the broader Tea Party influence over the party, I decided it was time to step back and sort out what we all mean when we talk about “battles” and “wars” on the Right these days. Here’s how I sought to do that at the Washington Monthly today:

I’ve been pretty outspoken for years now in arguing that aside from foreign policy, the main “battles” within the Republican Party have been over strategy and tactics, not policy or ideology. Now strategy and tactics do matter, as last year’s government shutdown and the incessant obstructionism that is the congressional GOP’s default position demonstrate. But the main function of the Tea Party Movement has been to intensify and defend a rightward movement in the Republican Party that’s been underway for decades but has gained hellish momentum since the 2008 elections, regularly overwhelming the efforts of GOP elites to instill some “pragmatic” caution. In that sense, the Tea Folk are winning “the war” even if they lose a number of primary “battles.”
If you look at the rhetoric and positioning of many of the “Establishment” winners in this year’s Senate primaries, it’s like the 2012 Republican presidential nominating contest all over again. There’s remarkable near-unanimity in favor of hard-core positions on fiscal matters, the economy, cultural issues, and immigration–and above all a violent resistance to the idea that government can play a positive role in national life other than at the Pentagon. “Pragmatic outsider” David Perdue of GA won his runoff in no small part by going Medieval on “amnesty,” just like Mitt Romney did during the 2012 primaries. “Establishment” icon Thom Tillis of North Carolina won his primary by branding himself as leader of a “conservative revolution” in his state (much as Romney called himself “severely conservative”), and identifying with “base activist” hostility to the poor and minorities (much as Romney went over the brink with his “47%” comments). Joni Ernst of Iowa, initially vulnerable in her primary for having supported a gas tax increase in the legislature, cozied up to every conservative activist in sight, indulged in harsh Obama-bashing, and endorsed a “personhood” amendment.
This rightward movement of the GOP remains the most important political phenomenon of our time, and despite all the “rebranding” talk after the 2012 presidential defeat, it’s still happening. So whereas no one should exaggerate the differences of opinion among Republicans at present, the rightward pressure based on real and threatened primary challenges is an important factor.

Perhaps in using military language in talking about intramural conflict on the Right, we should talk about a “Cold War”–one in which it’s reasonably clear who is on the offensive and seems likely to prevail. It’s not any sort of “pragmatists.”