A major subplot of this years midterm elections is the competition between the Republican establishment and the tea party wing of the party. The establishment is fighting back, but has the tea party already won?
The general election is still six months off. But Tuesday opens the summer preseason of intraparty contests, starting with an important primary in North Carolina. Between now and the end of June, more than two dozen states will hold primary elections. After a July break, the preseason will end with another round of primaries in August and early September.
Most closely watched for clues about the balance of power in the GOP will be the five primaries in which incumbent senators face direct challenges from tea party conservatives. They are Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), Thad Cochran (Miss.), Lindsey Graham (S.C.), Pat Roberts (Kan.) and Lamar Alexander (Tenn.).
At this point, all the incumbents are favored to win. McConnell is first up, with a primary on May 20, against Matt Bevin. One earlier primary also involved a tea party challenge. That was in Texas, where Sen. John Cornyn easily survived.
What does this say about the tea party? One thing it may say is that its not so easy to defeat incumbents in primaries. The reality is that incumbent senators (as well as House members) dont lose primaries very often. They have lost them less often over the past three decades than they did in the three-plus decades before that.
Rhodes Cook, an independent analyst of elections, scoped out the statistics in a recent newsletter. He found that the years between 1982 and 2012 saw fewer Senate and House incumbents defeated in primary elections than in the 34-year period from 1946-1980. In that first period, 38 senators and 147 House members lost primaries; since 1982, only eight senators and 74 House members have been defeated in primaries.
In House races, the most incumbent losses came in the three post-redistricting elections1992, 2002 and 2012when incumbents were sometimes pitted against one another because of newly drawn district lines.
In 2010, three senators were denied their partys nominations: Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who went on to win reelection as a write-in candidate; Utahs Robert Bennett, who was knocked out in a party convention; and the late Arlen Specter, who lost the Democratic Senate primary in Pennsylvania after switching parties. But in no other year between 1982 and 2012 was more than one senator been defeated in a primary.
That provides a baseline for evaluating the tea party challenges this year. There should have been no grand expectations of incumbents falling left and right to the energized tea party wing of the party. But thats not necessarily because the tea party has become a significantly diminished force.
Another reason the challengers might fall to the incumbents is the quality of the candidates. What the Republicans learned in 2010, in primaries involving their own incumbents as well as in primaries picking challengers to Democrats, is that the tea party candidates often werent ready for the primetime of a general election.
Read more:
Balz: Tea party vs. establishment as primary season opens