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But surprisingly perhaps, this week's big victory for the party machine was not greeted with overt displays of jubilation at Republican HQ in Washington. "It's more like relief," was how one senior official described the mood.

That note of caution raises important questions about whether the Republican mainstream is really beginning to win the argument.

The first question is whether the Tea Party's influence over the last four years has ensured that today's "mainstream" Republican candidate is actually running significantly to the right on the major issues such as tax, immigration, welfare and spending.

So when John Boehner - the Republican Speaker of the House who has not hidden his frustration with the intransigent right - says there's "not that big a difference" between Tea Partiers and the average conservative Republican, it's not just an appeal for unity. It also happens to be the truth.

That's how a candidate like Joni Ernst - a Harley Davidson-riding, gun-loving former soldier who says her experience "castrating hogs" on her Iowa farm will be useful in "fixing" Washington - can find herself being endorsed by both Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin.

The big bind for Republicans is that while tacking right might well help them re-take the Senate, recent electoral history suggests it will poison their prospects at the general election in 2016.

The voters who turn out in the mid-term voters are much older, whiter and more Republican-leaning than in a general election. In the 2010 mid-terms, 77 per cent of voters were white, the same percentage of whites in the US population in 1983.

The danger - as Whit Ayres, a highly experienced Republican pollster, warns - is that a resounding Republican victory in 2014, thanks to a favourable electorate voting in Republican-leaning states, risks the party drawing the "all the wrong lessons".

The same old tone and policies on immigration, welfare and social issues, that broadly appeals to the America of 1983 is not going to wash with the more liberal, multi-cultural and socially tolerant America that will vote in 2016.

Unfortunately, acknowledging this reality - as many moderate Republicans do in private - is not the same as acting up on it.

Excerpt from:
Republicans need a positive message to win back the White House in 2016