Why Republicans Are Choosing to Go Down With Trump

The seeming willingness of Congressional Republicans (with very few exceptions) to sake the future on Donald Trump, a narcissistic pathological liar whose approval level has fallen to 36% in some ways appears baffling.  Yes, the party base has become a toxic brew of Christian religious extremists and white supremacists with a sprinkling of greedy billionaires, but at some point one would hope that the future of the country would trump - no pun intended - partisanship and clinging to a file individual.  Sadly, as a piece in Vox argues, two factors convince Republicans to stay with Trump to the bitter end: (i) the fear of primary challenges by Trump's unhinged base, and (ii) an insatiable lust for power that means that Republicans simply cannot allow Democrats to win no matter the consequences to the nation.  It's a disturbing picture, but one that appears to accurately describe the current situation confronting the country.  The prognosis is likely not a good one.  Here are article excerpts:

 Last week, I wrote a piece that asked, “Will Republicans impeach Trump?” The short answer: unlikely.

In this piece, I want to explore how much this “unlikely” conclusion flows from the zero-sum logic of our two-party system. The short answer: a lot.

Because of the two-party system, Republicans are stuck with Donald Trump. If he goes down, they go down with him. There’s now no way for Republicans to advance conservative policy goals without also advancing Trump. And In this era of bipolar two-party tribal politics, no matter what Trump does, there’s always one thing worse for Republicans. Something even more unthinkable, something even more existentially frightening than Trump with his hand on the nuclear codes: Democrats having power.

Most congressional Republicans never wanted Trump as their standard-bearer. They still don’t. But their fates are now tied to him. If Trump goes down in a dramatic impeachment (is there any other kind?), Republicans almost certainly lose their House majority in the 2018 midterms, and probably continue to suffer the repercussions in 2020. And there’s a real risk that if Trump goes down, he tries to take all the furniture with him, fracturing the Republican Party.

So Republican congressional leaders are stuck. The only thing worse than having Trump as their unpopular standard-bearer is losing power and popularity because they tried to remove him as their standard-bearer.

We saw this in the presidential election. One by one, Republican leaders who had criticized Trump decided to forget all the things they said about Trump being a con artist, utterly amoral, a pathological liar. The most important thing was preventing Hillary Clinton from becoming president. Donald Trump was a vote against Hillary Clinton. There was no alternative, only a binary choice.

Many voters felt the same way. They had reservations aplenty about Trump. But right-wing propaganda told them to remember “all the children Hillary Clinton has personally murdered and chopped up and raped.” Some were convinced that “Clinton will demolish America as we know it, and every human life will be under government control.” As talk show host Dennis Prager put it recently in a National Review article (italics mine): “Many conservatives, including me, believe that it would have been close to over for America as America if the Republican candidate, who happened to be a flawed man named Donald Trump, had not won.”

Whether motivated by power or by the existential righteousness of their moral cause (or more likely, by a complicated, self-justifying mix of both), Republican leaders continue to make the same craven calculus . . . .

What would happen if they joined with Democrats to call for Trump’s impeachment?  Many of these Republicans would likely find themselves threatened in primaries, treated as traitors to the Republican Party. And some of them would probably lose.

Let’s say that these Republicans were even willing to go a step further. Let’s say they believed Trump was destroying the Republican Party as they knew it, and it was time to let the party die and start a new party in its place.

The Republican Party would then split. How would this play out?

For sake of simplicity, let’s say half of today’s Republican voters would stick with the Trump Republican Party, while the other half move over to the new Conservative Party (which would stand for more traditional conservative values of restraint and limited government).

So assuming a 50-50 electorate right now, we’d instead now have a 50-25-25 electorate (Democrat-Republican-Conservative).  . . . . The result? Democrats would win a landslide in the House, easily taking 300 seats. They’d also probably win a bunch of Senate seats too.

That’s how our single-member, plurality electoral system works. And it’s why Republicans would never do this — because they could anticipate exactly what would happen. If the Republican Party splits over Trump, Democrats win.

You can quibble with my guesstimates of percentages and breakdowns here. . . . But even if it only happens in a handful of districts, even if only a limited number of Republicans break off to stand against Trump, they could tip control to Democrats.

Because we have single-member plurality-winner districts, Republican leaders who formed a third party to support conservative policies but oppose Trump would be handing congressional elections to Democrats.

In the two-party system, Republicans in Congress need Trump as much as he needs them. As a result, Republicans, whether or not they think Trump is a narcissistic, amoral pathological liar, are stuck with him. So are voters who want conservatism without Trump.

Going forward, this trap will only make politics more ugly.

For Republicans, the challenge will be to keep their troops feeling certain that however imperfect Trump might be, Democrats would by definition be worse — that it really might be the end of the republic if Republicans lose the house. This likely means doubling down on all the aggressive us-against-them white Christian identity politics and apocalyptic narratives they can find to make sure their base shows up.

And so deeper into the widening gyre we go. This is the logic of our two-party system right now. And Donald Trump is still our president, leading us into deeper tribalism as he takes advantage of our two-party system’s fatal flaw.

The Republican Self-Inflicted Dilemma

While I feel despair at times over the damage being done to the country by the Trump/Pence regime and Vichy Republicans, I also take some cynical glee in watching many Republicans twisting on a rope of their own creation as they pander to Trump voters in the party base in order to avoid primary challenges while at the same time alienating moderate and many swing voters.  The entire process started when Christofascists and thinly veiled white supremacists were voted on to local city and county committees with the foolish idea that moderates could control these toxic individuals and the agendas they pushed.   Instead, the deplorable hijacked the party grass roots and sane and rational people fled the GOP in droves, I and my entire extended family included.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the Republican self-created dilemma.  Here are excerpts:

CARTERSVILLE, Ga.—Several miles off Route 41 in Bartow County, Georgia, is the downtown area of Cartersville. It's a throwback place with brick-face storefronts, independently owned businesses, and railroad tracks that bring freight trains straight through the center of the town every 30 minutes.

Here, the firing of James Comey arouses not support or opposition, but rather, indifference. Nobody I spoke with cared either way; it doesn't affect them or their families. People shrugged when asked about Trump's tweetstorms. Most agreed that press treatment of Trump is too harsh. Overall, the focus for Trump voters here is the big picture: the economy, jobs, and border security.

Bartow County is 885 miles from Manhattan, but this is Donald Trump country. He took 46 percent of the vote here during the primary, trailed by Ted Cruz at 25 percent and Marco Rubio at 18 percent. In the general election, Trump trounced Hillary Clinton, winning 75 percent of the vote to Clinton's 21 percent.

Currently, however, President Trump’s job approval is clinging to the 40 percent threshold. And while Republican members of Congress, save for a select few, are backing the president, his legislative agenda appears stalled, with the prospects of health-care reform tenuous at best. Tax reform, at this point, looks like a pipe dream.

Trump's struggles have left Republicans, who had once hoped to gain seats in 2018, worrying they might lose control of both the House and Senate. "Obviously no one knows what is going to happen in next year's midterm elections, but analysts who have watched congressional elections for a long time are seeing signs that 2018 could be a wave election that flips control of the House to Democrats,” Charlie Cook wrote recently in National Journal.

Trump keeps adding gasoline to fires, yet House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell behave as if it’s business-as-usual in Washington, D.C. If there is anything to explain their reticence in publicly rebuking Trump, it likely comes from GOP fears of alienating Trump voters across the country.

This is the predicament now facing conservatives and Republicans in Congress. Trump’s supporters—their own primary voters—are standing by him. But while Trump supporters want him to focus on the big picture issues such as health care and tax reform, the president spends most of his time consumed with the kind of trivialities other presidents leave for spokespeople to handle.

At this point, it does not appear that anybody in the White House can communicate to Trump the urgency to dial down the tweetstorms and outbursts. (Kellyanne Conway defended Trump’s tweeting as going “directly to the people.”)

That leaves leaders like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell in a bind. They worry about Trump alienating the swing voters some of their members will need to win reelection but if they make their concerns public, Trump supporters may see it as an attempt to undermine the president. In March, Trump threatened lawmakers who didn't back the AHCA with a primary opponent. Many Republicans represent districts that went strongly for Donald Trump in 2016, and while they hold safe seats for the general election, none of them want to waste time and resources beating back primary opponents.

Much as Trump voters may detest insiders, the president’s ability to enact his agenda now rests on Ryan and McConnell. They’re left to perform a high-wire act of politics and personal persuasion, trying to rein in their president’s excesses without alienating their own voters. If they can’t pull it off, voters in places like Cartersville are likely to be unforgiving. Couple that with a resurgent Democratic electorate, and the wave election Charlie Cook warned about comes closer every day.

 We can only hope that the Republicans' worst nightmares are realized in 2018.

North Carolina Passes Sweepingly Bill Voiding All LGBT Nondiscrimination Ordinances

GOP House Speaker Tim Moore and GOP bill sponsor Rep. Dan Bishop 

Confirming fears I noted yesterday, the Republican controlled North Carolina legislature has passed a sweeping anti-LGBT bill that will rescind all LGBT non-discrimination ordinances across the state. Is suspect that tonight LGBT North Carolinians must feel like German Jews did in the early stages of Hitler's rise to power when the first anti-Jewish laws began to be promulgated.   Equally disgusting is GOP Governor Pat McCrory promise this evening that he will sign "immediately."  One can only hope that Virginia will immediately reach out to businesses appalled by North Carolina's lurch toward hate and bigotry and assure them that Virginia is business friendly and will not persecute their LGBT employees.   As for the Democrats in the North Carolina House, these foul individuals need to be subjected to primary challenges as soon as possible.  I for one will boycott North Carolina and avoid spending a single penny in North Carolina or with a North Carolina based business. Here are highlights on this animus based legislation from the Charlotte Observer:

The N.C. General Assembly on Wednesday approved a bill that invalidates Charlotte’s new legal protections for LGBT individuals, doing far more than striking down a controversial provision that allowed transgender people to use the bathroom of the gender with which they identify.

The vote in the House was 84-25 after three hours of debate, with all Republicans voting for it and 11 Democrats breaking ranks with their party to support the bill.

In the Senate, the vote was 32-0 after the Democrats walked out in protest, saying they had not been allowed to participate in the process.

“We witnessed an affront to democracy,” said Democratic Sen. Dan Blue of Raleigh, the minority leader. “We will not be silent.”

Dana Fenton, the city of Charlotte’s lobbyist, said the bill would invalidate the city’s newly expanded nondiscrimination ordinance, passed in a 7-4 City Council vote in February. He said he believes the state’s largest employers will lobby the governor to veto it.

“I think you will see corporations, not just those in N.C., weighing in on this,” he said. “I think they will put pressure on the governor.”

But Raleigh station WRAL reported that McCrory would sign the bill into law late Wednesday.

The full bill wasn’t made public until Wednesday morning. Until then, it was unclear whether the legislators would target only the bathroom provision, or whether they would go further and strike down the rest of the ordinance.

The impetus of the special session was a provision in Charlotte’s expanded nondiscrimination ordinance that would allow transgender individuals to use the bathroom that corresponds to the gender with which they identify.

But it also would keep Charlotte and any other municipality from adding new protections for gays, lesbians or transgender individuals.

In North Carolina today, there are no legal protections for gays and lesbians. That means a private business in Charlotte or anywhere else in the state can refuse to serve someone who is gay, and a bakery could refuse to make a cake for a wedding of a gay couple.

In Charlotte, that would have changed as of April 1, when the expanded ordinance is scheduled to go into effect. The protected classes recognized by the state would be race, color, national origin and biological sex.

The bill also prohibits K-12 public schools, and publicly funded universities and colleges from having multistall transgender bathrooms. Critics said that could jeopardize federal funding for education.  The only transgender people who would be exempt would be those who had the sex on their birth certificate legally changed.

One opponent of the bill told senators that the legislation would have unintended consequences. The speaker asked them to consider the case of someone born as a female, but who now identifies as a man, with a beard made possible through hormones. That person will be required to use a women’s bathroom.

Personally, I hope the U.S. Department of Education notifies all North Carolina school divisions that their federal funding will be withdrawn if they comply with this hate based legislation.  Meanwhile, I can't wait for a lawsuit challenging the bill which is unconstitutional under the United States Supreme Court holding in Romer v. Evans.  As for self-styled evangelical Christians, I have nothing for disgust for them and their decision to embrace ignorance and bigotry. I want nothing to do with them and I long for the day when they become the social pariahs that they deserve to be.  In their own way, they are no better than members of ISIS.

GOP Super PAC Plans Gay-Rights Push This Fall

Paul Singer

While most Republican candidates remain to shamelessly prostituting themselves to the Christofascist/Tea Party elements of the GOP base, some are seeing the long term handwriting on the fall and have begun to take pro-gay rights positions.  Such courage and moral integrity, naturally outrages the hate merchants among the "godly Christian" crowd and puts such gay friendly candidates at risk.  Enter the American Unity PAC and its policy arm, American Unity Fund, with a mission of supporting Republicans who will vote for gay friendly policies ranging from gay marriage to employment non-discrimination protections.  As USA Today reports, American Unity plans on helping finance the campaigns of gay friendly GOP candidates this fall.  Here are story highlights:

A Republican group tied to hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer plans to spend at least $2 million up to Election Day to boost congressional candidates who share its views in favor of gay rights.

American Unity's midterm push comes after a string of recent victories, including little-noticed state contests in Illinois, Nevada, Minnesota and Hawaii, where it helped Republican candidates — vulnerable over gay-marriage votes — survive primary challenges.

The group has drawn up plans to back seven congressional candidates ahead of November's elections and could add more to the roster, said Jeff Cook-McCormac, a senior adviser to American Unity PAC and its policy arm, American Unity Fund. They include incumbents such as Pennsylvania Rep. Charlie Dent, a moderate Republican who announced his support for gay marriage in May and Richard Tisei, an openly gay Republican making his second bid for a U.S. House seat in Massachusetts.

The super PAC already has spent $700,000 in a congressional primary this year to help Republican Rep. Richard Hanna beat back a Tea Party-backed challenger in upstate New York. Hanna, a two-term incumbent, backs a federal bill to ban workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation.

For many years, there's been a huge fear from Republican elected officials that if they showed courage on issues like this, would they be able to survive politically?" Cook-McCormac said.

"What American Unity PAC is committed to doing is ensuring that as these courageous elected officials follow their conscience and do the right thing, that there is a political network in place that's there to defend them."

In all, the group has raised nearly $9 million through its three branches — a super PAC, the tax-exempt arm focused on policy issues and a third group that organizes donors to support candidates.

Singer, the founder of Elliott Management and a leading force in Republican efforts to legalize gay marriage, is the largest donor to the American Unity super PAC at nearly $2 million, federal records show. Another billionaire, Boston investment manager Seth Klarman, has donated $ 1 million.

American Unity's strategy varies by contest. In Illinois and Minnesota this year, it helped launch state-focused super PACs to back like-minded Republicans in primaries. In other states, it has encouraged its network of donors to send campaign checks directly to at-risk candidates.

GOP Challenger Calls Lindsey Graham "Ambiguously Gay"

Are Republicans in South Carolina finally catching on the U.S. Senator Lindsay Graham, a/k/a the Palmetto Queen from time to time on this blog?  It seems that one of Graham's primary challengers is calling Graham "ambiguously gay."  Frankly, I'd say there is much ambiguity about Graham's queenly disposition.  About the only thing positive about him is at least he never married a beard to further his political career like too many other closeted Republicans.   The Raw Story looks at the cat fight in South Carolina.  Here are some highlights:

At a press conference held Thursday to announce their solidarity in opposing Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of the four Republican candidates running against the incumbent senator referred to Graham as “ambiguously gay,” according to The State.

The news conference, held to announce a pledge between the challengers to support whomever ended up in a runoff with Graham, took an awkward turn when candidate Dave Feliciano stepped to the podium and addressed the issue of Graham’s sexuality.

“It’s about time that South Carolina (says), ‘Hey, we’re tired of the ambiguously gay senator from South Carolina, ” Feliciano said. “We’re ready for a new leader to merge the Republican Party. We’re done with this. This is what it’s about, all of us coming together and saying, one way or the other, one of us is going to be on that ballot in November’.”

Questions about Graham’s sexuality have  arisen previously but the senator has dismissed them.

Before speaking, Feliciano, a former police officer from Spartanburg with no previous political experience, signed a pledge with state Sen. Lee Bright, businessman Richard Cash, and attorney Bill Connor promising to endorse whichever candidate advanced to face Graham.
 
After the event, attorney Connor disavowed Feliciano’s comments as a personal attack and said that each candidate’s comments were their own.

Stating that he believes in free speech,  Cash added, “but I also believe in being civil and respectful. Mr. Feliciano’s comments were inappropriate and I disavow any association with them.”

However, both Cash and Connor said they still would honor the agreement, which they signed.

There are six GOP candidates who have announced primary challenges to Graham.  The other two, Columbia pastor Det Bowers and PR executive Nancy Mace, did not attend the news conference.

Connor may have disavowed the remark, but I suspect he secretly enjoyed it. :)

Cuccinelli is a Symptom of the GOP's Problems

Ken Cuccinelli and those who nominated him - especially the religious fanatics at The Family Foundation, a hate group in all but official designation as such - are not representative of mainstream Americans.  They represent a shrinking (and in my view, near mentally ill) element of American society that is in open rebellion against modernity, science, and equality for all citizens.  Their principal motivations are greed and hatred of others fueled by religious extremism and desperation that their white privilege is being eroded.  Despite all of this, the Republican Party has allowed these individuals to take over much of the Party grass roots and engage in behavior that has been near destructive for the nation's economy.  A piece in the National Journal looks at how Ken Cuccinelli reflects this sickness within the GOP.  Here are excerpts:

No, Ken Cuccinelli's expected defeat next week won't have any more bearing on the 2014 midterms than Chris Christie's anticipated landslide victory in solidly-Democratic New Jersey. But the divide that split the GOP asunder in Virginia is a powerful symptom of the problems that are hurting the party across the country.

Republicans are facing challenges winning over swing, suburban voters that were once a bulwark of the party's coalition. Cuccinelli has spent little time campaigning in vote-rich Northern Virginia, with his socially-conservative message failing to resonate with more-moderate voters.

Throughout his campaign, Cuccinelli has been catering to the party base, declining to criticize GOP tactics over the government shutdown and appearing with tea party leaders Ted Cruz and Rand Paul in the campaign's final month. His campaign appearance with Paul on Monday was at Liberty University, where the senator advocated a pro-life message to an evangelical audience.

"Republicans need to ask what's wrong with our business model here," said a frustrated Tom Davis, former Republican congressman from Northern Virginia and Cuccinelli supporter. "This should have been a slam dunk. Virginia almost always votes against the president's party ... All we needed was a mammal up there."

If Cuccinelli fails to engineer an unlikely comeback, it should signal that running an outspoken social conservative in a battleground state is a losing formula. But to the contrary, there are few signs that the message is getting through. If anything, the party's civil war – played out in Virginia between lieutenant governor Bill Bolling and Cuccinelli – is just beginning to heat up.

Consider: Seven of the 12 Republican senators up for re-election in 2014 are facing credible primary threats from the right. Few are expected to win, but most will pose more than a nuisance.

[W]ith the grassroots' energy focused on ousting their own, outside groups are paying less attention to the crop of vulnerable Democratic senators. The GOP campaign committees' fundraising is down, and American Crossroads is facing challenges replicating their fundraising success of elections past. Just like Cuccinelli has faced a huge financial disadvantage against deep-pocketed Terry McAuliffe, Republican candidates could find themselves outspent in pivotal races – thanks to the intraparty divide.

The Virginia governor's race also has highlighted how election rules designed to benefit conservatives have played an unheralded role in pushing the party rightward, costing them at the general-election ballot box. Most notable: The party's practice, in several states, of holding conventions instead of primaries to choose nominees, leaving the typically unrepresentative cross-section of single-issue activists to pick the Republican candidate.

In Virginia, Cuccinelli's allies bypassed the primary process to blunt intraparty opposition, a move that's contributed to his problems with unifying the party. Ironically, the outspoken conservative is belatedly trying to rally the base, something that would have been much easier had he engaged the broader GOP electorate in a primary campaign.

The bigger long-term fear, according to Republican strategists, is if the party divisions worsen, the tea party forces could emerge as a third party. Already McConnell's campaign has adopted a scorched-earth strategy not just against his primary opponent, but against the very tea party-oriented groups working to elect more conservative challengers to incumbents. The McConnell camp's goal is to exploit the groups' ideological inconsistencies, but those tactics are already inflaming intraparty tensions.

"The right could spring out very quickly and become their own entity—and then we're gone," said Davis. "These folks feel very empowered."

The so-called GOP establishment began creating this Frankenstein monster  as far back as a quarter century ago by welcoming Christofascists - who once had been viewed akin to lepers - into the local levels of the GOP.  Now the monster is out of control and frankly, I don't know how it can be killed. 

GOP Learns Nothing: RINO Hunting Season Opens in Earnest

Part of me takes delicious pleasure in watching the Frankenstein monster like Christofascist/Tea Party base of the Republican Party to continue to turn on the so-called GOP establishment and push the party closer to long term extinction.  When I left the GOP years ago over the rise of the Christofascists within the party and its inability to honor the concept of separation of church and state I predicted that long term the GOP was committing suicide.  With the advent of the Tea Party (which I see largely as the unpopular Christian Right hiding under a different name), things have only become worse as these elements of the GOP become increasingly open about their opposition to modernity, their blatant racism, their religious extremism, and their contempt and hatred towards anyone they deem "other."  Now, in the wake of the government shutdown debacle, these same lunatics are trying to target the few sane Republicans left.  If they succeed, it will only hasten the GOP's decline.  The only question will be how much additional damage will be done to America before the GOP becomes a small, permanent minority party.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at the quest of the crazies to eliminate moderate - and sane - members of the GOP.  Here are excerpts:

Republicans in the House of Representatives have such low approval ratings, according to recent polls, that a Democratic takeover looks possible. But before Republicans can defend their majority, they first must stave off a slew of primary challengers who are targeting incumbent members of Congress.

The new spate of primaries mostly target those Republicans who failed to toe the Tea Party line during the recent budget standoff, voting to open up the government and raise the debt ceiling. But the challenges are by no means limited to the crew of moderates. Even House Speaker John Boehner is not immune.

On the day the government shutdown began, J.D. Winteregg, a high school French teacher and founder of a group called The Ohio Accountability Project, announced a primary run against Boehner. The campaign will, at the very least, give a place for grassroots Republicans to vent their outrage against the GOP leadership while waiting for polls to open. In an interview, Winteregg said his campaign sends a message “that no one is safe.” And momentum for his run, he said, has been growing in the wake of Boehner’s budget capitulation in Washington.

In North Carolina, Taylor Griffin, a former aide to President George W. Bush, also announced his bid for Congress just as the government shut down. Griffin is running against Rep. Walter Jones, an antiwar former Democrat who was ranked by National Journal as the House’s most liberal Republican in 2011. Jones, Griffin conceded, has been pretty good on fiscal issues, but the challenger said the fiscal skirmishes left him “frustrated with how broken things had become, and I thought my congressman was part of the problem.”

It remains to be seen whether these races will bring out the full firepower of the conservative financial and grassroots army. Often outsiders have bested incumbent and establishment picks only after groups such as FreedomWorks, Heritage Action, Club for Growth, and the Tea Party Express have gotten involved in a big way.

The GOP establishment stupidly embraced these nutcases in the past out of cynical expediency.  Now, the monster has turned on them.  I am enjoying my predictions come to pass.

Extremist Primary Electorate is Costing the GOP

As note before on this, other than a series of sustained electoral defeats, I do not know what can save the GOP from the insane Christofascists and Tea Party saboteurs who have highjacked the party grass roots and who predominate in primary contests.  Frankly, today's GOP base is utterly untethered from objective reality and lives in some bizarre imaginary alternate universe that doesn't - and never did - exist in fact and which bears no relation to the reality experienced by most voters.  The result is that primary candidates that excite the GOP base are in all likelihood viewed as radioactive by everyone else, including independent voters and self-styled moderates.  One only need to think of U.S. Senate candidates Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock as examples of the phenomenon.  A piece in the Washington Post looks ate the ongoing problem for the GOP:  Here are excerpts:

Republican chances for a Senate majority in 2015 took a bit of a hit today, with senior GOP Rep. Dave Camp announcing that he won’t run for the Michigan open seat. Whatever Camp’s chances, he was the GOP’s top choice, and with him out the chances are extremely good that Democrats will retain this seat.

This points to a broader, if mostly hidden, risk that the radicalization of the GOP primary electorate and many of its party actors poses for the party’s long term hopes.

Everyone talks about Senate seats lost to Republicans by awful candidates foisted on the GOP by the Tea Party, such as Todd Akin and Christine O’Donnell. But perhaps even more important is another Tea Party effect: the prospect of Tea Party upsets convincing strong candidates that primary elections are a hurdle they can’t surmount — leading them to decide not to run.

Candidates are important in Senate elections — it’s often the case that a strong candidate can be the difference between a sharply contested race and one that fizzles. The best candidates are usually professional politicians, and those politicians are, in the lingo of political scientists, strategic: they choose to run only when they believe that it’s a good time to run.

But the possibility of Tea Party upsets in primaries make it that much more difficult. If Senators Bob Bennett and Richard Lugar can’t get renominated, then why should someone such as Camp risk it when he has a perfectly safe House seat that he would have to give up?

We don’t get to know exactly how much of a factor this is in any particular decision. But there are signs it could broadly matter. In the last cycle, Republicans failed to recruit a solid challenger in states such as Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan — all states in which Republicans have at least a fighting chance. That seems to be happening this time around in the campaigns for open seats in Michigan and Iowa, and in the races against potentially vulnerable Democrats in Minnesota, Colorado, New Hampshire, and perhaps two or three others.

 [T]he GOP that has had the most recruiting trouble lately, and it’s almost certainly because Republican leaders can’t be trusted to clear the field for strong candidates. The temptation to support insurgents, even ones who would badly hurt the party’s chances in November, is just too strong for both party actors and voters in Republican primaries. 

It’s a real, and under appreciated, cost of the Tea Party effect. And it’s not going away any time soon.

To survive long term, the GOP has to find a means to send the Christofascists and the equally insane Tea Party crowd back to the political wilderness.  They are toxic and will become more of a liability with every passing year.