Thread: Following the Money in the Tea Party-GOP Establishment Civil War

Following the Money in the Tea Party-GOP Establishment Civil War

Tar Heel Lessons in the GOP Civil War

There is much to learn about Republican infighting from North Carolina's most recent primary.

Tillis avoided a runoff in a critical North Carolina primary.
By Robert SchlesingerMay 9, 2014

In the GOP civil war, the insurgency known generally as the tea party is starting to seem like Abraham Lincoln’s famously circumspect general, George McClellan.

“Little Mac” could rouse the troops, but Lincoln grew frustrated with his reluctance to engage the Confederates. I thought of McClellan this week as North Carolina state House Speaker Thom Tillis cruised to the GOP nomination – he exceeded the 40 percent threshold necessary to avoid a runoff – to face Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan in what’s expected to be one of the most competitive races of the fall.

As the cycle began, the race seemed primed to produce a familiar story line: the establishment and the insurgency struggling for a Senate nomination with the soul of the GOP on the line and the ghosts of the likes of Christine O’Donnell, Sharron Angle and Richard Mourdock hovering.

But while the establishment engaged, the insurgents, McClellan-esque, demurred, as they had in March in Texas when Sen. John Cornyn rolled to easy victory.

North Carolina was the start of a several-week stretch of critical primary races that will have some genuine clashes in the GOP civil war. But this week’s contest, anticlimactic as it was, holds some lessons for judging the upcoming races.

[GALLERY: Cartoons on the Tea Party]

The first is that the Republican civil war suffers from an imprecision of language. It’s mostly described as the tea party versus the establishment, but what is the tea party? Several groups lay claim to the movement’s mantle, but they have varying levels of funding and political credibility.

As The Washington Post reported last month, many issue endorsements but spend most of their money on their own political operations rather than on supporting their chosen candidates. So getting dubbed a “tea party” candidate is easy compared to actually getting national anti-establishment muscle behind you.

Which brings up a second lesson: Follow the money. Tillis benefited from $2.5 million in TV ads and mailers from groups like American Crossroads (Karl Rove’s outfit), the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Rifle Association. Tillis’ main competitor, Greg Brannon, was deemed a tea party candidate, but it earned him little to no national anti-establishment support: He got a visit from Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul and a bit over $100,000 in help from the one major tea party group to support him, FreedomWorks.

Where does the money lead now? Insurgent groups have chosen next Tuesday’s Nebraska Senate primary to make their first stand of the season, spending over $1.2 million on behalf of Midland University President Ben Sasse, a former George W. Bush administration official, while pouring in another $583,000 opposing state Treasurer Shane Osborn, according to Federal Election Commission records compiled by the Sunlight Foundation. This race looks like a mirror reverse of North Carolina, with the putative establishment taking a pass.

[CHECK OUT: U.S. News Weekly, available for downloand and on iPad.]

The following week features a critical primary double dip, in Kentucky and Georgia. The action has been in the former race, with groups like FreedomWorks and the Senate Conservatives Fund dumping more than $1.8 million into the effort to unseat Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell, while the Chamber of Commerce has spent more than $500,000 supporting him. McConnell is expected to win handily before facing a tough race against Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes. The crowded Peach State Senate race hasn’t gotten the attention yet of the major groups involved in the GOP civil war, but the Ending Spending Action Fund plunked down nearly $1.2 million to make sure that fire-breathing Rep. Phil Gingrey doesn’t get nominated while a conservative group called Citizens for a Working America PAC has spent more than $1 million trying to push former Reebok CEO David Perdue past Rep. Jack Kingston. Perdue and Kingston are seen as the frontrunners and – in comparison to nuts like Gingrey and Rep. Paul Broun – pragmatists.

The winner of that race will have to deal with Michelle Nunn, the well-funded daughter of former Democratic Sen. Sam Nunn.

The other Senate civil war flashpoint in the coming weeks – and the one shaping up to be the most even fight – will come in Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran’s matchup against state Sen. Chris McDaniel. Groups like FreedomWorks, the Senate Conservatives Fund and Club for Growth have spent $2.6 million trying to take down the incumbent while the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and a newly formed super PAC have poured more than $1.1 million into the effort to save him. The Senate Conservatives Fund has also put nearly $140,000 into trying to dislodge Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts but this far out he seems likely to survive.

[SEE: Cartoons about the Republican Party]

And that’s it. As handicapper Stu Rothenberg wrote this week, there are “only a handful of races” that fit the civil war narrative. But don’t mourn the passing of the tea party just yet. GOP infighting is often about style more than substance – not the policies themselves but how they’re sold.

Take Tillis, the newly minted North Carolina Senate nominee: His establishment credentials don’t make him any kind of moderate. He has, after all, argued against the very existence of a minimum wage. As Paul Waldman noted in The Washington Post this week, the lesson of Mourdock, Angle and the others wasn’t that they were too extreme for the GOP but that they were “idiots – poor campaigners who inevitably said stupid things that generated media frenzies.”

You never know, though. A video emerged this week showing Tillis counseling a “divide and conquer” strategy to deal with people who depend on government assistance. Even establishmentarians sometimes commit the gaffe of saying what they really think.

For Rand Paul, A Stumble On Road To 2016 White House...

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul bet on a long-shot and lost in North Carolina's contentious Republican Senate primary, raising new questions about the Tea Party hero's bid to woo the party establishment on his way to...



http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articl...ors_picks=true

Tea Party Activists See Own Groups Among Washington Adversaries

By JONATHAN WEISMAN and JENNIFER STEINHAUER
MAY 12, 2014



Republican candidates at their final debate, in April, before Tuesday's Senate primary in Nebraska. From left; Shane Osborn, Bart McLeay, Ben Sasse and Sid Dinsdale.CreditFrancis Gardler/Lincoln Journal Star, via Associated Press

WASHINGTON — The still-emerging Tea Party movement is not merely waging war against the Republican establishment this year. Some of its more heated disputes are coming from within.

That struggle is playing out vividly in Nebraska, which will hold a Republican Senate primary on Tuesday between former State Treasurer Shane Osborn and Ben Sasse, the president of Midland University.

Mr. Osborn, who has the support of activists in the state, secured a major endorsement last November from FreedomWorks, the organization that helped vault the Tea Party to prominence. Mr. Osborn, the group said, stood “with the grass-roots uprising before it was cool.” But in March, FreedomWorks rescinded its support of Mr. Osborn and backed Mr. Sasse.

Ever since, Nebraska’s Tea Party members have been battling national Tea Party donor groups.

“We are not million-dollar Washington, D.C., special interest groups with strong ties to Capitol Hill. We are simply Nebraskans who are fed up,” a group of 52 activists wrote in an open letter protesting FreedomWorks’ about-face, adding, “We were not consulted, polled, or contacted by these Washington, D.C., groups.”

Other activists complain that the Washington groups are losing touch with people at the local level.

“It worked well when they communicated with us on the ground,” Patrick Bonnett, chairman of the Conservative Coalition of Nebraska, said of the Washington groups. “It breaks down when they unilaterally get involved in our local races, even if it’s in federal campaigns, and endorse and start spending money.”

In many ways, the tensions are an inevitable product of a political movement that began without central leadership and spread with antigovernment fervor.

Initially, the national groups saw themselves as shepherds of a grass-roots Tea Party flock, but they have since taken on an electoral role, cultivating candidates and choosing sides. But they have struggled to come up with candidates at times, and some of their contenders have stumbled badly.

Some of the groups have also engaged in the kind of spending that Tea Party members have denounced.

For instance, the Conservative Campaign Committee paid Diana Nagy, who sings at Tea Party rallies, $4,500 to cover her stay at a Michigan golf resort. The Senate Conservatives Fund, a group founded by former Senator Jim DeMint, Republican of South Carolina, began renting a Capitol Hill townhouse with a hot tub and wine cellar.

There is also widespread criticism that the groups spend a small portion of the money they raise in support of candidates. “The pursuit of money was more important than the desire to work closely with the state activists,” said Dick Armey, a former House majority leader who left FreedomWorks and criticized what he said was the group’s drift.

The groups’ leaders defend their operations. “We need to raise money to keep ourselves going,” said Adam Brandon, the executive vice president of FreedomWorks. “Grass-roots activism is not cheap, and this stuff is not for free.”

In recent weeks, the chosen candidates of groups like FreedomWorks, the Senate Conservatives Fund and the Club for Growth have shown the limits of raw conservative appeal.

In Kentucky, businessman Matt Bevin won the groups’ backing in his primary run against Senator Mitch McConnell, in large part because of their anger over Mr. McConnell’s support for the 2008 Wall Street bailout. It turned out Mr. Bevin backed the bailout as well.

In Kansas, Washington groups helped lift Milton Wolf’s long-shot campaign to defeat Senator Pat Roberts, only to see Dr. Wolf’s campaign founder when it emerged that he hadposted graphic X-rays of gunshot victims on his Facebook page.

In North Carolina, FreedomWorks backed Greg Brannon, an obstetrician, as the Republican to challenge the embattled Democratic Senator Kay Hagan. In February, a jury found that Mr. Brannon had misled two investors in his start-up company and ordered him to pay at least $250,000 in compensation. On Tuesday, he was defeated by the establishment’s pick, Thom Tillis, North Carolina’s speaker of the House.

And in Mississippi, a clip surfaced from a radio show in which State Senator Chris McDaniel, the Tea Party challenger to Senator Thad Cochran, riffed on picking up Mexican women by calling them “mamacitas.”

“This guy’s been elected for over five years as a state elected official.

That matters,” said Chris Chocola, president of Club for Growth, which stood by its investment in Mr. McDaniel. “I would ask the Cochran folks, ‘If this is so inappropriate, then how come you don’t use it' ” in the campaign in Mississippi?

These issues, particularly the challenges to sitting senators, have unnerved many of the faithful. “They strayed from their plan,” said Victor Mavar, an 87-year-old retired seafood processor from Biloxi, Miss., who said he was a “charter member” of the Club for Growth but wrote a letter to Mr. Chocola to withdraw his support because it had targeted Senator Cochran.

The groups, he said, should focus on taking out Democrats, not fellow Republicans. Senator Cochran, he said, “is honest, he is truthful we’re not going to give him up.”

Republican leaders in Washington hope Mr. Mavar’s view is widely held as they move to starve groups like the Senate Conservatives Fund of contributions.

Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio and Mr. McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, have vowed to bring about the groups’ demise in the 2014 campaign. Privately, Republican leaders have pointed to possible financial mismanagement and poor candidate vetting to raise doubts among the groups’ small circle of donors.

The Senate Conservatives Fund and its adjunct, Senate Conservatives Action, for example, have raised $12.6 million in this campaign cycle but spent only $4.9 million on the candidates they endorsed.

Operating expenditures topped $7.4 million.

Republican officials revealed that the fund had paid $50,000 since June on a five-bedroom Capitol Hill house. Federal Election Commission filings show the group has spent more than $15,000 on interior design services and $11,212 on painting and decorating.

Matt Hoskins, head of the Senate Conservatives Fund, said that by the end of the 2012 campaign cycle the group had spent 68 percent of its revenue on endorsed candidates, and that it expected to hit 70 percent by the midterm election in November.

FreedomWorks has raised $1.8 million this campaign season and spent $1.4 million on its own operations; the group Tea Party Express has spent $7.5 million on operations out of $8 million raised.

Club For Growth, in contrast, has raised $5.2 million and spent $536,000 on operations.

“If all we do is raise money and pocket it, they wouldn’t be upset,” Mr. Hoskins said of the Republican establishment. “The reason they’re upset is that we raise money and spend money on our candidates.”

Correction: May 12, 2014
An earlier version of this article stated incorrectly the amount Club for Growth, a conservative political group, has spent on operations. It has spent $536,000, not $1.5 million.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/13/us...saries.html?hp

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