Thread: Lamar Alexander: how a Senate moderate is thriving in GOP primary

Lamar Alexander: how a Senate moderate is thriving in GOP primary
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Sen. Lamar Alexander voted with Senate Democrats to back immigration reform, yet that doesn't appear to have clobbered his prospects in Thursday's GOP primary.
By Francine Kiefer, Staff writer August 7, 2014

WASHINGTON — Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander faces two tea party-like challengers in the Tennessee GOP primary Thursday. But the “establishment” Republican has not run a campaign to out-right the far right. Instead, he’s actually promoted his record as a dealmaker, working across the aisle to get things done in Congress.

How is it that bipartisanship – Senator Alexander calls it “results” on the campaign trail – can sell in a Southern state with an all-GOP state assembly and governor, a state that has voted Republican in the last four presidential elections?

Here are six reasons why that strategy can work:
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Alexander touts his conservative values. Alexander’s leading tea party opponent, state Rep. Joe Carr, says that the senator has lost his way over his 12 years in Washington. The senator’s scores with some conservative groups aren’t great: 49 percent from Heritage Action and 60 percent for 2013 from the American Conservative Union.
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So Alexander touts his own, custom-made “Tennessee scorecard,” built up over a lifetime of civic service, including two terms as governor: an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association, a 100 percent rating from the National Right to Life Committee, and his 100 percent score from the US Chamber of Commerce.

In ads, he puts his conservative credentials front and center: One ad features actor and former US Sen. Fred Thompson (R) of Tennessee, whose first words are: "Lamar Alexander is a conservative United States senator who deserves reelection." Another attacks Obamacare, a defining conservative issue. A former US secretary of Education, Alexander also ran an ad against "a national school board," that is, too much federal interference in education.

The senator emphasizes results. What really sets off Mr. Carr and his supporters, such as conservative radio host Laura Ingraham, is that Alexander was one of 14 Republicans to vote for comprehensive immigration reform. The bipartisan bill passed the Senate last year but hit a brick wall in the House.

The senator can deflect Carr’s criticism somewhat because he recently voted against President Obama’s request for emergency aid to handle the child-migrant crisis on the border – a fact he slipped into his closing ad of the campaign.

But he’s hung tough over support for immigration reform as a way to fix the overall problem. And he likes to talk about the nine bills he helped become law despite a divided Senate last year, such as a drug-safety law and reform of federal student loans. "Some people just want to make a speech," he said at a recent campaign stop. "I want to get a result."

Jennifer Duffy, who tracks the Senate for the independent Cook Political Report, says this message plays well. “He’s saying he’s willing to work to get things done, which is a fairly decent message given voters’ frustration with Congress.”

Tennessee values statesmen. A lot of political experts, and Tennessee politicians themselves, point to the grandfather of the modern GOP in Tennessee, the late statesman and Senate majority leader, Howard Baker Jr. The diplomat, senator, and chief of staff to Ronald Reagan was known in Washington as “the great conciliator.”

If you look at the Republican politicians who have come in his wake, they put pragmatism over ideological purity, including Tennessee’s other GOP senator, Bob Corker, a businessman and former mayor of Chattanooga. In April, the GOP state legislature approved one of Republican Gov. Bill Haslam’s biggest priorities – free community college starting in the fall of 2015.

“This is Howard Baker’s state,” says Kyle Kondick of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “They’re not fire-and-brimstone Republicans.” Carr, however, says the state’s changing, and that’s why Alexander made sure his campaign machinery was well-oiled.

Alexander focused early on campaign machinery. Like other establishment senators who beat tea party opponents this year – Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, to name two – Alexander locked in his endorsements early and made sure he had plenty of money in the bank.

He most of the Tennessee GOP congressional delegation to back him, which limited the number of high-profile Republicans in the state who could challenge him. That left a state representative (Carr) and a Memphis radio station owner (George Flinn). Alexander has outspent Carr 5 to 1, according to reports of campaign-finance disclosures.

When it comes to opponents, the more the merrier. Besides Carr and Mr. Flinn, four other Republicans are challenging Alexander on Thursday, which makes his Republican opposition more diffuse. Alexander also doesn't need to top 50 percent to win the primary. Ms. Duffy thinks that only two of Alexander’s opponents can crack single digits “and the rest will be lucky to get 1 percent.” The point is that “if there is an anti-Alexander vote out there, they have lots of options.”

Know your state. Kansas Republican Sen. Pat Roberts was pilloried by his tea party opponent for being AWOL from his state. Though Senator Roberts survived his primary this week, the vote was closer than expected. But that charge can’t stick against the Tennessee senator. After losing his first bid for governor, Alexander, in 1978, traded in his campaign suit for a red-and-black plaid shirt and hiking boots, and started on a 1,000 mile walking tour across Tennessee to get to know voters. It worked, and he won. (He also broke out his signature plaid shirt for his two presidential runs but did not win.)

In his two terms in the Senate, he has spent more than half his nights in Tennessee, according to an Alexander aide. The senator just finished a bus tour of more than 40 stops.

“People who get in trouble in electoral politics usually take someone for granted," Alexander told Dan Balz at The Washington Post. "I think every time you run for election you start from the bottom and work your way back up again. That's what I'm trying to do."


http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/DC-Deco...in-GOP-primary

Keep track of all of these biased media sources that were cheer leading for Lamar Alexander before we beat him.

W

Mark Levin

GOP establishment took a beating in primaries; conservatives just getting started



Republicans Have More Reason Than Ever To Worry About Primary Challenges
One of the most universal lessons of sports prediction is that margins matter. An...
fivethirtyeight.com|By Nate Silver

Republicans Have More Reason Than Ever To Worry About Primary Challenges

4:22 PMAug 6 By Nate Silver



Sen. Pat Roberts takes the stage to make his victory speech Tuesday in Overland Park, Kansas.
Charlie Riedel / AP

One of the most universal lessons of sports prediction is that margins matter. An NFL team that wins a number of games by less than a touchdown might get banner headlines for its clutch performance. But a team’s record in close games is mostly just luck. A football team that thrives on winning close games is likely to see its luck revert to the mean and start losing its fair share of them. The same is true in baseball, basketball and most other sports.
In fact, at least in my experience, this is close to being a universal maxim for statistical prediction of all kinds: Mind the margin. Oftentimes, we’re interested in some binary outcome. Does the team win the game? Does the Democrat win the election? Do the floodwaters breach the levees? But those binary outcomes result from some continuous variable: The floodwaters breach the levees at 60 feet but not at 59. When building a model around historical data, you’ll almost always make better forecasts by looking at the continuous variable instead of the binary one. Close calls count. Like the NFL team that keeps winning games by a field goal, the levee that is at the brink of being topped during every hurricane is likely to fail sooner or later.
So, while Republican incumbent senators have gotten some credit lately for their clutch performances in Kansas, Mississippi and other states, where they’ve fended off challenges from more conservative opponents, the GOP still has plenty to worry about. There have been far more close calls to its incumbents than usual.
Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts, for instance, won just 48 percent of the vote Tuesday in defeating Milton Wolf, a radiologist with no prior experience running for elected office. Mississippi’s Thad Cochran initially placed second against Chris McDaniel, a state senator, before barely winning the runoff election, in part because of votes from African-American Democrats.
Sen. Mitch McConnell’s win in Kentucky in May, where he got 60 percent of the vote to challenger Matt Bevin’s 35 percent, was more emphatic. Still, it was much closer than Senate primaries normally are.
Between 2004 and 2008, just four of 39 Republican senators running for renomination, or 10 percent of them, got less than 65 percent of the primary vote. This year, five of 10 have fallen below that threshold: not only Roberts, Cochran and McConnell, but also Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John Cornyn of Texas, who both benefited from running against divided fields.
In fact, the average share of the primary vote received by Republican incumbent senators so far this year is 73 percent. Not only is that lower than 2004 through 2008, when incumbents averaged 89 percent of the vote — it’s also lower than 2010 and 2012, the years when the tea party was supposedly in ascendency, when GOP incumbents got an average of 78 percent.

So, though this year’s primary season is almost over — on Thursday, Tennessee’s Lamar Alexander will be the last Republican incumbent to face a competitive primary — there’s no evidence the threat from primary challenges has been reduced going forward. It may even still be increasing. Beware of mainstream media narratives that state the contrary; they often draw too many conclusions from idiosyncratic results or fail to appreciate the differences between primaries and general elections.

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