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.

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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.

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