Freedom Line Blog

Though you won’t hear much about it in the press, tomorrow will be a big day for the Tea Party movement. That’s because it will be the day that Republican voters caucus throughout Utah to pick their delegates to the state convention — delegates who, in turn, will choose which candidates to put on the Beehive State’s June primary ballot.

This is momentous because there’s a big push by Tea Partiers — with FreedomWorks leading the charge — to unseat incumbent Republican Senator Orrin Hatch and replace him with a more conservative alternative. This is how Politico frames it:

The group’s tactics are the latest chapter of the debate still hounding Republicans as they try to win a majority on Capitol Hill this November: Should they purge their own to find fresh blood who will be less willing to seek bipartisan compromises by straying from conservative principles? Or should they unite behind the most electable candidate and train all their fire power on Democrats?

Allow me to answer both of those questions: yes.

It’s all a matter of political prudence. One of the lessons of the 2010 midterm senate races was the importance of finding the right candidate for the right jurisdiction — and that means different things in different places. In Utah, for instance, which is the most Republican state in the nation, it was utterly sensible to replace incumbent Bob Bennett (not exactly a liberal, but not really a constitutional conservative either) with Tea Party darling Mike Lee, knowing that Lee could easily carry the general election in the fall. The Tea Party was similarly shrewd in getting behind Marco Rubio in Florida, Ron Johnson in Wisconsin, and Rand Paul in Kentucky.

There were a few missteps, however. The hyper-conservative Sharron Angle was a poor choice for the swing state of Nevada, where either Sue Lowden or Danny Tarkanian (both of whom would have voted as conventional conservatives) would have stood a better chance at defeating Harry Reid. Even less suited for her contest was Christine O’Donnell, the conservative firebrand running in deep-blue Delaware. O’Donnell’s primary opponent, the moderate-to-liberal Republican Mike Castle, would doubtlessly have taken many votes as a U.S. Senator that would have made conservatives squirm — but fewer than the eventual winner, Democrat Chris Coons, who Castle likely would have beaten had he been the nominee.

So what does this principle mean for Utah? Hatch, like Bennett before him, has been an able public servant, who has, most of the time, been in conservatism if not exactly of conservatism. Were he from a swing state where moving to the right could be an electoral death sentence, then that would probably be a sufficient argument for retaining him. That’s not the case in Utah, however. And the state’s conservatives are going to have a hard time turning down the opportunity to elect another senator as consistently principled in his defense of limited government as Mike Lee.

It doesn’t help either that the best argument against Hatch comes from Hatch. I’ll let Politico have the final word:

In Utah, FreedomWorks distributed a 44-page brochure to 37,000 potential convention-goers, highlighting Hatch’s positions over the years on earmarks, the bank bailout and deals with Ted Kennedy over a child health care law.

On the inside page of the brochure is a quote from Hatch during his first campaign in 1976 against 18-year incumbent Sen. Frank Moss: “What do you call a senator who’s served in office for 18 years? You call him home.”

Hell hath no fury like a career politician scorned.  Nine-time congressman and two-time governor Mike Castle (R-DE) will conduct a poll to gauge his chances as a write-in candidate for Delaware’s Senate seat.  If he chooses to challenge the Republican Party’s nominee, Christine O’Donnell, Castle will join Lisa Murkowski(I-AK) and Charlie Crist (I-FL) as moderate GOP statewide elected officials who decided to quit their party rather than their hold on power.

Prediction: If Castle follows through with a write-in candidacy Christine O’Donnell will gain ground in the polls.  Like other Tea Party candidates she’ll be able to attack Democrat Chris Coons for supporting President Barack Obama’s agenda, and charge that Castle is nothing more than a self-aggrandizing career politician.

In this climate, the truth of both of those charges could be enough to give O’Donnelll a Senate seat for six years.

It’s nearly a week later, but on this Sunday talk show-eve we can be guaranteed that tomorrow’s beltway chatter will be dominated by talk of Christine O’Donnell’s upset of Mike Castle in the GOP senate primary in Delaware. To save you the pain of sitting through Meet the Press, This Week, Face the Nation, Fox News Sunday and CNN’s State of the Union, here are the basic talking points you’re going to hear all morning: O’Donnell’s win proves that Tea Party radicals are taking over the GOP, ruining their chances for a majority this year and imperiling the long-term existence of the party.

Put aside the obvious bias of these remarks (remember how two years ago the GOP was imperiled because it was losing? Now apparently it’s imperiled because it’s winning). The truth is a lot more complicated.

It’s undoubtedly true that O’Donnell’s nomination makes it much likelier that Democrats will retain the Delaware seat that used to be held by Joe Biden. Delaware is a solidly blue state and O’Donnell’s deep Republican red — regardless of her virtues or vices — is never going to play as well as Castle’s fuschia statewide.

The Tea Party’s stated goal, however — moving the Republican party closer to the principles of small government — is on track for success in most of its other contested senate races throughout the country. Ken Buck in Colorado, Mike Lee in Utah, Ron Johnson in Wisconsin, Rand Paul in Kentucky, Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania, and Marco Rubio in Florida are among the Tea Party-backed candidates who appear on track for victory. Joe Miller in Alaska is a strong bet too, though Lisa Murkowski’s misbeggoten attempt at a write-in candidacy may tighten that race. Only Nevada’s Sharron Angle presents similar difficulties to O’Donnell, but on a far narrower basis. As of this writing, she’s polling essentially even with Harry Reid.

But there’s an even bigger misperception at work here. Since pundits only discovered a few weeks ago that Republicans had a shot at taking over the senate, they were able to put their Prozac back in the medicine cabinet with the O’Donnell win. This is a mistake. For while Delaware may have just slipped out of reach, two seats that were not previously part of the electoral calcuation are now in play.

The first is in Connecticut, where former WWE CEO Linda McMahon has pulled within five points of the supposedly invincible Attorney General Richard Blumenthal. The second is West Virginia, where the seat formerly held by Robert Byrd was expected to be an easy win for Democratic Governor Joe Manchin. However, industrial executive John Raese has closed the gap to within five points as well. Given the strong conservative turnout expected this year, these could both be sleepers come election night.

Don’t despair, conservative America. We’re just getting started.

Where’s the party unity?  Florida’s Charlie Crist morphed into an Independent when it became clear Marco Rubio would be the Republican Senate nominee.  To date, Delaware’s Mike Castle hasn’t called to pledge his support to GOP nominee Christine O’Donnell.  (Though he did find time to take phone calls from both President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden.)

And today, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski announced she would reject the judgment of her fellow Republicans and run as a write-in candidate after losing her reelection primary to Joe Miller.

Here we go again.  While the conservatives always fall in line, it’s the Republican Party’s moderates that are refusing to put their own political interests at the service of party unity.

Wake me up when it’s November…