Mitch McConnell's decisive victory over his tea party challenger overshadowed the night. GOP incumbents learn how to win

In 2014, the tea party insurrection is starting to look more like the Boston Massacre.

In state after state this primary season, entrenched politicians are proving that incumbency counts for something after all, leveraging the stature and financial firepower that comes with high office to demolish challengers from the activist right.


In three states Tuesday night, long-serving lawmakers rolled over tea party opponents. Eight-term Idaho Rep. Mike Simpson beat back a challenger supported by Club for Growth, the most influential conservative group targeting elected officials in primaries. In Pennsylvania, Rep. Bill Shuster easily dispatched an opponent once touted as a tea party warrior.

Overshadowing the whole night was Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s decisive triumph over Matt Bevin, a conservative Louisville investor whose bid drew support from outside groups such as the Senate Conservatives Fund and FreedomWorks. Bevin proved entirely unequal to the task of fighting McConnell and saw his public image shredded as McConnell’s campaign picked apart his record on issues from bank bailouts to cockfighting.

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For all the furor over the downed GOP incumbents of 2010 and 2012, Republicans say the 2014 season is well on its way to reasserting a once-iron law of politics: It’s awfully hard to oust a sitting member of Congress who’s willing to fight for his seat. After all, a politician like McConnell got where he is for a reason. The political muscles and focused ambition that make a person a senior U.S. senator in the first place don’t simply vanish the moment a primary challenger files papers.

It takes time, energy and a painful amount of money: The cost of winning renomination as a sitting Republican senator has more than doubled since 2002, according to an analysis of Federal Election Commission filings.

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But if 90 percent of life is showing up, Republicans say that figure is probably even higher for incumbents facing down foes from the ideological right.

“We were able to sneak up on people in the past. There’s no sneaking up on people anymore,” said Chris Chocola, the former Indiana congressman who now heads Club for Growth. “If there’s an incumbent in a benign to helpful political environment, they’re very, very hard to beat. An incumbent in an adversarial political environment is easier but still tough to beat.”

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Since the start of the tea party wave in 2010, only a handful of Republican incumbents have lost primaries, including Sens. Dick Lugar of Indiana, Bob Bennett of Utah and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. (Murkowski retained her seat as a write-in candidate.) Conservative insurgents have scored major successes in open-seat races — Marco Rubio’s primary win in 2010 and Ted Cruz’s in 2012, for example — but their record against incumbents features fewer big victories.

In almost every case, the loser was a lawmaker who shrugged off the challenge until it was too late or who seemed to lack the will to fight in the first place. In 2012, Reps. Cliff Stearns of Florida and Jean Schmidt of Ohio lost primary elections to conservative against whom they barely spent a dime.

This year, Republican campaign committees put their members on notice at the start of the cycle. Staffers at the National Republican Congressional Committee held a series of briefings for lawmakers about how to prepare for tough primaries. On the Senate level, senior National Republican Senatorial Committee strategists held one-on-one meetings with sitting senators to emphasize the importance of working actively to lock down the party nomination.

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For many Republicans accustomed to running in conservative states and House districts, the very idea of running a full-scale reelection effort was something of a novelty. But the results speak for themselves, as untested challengers have watched their political platforms disintegrate under the withering pressure of a competitive statewide campaign.

In Kentucky, McConnell thoroughly discredited Bevin as a conservative messenger. The GOP leader ran advertisements attacking Bevin for having praised the Troubled Asset Relief Program bailouts while he was a financial executive; McConnell’s campaign manager, Jesse Benton, humiliated Bevin at a conservative rally with a pop quiz about the Constitution that Bevin flunked.

Elsewhere, in primary fights that are still in progress, incumbents have blunted or broken the momentum of hard-right challengers.

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In Kansas, Sen. Pat Roberts has watched a primary challenge from physician Milton Wolf falter and fizzle after revelations that Wolf posted images of X-rayed gunshot victims on his Facebook page. Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran still faces a potentially competitive primary from state Sen. Chris McDaniel, but early fears that Cochran might collapse have faded as McDaniel’s record of incendiary statements and inconstant support for Mississippi’s federal priorities has been aired before the voters.

These successes all come at a price.

In 2002, the last time this class of senators was up for election in a nonpresidential year, GOP incumbents seeking reelection reported spending an average of $1.1 million up through their preprimary campaign filings. Many of those expenditures reflected the cost of preparing for tough reelection campaigns in states like Maine and Arkansas.

This year, Senate Republicans seeking reelection have spent an average of $2.8 million up to this point in the cycle. Only one of them, McConnell, expects a difficult race in November.

Three senators who have faced primary challenges in 2014 — McConnell, Roberts and Wyoming Sen. Mike Enzi — have already spent more on their campaigns than they did in the entire 2002 cycle. Cochran is on track to surpass his total 2002 spending before Mississippi’s June 3 primary. And that doesn’t count the spending of outside groups that have spent millions to support incumbents facing rocky primary campaigns.

If that seems like an incredible sum of cash to burn through just to keep the GOP nomination, party strategists say that’s just the way Republicans live now, in an age when the rise of outside groups and wall-to-wall political media have made it far easier for obscure challengers to suddenly put themselves on the map.

Former Utah Republican Party Chairman Dave Hansen, who steered Sen. Orrin Hatch’s successful 2012 reelection, said this kind of primary spending “is going to be around for the foreseeable future.” What Hatch and others have shown, Hansen said, is that a fully engaged incumbent running hard in a primary is still a fearsome opponent to grapple with.

“In a primary, more than anything because of lower turnout, you have to focus on basics and getting people out to vote. We spent a lot of time and money just getting people’s names,” Hansen said. “You have to give people a reason to keep you there, and once you do that, you have to make sure people vote.”

And, Hansen said, incumbents shouldn’t shy away from tangling with the outside groups — FreedomWorks, in Hatch’s case — angling for their seats. “By the time the primary rolled around,” Hansen recalled, “the favorable-unfavorable rating on FreedomWorks — well, I guess Al Qaeda was slightly lower, but not much.”

In this week’s primaries, both McConnell and Simpson took aim at the outside groups backing their opponents, casting their challengers as the puppets of out-of-state forces. McConnell has also worked to punish consultants doing business with Bevin, banning at least one firm from doing work with the NRSC because of its consulting contract with the Senate Conservatives Fund.

What’s more, some of the powerfully funded business groups that shied away from primary fights in earlier cycles engaged forcefully on behalf of endangered incumbents. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce spent heavily on behalf of both Simpson and McConnell ahead of this week’s elections. In Simpson’s case, Chamber chief Tom Donohue personally trekked to Boise on St. Patrick’s Day to present the congressman with a Spirit of Enterprise award. A longer list of esoteric trade groups, including the American Chemistry Council and the American Dental Association, have anted up for Simpson with substantial independent expenditure campaigns.

Rob Engstrom, the Chamber’s senior vice president and political director, said the business group had profited from going into primary elections earlier and more aggressively. He cited the Chamber’s ads in Idaho featuring former GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney as a successful case study.

“We employed local messages and trusted messengers in the places that mattered most,” Engstrom said. “By getting involved early, we were able to set the terms of the debate in a way that benefited our preferred candidates.”