Conventional thinking about outside spending in Republican primary races brings to mind rogue groups supporting insurgent candidates like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, along with less successful efforts supporting Christine O’Donnell, Sharron Angle, Todd Akin and others. (See, e.g., Senate Conservatives Fund, Club for Growth, tea party groups, etc.).

The run up to the March 4 congressional primaries in Texas, though, displays the other side of the outside spending coin. In the Senate race, the challenge by Rep. Steve Stockman to incumbent John Cornyn looked like it might follow the usual pattern. Instead, a more establishment GOP group, Texans for a Conservative Majority (mostly funded last year by home builder and longtime Republican donor Bob Perry before he died), has spent more than $1 million attacking Stockman. That, combined with gaffes by the challenger himself, appears to have stopped the threat to Cornyn in its tracks — even though Cruz has refused to endorse his fellow Texan.

In the House, Rules Committee Chairman Pete Sessions faces challenger Katrina Pierson. She was able to raise about $145,000 through mid-February — not much compared with the $1.5 million Sessions has raised, but enough to get a little attention. In swooped the National Association of Realtors, which has made about $400,000 in independent expenditures supporting Sessions, and the American College of Radiology, which has spent about $47,000, also on behalf of the incumbent. With outside spending support currently three times more than what the challenger has raised, and Sessions’ own fundraising 10 times larger than Pierson’s, this race doesn’t seem likely to result in an upset.

What’s going on in the Texas races is consistent with a larger trend that has emerged at the start of the 2014 campaign: The outside groups spending the most thus far are inclined to support more mainstream candidates, by and large.

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But things can change quickly in this world of unlimited money.

Image: John Cornyn at Baylor University, December 2013 (AP Photo/Waco Tribune Herald, Rod Aydelotte)



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