Right outside groups realize they’re better off working with the national party, Duncan says. | AP Photos The price of crushing the tea party

National Republican leaders are toasting primary season as a smashing success over activist conservatives that has put the hard right on the ropes and given the Washington GOP the slate of candidates it wanted for 2014.

Those victories, however, have come at a staggering cost — and Republicans are painfully aware of the price of putting down an intraparty insurrection.


Establishment-aligned groups have already spent some $23 million on independent expenditures propping up favored House and Senate candidates in contentious primaries, according to a POLITICO review of Federal Election Commission records. By comparison, Republican nominees raised and spent that amount in the 2012 North Dakota, Indiana and Nevada Senate races combined — three of the most competitive campaigns fought that year.

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The scope of the effort to suppress activist-backed candidates has been broader and costlier than is widely understood, covering at least 20 House and Senate primaries from North Carolina to California, and from coastal Mississippi to the outer tip of Long Island. The loose coalition of establishment forces encompasses two dozen advocacy groups, industry associations and super PACs that have raised and spent millions on behalf of Washington’s chosen candidates.

Former Republican National Committee Chairman Mike Duncan said the “quote ‘establishment’” had successfully divided up the primary map this year to avoid duplicating one another’s efforts. Eventually, Duncan said, outside groups on the right may realize that they’re better off working with the national party than raging against it. Indeed, in many cases this year, national party favorites have tacked well to the right to win their primaries.

“I think we have to keep on winning. I think we have to show up and make sure that our candidates are not going to be complacent and that they start early,” Duncan said. “That wake-up call certainly seems to have gotten through.”

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Nearly a third of the establishment money has come from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The business lobby’s spending in this year’s toughest primaries has about equaled the $7 million that the conservative Club for Growth and the Senate Conservatives Fund have spent together on the most fractious elections — excluding races, like the Senate campaigns in Arkansas and Alaska, where there’s been no meaningful clash between establishment-sanctioned outside groups and the activist right.

And the $23 million figure isn’t even close to a full accounting of what D.C.-backed candidates spent to win their nomination fights. Candidates themselves, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John Cornyn of Texas, have collectively spent tens of millions more from their campaign accounts.

Top Republican strategists and party officials say they have no regrets about going all-in against flawed primary candidates. In a perfect world, they say, the whole expensive ordeal would be unnecessary. With conservative outside groups routinely bumping off incumbent lawmakers and prized recruits, it’s simply the cost of doing business — now and perhaps for the foreseeable future.

Former George W. Bush White House political adviser Scott Jennings, who is steering a pro-McConnell super PAC this year, likened the heavy investment to a sports team that fields its strongest players possible midway through a playoff series.

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“There may not be a game seven if you don’t have a game six, so you have to spend to win,” Jennings said. “In a world that you could script without the realities of the world we live in, you’d never spend a dollar until you get to the end of your general election. But that’s not the world we live in, and it’s OK.”

After the Chamber of Commerce, the most prolific spenders have been American Crossroads, which spent $2.4 million boosting Senate candidate Thom Tillis in North Carolina and tearing down three-time New York congressional candidate Matt Doheny; and the National Association of Realtors, which put nearly $2 million into protecting a half-dozen GOP incumbents. National advocacy groups such as the National Rifle Association and the American Action Network have gone to bat, with the NRA rushing to Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran’s aid and AAN helping nominate state Sen. Lee Zeldin in a New York congressional primary this week. The moderate Republican Main Street Partnership played heavily both in Mississippi and in a different New York congressional race upstate.

State-based super PACs have played a major role as well: In Cochran’s race, the Mississippi Conservatives super PAC reported $1.8 million in independent expenditures for the senator and against his hard-edged opponent, Chris McDaniel. In Texas, the pro-Cornyn group Texans for a Conservative Majority put $1.1 million into burying long-shot challenger Steve Stockman. In Oregon, the reform-minded group NewRepublican.org spent a half-million dollars helping physician Monica Wehby win the GOP Senate nomination.

Candidate-specific groups have also aided Oklahoma Rep. James Lankford and Iowa Senate nominee Joni Ernst, as well as Graham and other congressional incumbents.

A handful of super PACs controlled by individual donors have joined the fray. The billionaire Ricketts family’s group, Ending Spending, put $1.9 million into attacking flawed Georgia Senate candidate Phil Gingrey and helping now-Rep. Bradley Byrne win an Alabama special election last year. New York financier Paul Singer’s American Unity PAC spent $663,000 defending Rep. Richard Hanna from a socially conservative primary challenger opposed to the congressman’s support for same-sex marriage.

And then there are the less purely partisan industry groups that have escalated their political spending to aid incumbents in distress. Together, the American Hospital Association, American Dental Association, American Chemistry Council and American College of Radiology Association pumped $1.8 million into incumbent vs. challenger races. Among the races they invested in were Idaho Rep. Mike Simpson’s primary, as well as the Cochran contest and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s unsuccessful reelection campaign.

All told, the collection of Washington-sanctioned entities marshaled a level of firepower that matched or exceeded what conservative activist groups were able to deploy in any given race. The groups don’t all work in concert, nor do they match the activist right dollar for dollar and race for race: In the Nebraska Senate primary, for example, a parade of conservative groups closed ranks behind former college president Ben Sasse. None of the big national establishment groups dug in to oppose him. (Occasionally they have been on the same side, as in the Iowa Senate primary that saw both the Chamber and SCF spending for Ernst.)

Conservatives have had a few significant 2014 wins, including Sasse’s victory and the ouster of 91-year-old Texas Rep. Ralph Hall in a spring runoff. Cantor’s defeat in Virginia was a shock to Washington, though no major conservative groups engaged in the race against him.

But with a few exceptions, in the races where the establishment and the right have gone head to head, the latter has come up short.

The Beltway GOP’s decision to pursue such an expensive and confrontational strategy this year emerged directly from the Republican disappointments of 2010 and 2012, when anti-establishment groups such as the Club and the Senate Conservatives Fund were often the dominant outside spenders in any given primary. Fearful of upsetting the party’s base, Republican leaders shied away from direct conflict.

This year, with control of the Senate and the functionality of the House majority at stake, strategists made a different choice.

“One of the big takeaways from 2012 was that candidates matter and our board decided we need to get more involved in these primary contests,” said Scott Reed, the Chamber’s top strategist. He described the group’s goal as “not picking winners and losers, but engaging where there is a clear contrast.”

Dan Conston, communications director for the American Action Network, said the group “felt it was important to support electable, center-right candidates in their primaries” for reasons of both tactics and substance: “They not only offer our best chance for victory in November, but they’d be productive members of a governing House majority.”

To Republicans battered and exhausted by the skirmishes of the 2014 primary season, the notion that the mainline GOP has learned how to win is only partial solace.

As much as incumbents and electability-minded candidates have learned how to fare better in nomination fights, the notion of fighting these pitched battles year after year — throwing industry money against activist money in dozens of states across the country — sends shudders down Republican spines.

Mississippi Republican Party Chairman Joe Nosef, who saw his state’s six-term senator bounce back from the brink of disaster and vanquish a Club- and SCF-backed challenger Tuesday, said the race had a “depleting” effect on the whole state.

“More than money, it was something that was a big drain on people emotionally,” Nosef said. “It definitely took a toll on people. More so than money, it just took a toll on people emotionally.”