Thom Tillis was the Republican party's guy in North Carolina, and he won the Senate primary there last night with nearly 46 percent of a vote, comfortably avoiding the two-month runoff he'd have had to endure if he'd come in below 40 percent.

GOP operatives want reporters to believe that Tillis' candidacy was a controlled experiment, whose outcome proves the party has discovered a formula for vanquishing unsavory or undisciplined insurgent candidates backed by the Tea Party or other right wing groups. That the Republican civil war is over and the establishment has won.

NC suggests a spasm of reasonableness in the GOP.. Will it last? http://t.co/UZh30sRvVW — Jennifer Rubin (@JRubinBlogger) May 7, 2014

And it's not entirely spin. There are remarkable differences between the party's approach to Senate primaries in 2014 and its lead-from-behind-then-faceplant approach in 2010 and 2012. They engaged the fight in North Carolina not just rhetorically, but with large sums of money, badly outmatching Tea Party-branded groups that are disorganized at best and right-wing fleecing operations at worst. And they coordinated with allies when necessary—both explicitly, and through the use of the sort of political smoke signals campaign finance laws frequently require.

All of that is to their credit. There is no sense denying it.

But the case isn't as open and shut as Republicans would like it to be. Even if you ignore the obvious differences between 2010 and 2014, and the fact that the establishment has defeated right wing candidates before—just ask Senator Tommy Thompson—there are several reasons to believe that getting someone like Thom Tillis nominated doesn't herald the end of the GOP's problem with its conservative base. It's just morphed into something different.