On Tuesday night, Sasse ran away with the primary, taking 49 percent of the GOP vote and more than doubling his nearest competitor. This makes him the likely next senator from Nebraska, a red state where Sasse is not expected to face serious Democratic opposition in November. Statements immediately poured forth declaring his win a victory for the Tea Party, which has seemed benighted in recent months. "For the past week the mainstream media has been pushing the recycled ‘Tea Party is Dead’ headlines, but tonight’s results show how again they’ve got it wrong," Taylor Budowich, executive director of the Tea Party Express, said after the race was called for Sasse late Tuesday.

But Sasse actually represents less the Tea Party's anti-incumbent rage than the sort of fusion candidate who can unite the party establishment and base—a well-credentialed insider who can convince the right wing he's on their side. As Dave Weigel put it in Slate, "Sasse is a veteran of the establishment who masterfully ingratiated himself with the conservative movement." Particularly in red states, he could represent the harmonizing future of the GOP in a post-GOP-civil-war world. Last week, Thom Tillis won the North Carolina Republican primary more by straddling the establishment and Tea Party than by taking sides; Sasse did so even more effectively.

Sasse's campaign argues that his win illustrates a larger point about the past few years' intraparty conflict: The best candidates—Tea Party and establishment alike—have generally won, while the rank incompetents have lost. In a memo on Sasse's victory, his campaign advisers John Yob and Jordan Gehrke wrote:

In the last two cycles, we saw what happened when anti-establishment candidates with questionable backgrounds or poor campaign skills were nominated in several states. In 2012, other states showed what happened when the establishment worked to manipulate the system to put forward equally flawed candidates who also fared poorly in General Elections in 2012.

It's not fair to blame the Tea Party for costing Republicans the Senate, according to this argument, when "electable" establishment candidates have also blown plenty of Senate races in the past couple of election cycles. The GOP civil-war narrative, Yob and Gehrke write, was "relevant yet overplayed" in Nebraska.

Now that he's virtually guaranteed to be a senator, what kind of senator will Sasse be? Despite his support from the likes of Palin and Cruz, he's sending signals he doesn't plan to be a bomb-thrower in Washington. On Tuesday, in an interview with MSNBC's Chuck Todd, Sasse called himself a "team player" who would seek consensus around the best conservative ideas through persuasion. During the campaign, an aide to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was behind an anti-Sasse advertising effort—apparently a part of McConnell's war on the Senate Conservatives Fund, which is supporting the leader's own long-shot primary challenger. But Sasse now says that's water under the bridge and he looks forward to working with McConnell.