JIM DEMINT was not on track to become a pillar of the Senate. He replaced Fritz Hollings, who retired, in 2004 and then cruised to re-election (over one of the strangest major-party senate nominees in memory) in 2010. But he has long supported term limits, and had all but officially ruled out running for a third term in 2016. Without another campaign on the horizon, one can assume that he was already looking toward his post-Senate future. Still, his resignation, announced earlier today and effective when he leaves to head the Heritage Foundation next month, counts as a moderate surprise—surprising because he had four years left in his term, but only moderate because the journey's end was visible, and his power and influence may well have peaked.

For all his reputation as a right-wing bomb thrower, Mr DeMint was at heart a prodigious fund-raiser, and an outstanding ad-man and marketer (before being elected to the House in 1998 he ran his own market-research firm in Greenville). In 2007 he backed Mitt Romney over John McCain, citing the former's signature health-care law in Massachusetts as evidence that he could "take good conservative ideas, like private health insurance, and apply them to the need to have everyone insured... Those kinds of ideas show an ability to bring people together that we haven't seen in national politics for a while. We don't need the nation to be more polarised."

But that was before Mr Obama took office, and the market for polarisation boomed. In 2010 Mr DeMint's PAC backed five winning insurgents in the Senate, two of whom—Marco Rubio and Rand Paul—look likely to run for president in four years. He bested Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, in a fight over earmarks (among other scraps), and appeared to be about the business of building himself a congressional power base to rival Mr McConnell's. But in 2010 he did not only back winners. Among the top ten recipients of his Senate Conservatives Fund's largesse were Christine O'Donnell, Joe Miller, Sharron Angle, Ken Buck and Dino Rossi, ideologically pure losers all. What's more, they all lost winnable races. One could argue, then, that Mr DeMint's contribution to the 2010 Senate was a net zero. The long-term effects may in fact have been worse: his candidates won in deeply-red Utah and Kentucky as well as purple Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Florida, but the five losers failed to beat vulnerable Democrats in largely Democratic states (Alaska excepted). The PAC's 2012 record was similarlyambiguous (though by 2012 Mr DeMint had cut formal ties with the group, allowing it to become a SuperPAC), backing winners in red Texas, Arizona and Nebraska and losers in purple Ohio and Indiana. To put it another way, his candidates tend to do best where Republicans do best anyway; his candidates have tended, overall, to falter when they have to fight for the centre. Mr DeMint has proven far more adept at picking off Republicans than Democrats. That is the record of an opportunist, not a kingmaker.

(Photo credit: AFP)