Something different is going on in the Republican Party in the runup to the 2014 midterm elections. Candidates and voters alike are demonstrating a renewed understanding of the danger of the self-inflicted political wound and the need to avoid it.

On Tuesday in North Carolina, the first important GOP Senate primary race of the year ended with frontrunner Thom Tillis securing 46 percent of the vote, significantly more than he needed to avoid a costly and difficult runoff.

This was notable because Tillis had three candidates running to his right on the grounds that this gun-loving, pro-life state legislator wasn’t an authentic conservative.

Their argument seemed based largely in the fact that Tillis was getting support from the so-called Republican “establishment,” while several of his rivals got backing from self-appointed Tea Party groups.

When it came to experience and fluency and a proven electoral record, Tillis had it all over his rivals. But that might not have been sufficient unto the day in 2010 or 2012. In those years, in Senate race after Senate race, Republican primary voters chose unpolished and highly problematic candidates who showed a lamentable tendency to shoot themselves in the foot they’d just put in their own mouths.

Thanks to those candidates, Republicans lost races they likely would’ve won (had more established types not lost the primary) in Indiana, Colorado, Missouri, Nevada, Alaska, North Dakota and Montana. Those victories would have given the GOP control of the Senate in 2010 and extended the party’s domination in 2012. Instead, the party fell short of victory in ’10 and lost a net two seats in ’12.

Tillis’ Republican rivals in North Carolina would have been a gift to the embattled Democratic incumbent, Kay Hagan. They were unpolished, uncomfortable with issues and consumed with parochial interests. In those earlier years, their rough-hewn qualities might’ve offered a perverse incentive to primary voters to cast ballots for them on the grounds of authenticity and ideological purity.

But this year, the results on Tuesday suggest, Republican voters will go to the primary polls sadder and wiser. They’ve seen how a bad candidate can single-handedly destroy himself, especially with a mainstream media hungry to turn any GOP pothole into a sinkhole.

And so they may be subsuming William F. Buckley’s 1967 dictum that conservatives should vote “for the most right, viable candidate who could win.”

Tillis’ victory comes six weeks after the Colorado Republican Party pulled a switcheroo, getting a Tea Party candidate who’d lost a winnable race in 2010 to drop out of the Senate primary in favor of the state’s rising GOP star, Rep. Cory Gardner. He’s now running neck-and-neck with the incumbent first-term Democrat, Mark Udall.

The distinction between the good and bad candidates in these races doesn’t have much to do with their views. A Sen. Tillis will be on the rightward edge of the Republican caucus in 2015 if he wins in November, just as one of his rivals would’ve been.

It’s more a question of comportment and the ability to talk about issues in a way that is not in itself needlessly divisive and off-putting. Basically, Tillis seemed like he was ready to play in the big leagues and the others didn’t, which is true as well of Gardner in Colorado.

And the key to playing in the big leagues these days is, first and foremost, not to blow up your own campaign.

Over the coming months, primary voters face more challenges of this sort in Georgia, Louisiana, Kansas and Mississippi. Given the clear advantage Republicans are going to enjoy going into November, the job of GOP primary voters is, pretty much, not to mess things up. It will be instructive to see whether they avoid the self-inflicted wounds that have done so much damage to their party over the past few years.