LaTourette wants to make it easier for those GOP congressmen who are willing to work toward a grand bargain and is leaving Congress to do just that.

He’s taking over the Republican Main Street Partnership — the slimmed-down group of congressional GOP centrists — and is going to create a super PAC to serve as a counterbalance to the Club for Growth in House Republican primaries.

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“When a center-right Republican is in a primary and is being targeted by some group as a RINO, we’re going to make sure we have their back,” said LaTourette. “Not just with speeches and press releases but with money.”

LaTourette said his initial goal for the group’s super PAC would be to raise $10 million and he had already gotten favorable responses when he brought up his plan with senior House Republicans on committees that make it easy to raise money.

“We’re going to hit the road [to raise money] as soon as I’m off this payroll,” he said of his congressional tenure.

As for the NRCC, incoming Chairman Greg Walden (R-Ore.), another Boehner ally who backed the cliff deal, said the group would most likely continue its policy of staying out of contested primaries but did note that the House campaign arm is an “incumbent-driven organization” that wants to ensure its incumbents “are as strong as they can be.”

And by way of subtle warning to his fellow backers of the compromise, Walden said advance preparation was key for any incumbent worried about being primaried.

“The textbook case is Upton,” said Walden, alluding to Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), the center-right chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee who took steps to protect his right flank well before a long-anticipated primary he won easily last year.

On the presidential level, the prolonged and debate-a-week 2012 GOP primary has become central to Republican post-mortems about how Mitt Romney was so soundly defeated.

A session devoted to the primary at Harvard’s quadrennial post-election conclave was dominated by grumbles from Romney officials about the multitude of debates.

Stuart Stevens, Romney’s top strategist, likened the hyped-up TV forums as something close to “American Idol.”

And Romney’s political director, Rich Beeson, said in an interview for POLITICO’s ebook on the election that the primary, which stretched until mid-April partly because of the proportional distribution of delegates, cost the Republican nominee precious time in setting up his general election operation.

“It was probably worth 350,000 votes,” said Beeson.

A committee tasked by RNC Chairman Reince Priebus with assessing what went wrong in 2012 and how the GOP can rebound will consider changing the 2016 primary back to a winner-take-all format. But such a proposal is likely to run into serious resistance from RNC members who hail from states whose primaries and caucuses have typically taken place long after the nomination has been decided.

What’s more likely, according to one committee member, is an effort to take control of the debates, by which the RNC would have more say over the number and format of the forums.

“[There’s a] clear appetite to change the primary debate structure,” said Henry Barbour, a top Priebus ally. “[There were] too many and too much control with the media.”