Thom Tillis, who threw lots of red meat to the GOP base, won the NC Senate primary last night:
Bullet: dodged. North Carolina speaker of the house Thom Tillis cruised to victory in Tuesday’s North Carolina Republican Senate primary, setting up a general election showdown with Sen. Kay Hagan (D-N.C.) this fall. Democrats had held on to hopes that Tillis, who was endorsed at the last minute by Mitt Romney, would fall short of the 40-percent threshold needed to win the race outright and head into a runoff with Greg Brannon, a far-out tea party doctor backed by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.)
Sides provides the above chart on Tillis’ ideology:
Were Tillis to win in November, the Senate would be getting someone whose political beliefs look much more similar to Grassley’s than Cruz’s. By contrast, Brannon’s views are closer to Cruz’s and [Mark ] Harris [another Tea Party favorite] is estimated to be even more conservative than Cruz.
Of course, we don’t know whether Tillis will beat Hagan. Our forecast sees Hagan as the current favorite but other forecasts see the race as a toss-up. Nevertheless, nominating a relative moderate likes Tillis probably helps the GOP win, since political science research shows that strongly ideological candidates can be punished at the ballot box. What this analysis shows is that a Republican victory in November will contribute a lot less to Senate polarization with Tillis as the nominee instead of Brannon or Harris.
Molly Ball wonders whether yesterday’s win for the GOP establishment means the tide is turning against less electable Tea Partiers:
To a degree not seen before since the advent of the Tea Party five years ago, the Republican establishment took on the warring factions that have given the GOP so many ulcers in recent years—and won. With 94 percent of the vote counted Tuesday night, Tillis had cleared the 40-percent runoff threshold, taking 45 percent of the vote to his nearest competitor’s 27 percent.
In the month ahead, similar contests will unfold in several more states, including Kentucky, home of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. The establishment—defined here as the traditionally corporate and institutional GOP—hopes to keep up the full-court press begun in North Carolina and run the table, theoretically producing the slate of nominees that will give the party the best possible shot at taking the Senate.
But Pierce rejects the claim that Tillis is a moderate:
[T]here is no Republican “Establishment” any more. This is because the notion of a Republican Establishment requires that there be at least an occasional flirtation with moderation and there are no Republican moderates any more. (It also requires that there be at least an occasional flirtation with reality, but I don’t expect miracles here.) Tillis is a perfect example. Not only has he presided over a legislative body that is extreme in the legislation it passes, but Tillis himself has signed aboard the “personhood” crusade on reproductive rights, and he has resolutely stood in opposition to marriage equality. The difference between Tillis and Brannon, in terms of what their campaigns say about what they’d do if they were elected, is solely based on the theory that Brannon was so far off the wall that Tillis could be positioned by the media as being a moderate. The goalposts, by now, probably can be found on Mars.
Kilgore makes related points:
It’s true that had Thom Tillis been forced into a runoff it would have given the “Republican Establishment” a lot of heartburn and cost it a lot of money. Once that is said, however, I just don’t see last night as much of a landmark for the famed Establishment, and explained why in a column at TPMCafe.
For one thing, the “Establishment” did not have a great night in House races in NC. But even if all you do is to focus on Tillis’ win, it came at the sort of price that I suspect “Establishment” candidates are going to be willing to pay all over the country this year: abject surrender to party extremists on every key issues.
