The Anti-War GOP

Daniel McCarthy defends Matt’s suggestion that the GOP would be better off in the Senate races if its candidates opposed the war:

That strategy didn’t seem to work too well for Lincoln Chafee in 2006. Antiwar House Republicans John Hostettler and Jim Leach also lost their seats. The Chafee example doesn’t disprove Yglesias’s point, however. What it shows is lone dissenters have a hard time escaping from the downward drag of the party line: Lincoln Chafee did lose in large part because the Republicans were pro-war, even though he wasn’t. As long as the GOP is committed to the war, outlying dissenters risk getting shot by both sides: antiwar voters blame them for their party affiliation, while the party base may reject them for deviating from the Republican line.