Karl Rove is starting a new fundraising organization to support “electable” Republican candidates, while Tea Party groups are crying foul. This fight is good for Karl Rove and for groups with Tea Party branding, but bad for the rest of us.
The Tea Party groups and Karl Rove can fundraise off of each other without having to deal with the Republican party’s bigger problems. This isn’t really an argument about how the Republican party will change. This is a fight that keeps everybody in their comfort zone. Rove already knows how to run the same kinds of ads that Republicans have been running since Reagan was president. He spent $300 million on such ads in 2012 and look where it got us. Tea Party groups already know how to call Republicans ideologically impure. Doing so won’t win over the median voter. Both sides are soliciting funds to say the same old things to the same old people
A lot of this argument seems to be talking around what actually happened in key races. Moderate and establishment Republican candidates like Mike Castle and Richard Lugar didn’t lose for a lack of money. Even when you count the outside spending, Castle and Lugar outspent their opponents substantially. Conservative groups spent money on the Indiana and Delaware races to help out Christine O’Donnell and Richard Mourdock, but we need to keep that spending in perspective. The conservative groups didn’t outspend their establishment opponents. They just gave the insurgent candidates a chance to be heard. That was all it took. No amount of donations to Karl Rove could have solved the problems of Mike Castle and Richard Lugar because their real problem was a message that didn’t appeal to Republican primary voters and their seeming lack of interest in the priorities of conservatives. Establishment and moderate Republicans need to learn how to win their own fights a lot more than they need ad buys from Karl Rove.
If Rove’s Conservative Victory Project wants more conservative victories, they could publicize policies that could get majority support. They could spend money to advertize conservative tax policies that are pro-growth and pro-parent as opposed to President Obama’s steady stream of tax increase proposals. If Tea Party groups want to move policy to the right, they could spend more of their money explaining how alternatives to Obamacare would save the government money while still protecting people with preexisting conditions.
The question donors should be asking of both Karl Rove and the Tea Party groups is “How will you spend my money to win over Americans who voted for Obama in the last election?”
February 10th, 2013 | 12:19 pm
[...] Karl Rove is starting a new fundraising organization to support “electable” Republican candidates, while Tea Party groups are crying foul. This fight is good for Karl Rove and for groups with Tea Party branding, but bad for the rest of us. The Tea Party groups and Karl Rove can fundraise off Source: Postmodern Conservative [...]
February 10th, 2013 | 1:44 pm
Pete, it’s also fair to note that Democrats sometimes fund the Republican primary candidate who’d be the weakest candidate in the general election, as with Akin in Missouri last year.
February 10th, 2013 | 1:47 pm
djf, true to some extent (also with Angle in Nevada), but that only works if the other candidates only start making the case against the bad candidate in the last week or so. The problem is having to play catch up, not a lack of money per se (usually – though that might have been a problem in Missouri.)
February 10th, 2013 | 2:15 pm
Pete, I suspect that the stats show that the Tea Party stayed home because Romney was a RINO. Is that true?
Quit dancing with Mr. Rove, the eastern monied interests, and the statist/progressivists that make up the power base of the GOP. The Tea Party has NOTHING in common with these people.
February 10th, 2013 | 2:43 pm
Right Pete, it’s important not to forget the adage contained in the acronym for EMILY’S list- Early Money Is Like Yeast.
Karl Rove and the Tea Party are probably hoping to push the needle toward their policy preferences mostly at the early stages of races, encouraging “their” type of people to run; money from the PAC’s and 501c4′s at the later stages is much less cost-effective at changing the policy preferences of the parties (though still important in some cases- see Santorum vs. Romney campaigns in the primary)
February 10th, 2013 | 2:59 pm
CJ, that’s just the thing, in a lot of cases the moderate or establishment candidate has the money and has it early. They just waste it and ignore the people who actually show up in primaries. giving Karl rove more money to spend on primary ads can’t fix that.
I get that money at the early stages of the primary has more leverage, but the early stages aren’t the main problem of the GOP. The problem is not enough votes in the general election. As Ramesh Ponnuru points out, both Tea Party and establishment candidates did rather badly in 2012. Spending money to educate persuadable voters (including one who don’t know they are persuadable) between elections sounds like a more fruitful course for both the “establishment” and “Tea Party” than spending money on Candidate X rather than Candidate Y in the primaries and then carpet bombing the airwaves in support of whatever Republican wins the primary in the month before the election
February 11th, 2013 | 9:00 am
[...] Karl Rove Vs. The Tea Party – Pete Spiliakos, PoMoCon / First Things [...]
February 14th, 2013 | 2:11 pm
[...] to support, and, to a small degree, the future of the Republican Party. First Things posted a recent blog about the topic that might be worth your [...]
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