At first glance, the 2014 midterms look like a catastrophe for the Tea Party. Sarah Palin’s candidates lost in state after state, conservatives like Louisiana’s Rob Maness who proudly embraced the Tea Party label got walloped, and favorites of the so-called RINO surrender caucus—including Thom Tillis and incumbent Sen. Lamar Alexander—sailed to wins in their primaries ahead of their victories last Tuesday.
But movement conservative and Tea Party Republicans see it differently. They argue that their strategy for this cycle worked out fairly well—at the very least, well enough for them to see no reason to shift strategy. Prominent conservative activists who backed upstart challengers like Maness and Chris McDaniel in Mississippi are eager to push back against the emerging narrative that GOP gains in the 2014 midterms were the result of establishment Republicans’ efforts to “kick out the crazies”—for lack of a better term. In retrospect, these activists feel little regret for how the 2014 midterms played out; if anything, they feel vindicated.
Conservatives’ biggest win came early in the cycle, in the Nebraska Republican primary between former Bush administration official Ben Sasse and former Nebraska treasurer Shane Osborn. The ideological differences between those two candidates were a tad inscrutable—the two weren’t identical, but they probably had more in common than any other top primary contenders....
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
