Bloomberg News: Kentucky, Wyoming and South Carolina should be easy wins for incumbent Republicans trying to regain the U.S. Senate majority in 2014.More Todd Akins, more Christine O’Donnells, more Sharon Angles? Yeah, they’re probably coming. And if history is any indication, the Tea Party insistence on ideological purity could be expensive. “It’s those primary challenges that shot down the Republican effort to win the Senate in the last two elections,” David Redlawsk, a political science professor at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey told Bloomberg. “The Tea Party brought in what turned out to be very weak candidates.”
Instead, the primary challenges they face threaten to drain resources, sharpen campaign trail rhetoric and build division for a party struggling to find its way after a demoralizing 2012 election.
In Georgia, the Republican primary is jammed with seven candidates, pitting one wing of the party against the other — as is the case in the other states. Meanwhile, Democrats are unifying behind one candidate.
The infighting has raised Democratic expectations that they can keep control of the chamber and perhaps capture seats in Republican-leaning states. They did that in Indiana and Missouri in 2012 against inexperienced candidates backed by the small-government Tea Party branch of the party.
What gets me is that teabaggers seem to have convinced themselves that they speak for America. And, being a group of people who embrace an evidence- and fact-free belief system, the fact that America rejects them time and again does nothing to disabuse them of this belief. When Todd Akin opened his mouth and said the most insane thing ever, he really did think the public would find it compelling. They don’t say these aggressively stupid things because they think people need to be convinced that they’re true, they say them because they think they’re the sorts of things “everybody knows.” So they say these things not because they’re incautious or can’t censor themselves, but because they have absolutely no idea what the American public will find offensive and/or jawdroppingly asinine.
And the beauty of it all is that the Tea Party is a monster of the GOP’s own creation. They taught these chumps the things that “everybody knows” and now they find themselves being dragged down by their idiocy and ignorance — the very idiocy and ignorance the party instilled in these ‘baggers in the first place.
You don’t often see pure poetic justice in the wild, so make sure to savor it.
