So far, his efforts have been successful enough. After spending an astonishing $5 million, Hatch secured 59 percent at last month’s state convention, three times what Bennett got in ’10. But he fell a handful of votes shy of the 60 percent threshold that would have handed him the nomination on the spot and was instead forced into a primary with Liljenquist. There’s been no reputable polling on the race, but the assumption is that Hatch is comfortably ahead, and that making noise about debates won’t do much to help Liljenquist.

The bad news for Hatch, as Charlie Mahtesian pointed out earlier, is that there’s a lot of time between now and the June 26 primary. Here the threat to Hatch really isn’t Liljenquist and anything he might say and do; it’s an outside group or individual deciding to target the race and pour big money into the anti-Hatch effort. If this were to happen, it might not matter that Hatch has given his enemies little in the way of ammunition. With enough money, anyone can be made to look bad. And the one thing Hatch can’t run away from is his political longevity, which is a liability to today’s outsider/purity-obsessed GOP base.

Mahtesian notes that the Club for Growth seems unlikely to enter the fray, but in the super PAC era, a billionaire or millionaire could at any moment take a random interest in any race and alter the outcome with a hefty investment. The best illustration of this came Tuesday night in Kentucky, where Tom Massie won a GOP congressional primary after a rich 21-year-old Texas college student spent more than $500,000 on his behalf.  A week before that, another plutocrat fueled the unexpected rise of Deb Fischer in a Nebraska Senate primary.

The pro-Fischer money didn’t come in until the final few days of that race. Which means that even though he’s in good shape now, Hatch still has a month of sweating ahead of him.

He also got more than $500,000 worth of backing from a super PAC called Liberty for All, which was funded almost entirely by a 21-year-old Texas college student with an inheritance. The group ran ads supporting Massie and criticizing Webb-Edgington and Moore.

Marc Wilson, a supporter of Webb-Edgington, criticized the group after the ballots were counted.

“It’s a shame that a Texas libertarian super PAC could come in and invade the Republican Party to buy a congressional seat,” he said.

The rich college student is John Ramsey, a senior economics major at Stephen F. Austin University who also volunteered for Ron Paul’s presidential campaign in Iowa. Mother Jones’s Tim Murphy profiled Ramsey, who inherited a share of his grandfather’s real estate/industrial fortune in 2010, last week and found that, in addition to airing ads and sending out mailers, Ramsey’s super PAC had built an 11-person ground operation in Kentucky.  “I would call us more like a party, frankly,” Preston Bates, who cofounded Liberty for All with Ramsey, told Murphy.

Really, that line says it all. Traditionally, candidates in congressional primaries have needed either the blessing of party leaders or their own financial resources to compete and win in primaries. The same has generally gone for Senate primaries. But with super PACs, random plutocrats such as Ramsey can identify candidates across the country who champion their pet causes and deliver them to parity (at least) with their opponents. In this case, Ramsey’s agenda is the Paul version of liberty, which includes views on civil liberties that run counter to the standard GOP dogma. But it could be anything. Last week, the Ending Spending super PAC, which is bankrolled by Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts, played a crucial role in Deb Fischer’s out-of-nowhere victory in Nebraska’s GOP Senate primary.

In presidential politics, spending a few hundred thousand – or even a few million – dollars on behalf of a candidate won’t get you very far, especially in the general election phase. But in House and Senate primaries, those same sums can be decisive. It raises the question of how many millionaires and billionaires with political agendas will take note of the Massie and Fischer examples and say to themselves: Gee, wouldn’t it be neat to have my own member of Congress?

This often results in maddeningly deceptive messaging from Romney and his allies, something that the newest ad from the Karl Rove-affiliated Crossroads GPS illustrates perfectly:

There’s nothing very complicated going on here, just an attempt to connect an everywoman’s despair about what a weak economy has done to her family with a bunch of scary-seeming statistics about spending and debt under Obama.

The CliffsNotes version of what’s wrong with this: 1) There’s been no spending explosion under Obama; 2) the increase in debt under Obama can be traced to the economic crash (which dramatically reduced federal revenue), the wars, the Bush tax cuts (which, yes, Obama agreed to extend – at the insistence of Republicans), the 2003 Medicare prescription drug law, and only to a very minor extent the 2009 stimulus; and 3) the economy would actually be in better shape now if Obama had spent more.

That’s the context that the Obama campaign needs the public to understand, and you can see why it’s such a struggle. Voters have a demonstrated tendency to express concerns about deficits only when the economy is bad. This is why, for instance, the Democrats during the 1981/82 recession reaped a political windfall while railing against Ronald Reagan’s massive deficits, but gained zero traction on the issue when the economy improved in 1984 – even though deficits were even higher (and still soaring) then.

The lesson is that most voters don’t actually care about the deficit itself, or really understand what it is. But it’s a scary-sounding word that conjures thoughts of government bloat and reckless spending, which makes it an irresistible weapon for a recession-era opposition party.

But, as Jamelle Bouie argued yesterday, even if this strategy does lead voters to dislike Romney and conclude that he’s a heartless capitalist, that hardly guarantees that they’ll follow through and vote against him because of it. There may be some evidence of this in a new ABC News/Washington Post poll, which finds Romney and Obama running dead even (47 percent each) on the question of who would do a better job handling the economy. But on the question of which candidate better understands people’s economic problems, Obama enjoys a healthy 8-point edge.

This is only one bit of data in one poll, and there are several possible explanations for it. But it seems plausible that Romney’s lower score on understanding people’s struggles at least partly reflects his well-established image as an out-of-touch, top-1 percent guy. And yet, because their overall economic anxiety is so high (83 percent say the economy is in “not so good” or “poor” shape), a potentially critical number of voters who don’t think he understands their problems still see him as the better choice to manage the economy.

Similarly, a new PPP poll conducted for the SEIU finds that 57 percent of voters believe that Romney was mainly interested in making profits at Bain, while just 12 percent say he was motivated to create jobs. This is exactly the kind of split that Democrats are aiming for with their attacks, which only bolsters the question Bouie raised about whether it ultimately will turn voters away from Romney.

It’s only May, of course, and it may be that weeks and months of repetition in speeches, ads and debates ends up having a decisive effect on swing voters. So there’s no reason for Democrats to stop invoking Bain; it very well might end up working. But it would also be reasonable to develop some other counter-punches for the Romney message, which boils down to: If you don’t like where the economy is, don’t ask questions – just vote the guy in charge out.

In the new ABC/WaPo poll, one possibility jumps right out: George W. Bush. By a margin of 49 to 34 percent, voters still see him as more responsible for the current state of the economy than Obama. That 15-point spread is actually down, though, from back in January, when 54 percent of voters blamed Bush and only 29 blames Obama.

Maybe there’s nothing the Obama campaign can do about this evolution, and the longer he’s president – and the closer the November election gets – the more voters will ignore the former president and focus on the current one. But it may also be that the Obama campaign has been a little too quiet in reminding voters exactly what kind of economic catastrophe Obama inherited, whom he inherited it from, and how closely Romney’s economic program resembles what was in place just before the meltdown that started this all.

Money from Wall Street and the investor class has played a big role in Booker’s rise, helping him level the playing field in his 2002 mayoral bid against incumbent Sharpe James and to ward off serious competition in his follow-up campaigns in 2006 and 2010. His cultivation of and sympathy for Wall Street, though, may come as news to many of Booker’s rank-and-file Democratic admirers.

“People inside politics have always understood it,” Codey said. “He’s just played that game very, very well. And if you run for statewide office like it looks like he wants to, that’s going to be helpful for you.”

Booker’s name is frequently touted in connection with next year’s gubernatorial race and Frank Lautenberg’s Senate seat in 2014. The state’s most powerful Democratic boss, George Norcross of South Jersey, cited Booker as the party’s top contender to face Chris Christie just a few days ago. Booker’s statewide popularity, in fact, is probably stronger than ever, thanks to his recent dash into a burning building to save a young woman.

But behind the scenes, Booker’s relationship with Norcross has deteriorated, and insiders suggest that Norcross, who has emerged as Christie’s most important political ally in the state, sees him as the perfect sacrificial lamb – not likely to beat Christie in ’13, but strong enough not to hurt the down-ballot Democratic candidates the Norcross empire depends on. Booker himself enjoys a solid working relationship with Christie, whose poll numbers are up of late, further complicating a potential campaign next year.

This is why the assumption is that Booker will wait until the 2014 Senate race to make his move. The 88-year-old Lautenberg is vowing to run again, but he’s now locked in a very public feud with the Norcross crowd, and it seems inevitable that he’ll draw a primary challenger (or challengers).

Codey, who has been both an ally and enemy of Booker’s in various Democratic turf wars, said he thinks the Bain story will be forgotten by Democratic voters long before Booker embarks on a statewide campaign. But in an interview with Capital New York’s Josh Benson today, state Sen. Ronald Rice, one of Codey’s top home county allies (who waged a quixotic campaign for mayor against Booker in 2006), touted Codey as an ideal Booker opponent for a ’14 Senate primary. Codey groaned at that.

“Thank you very much, Ron.”

What may be most surprising to those who know Booker as one of the biggest stars of New Jersey politics is how shaky his standing is in his Newark base. He became a national star through his near-miss challenge of Mayor Sharpe James in 2002, and when the embattled James stood down in 2006, the rest of the city’s old guard essentially gave Booker a pass. But running against feeble (and now imprisoned) opposition in 2010, Booker failed to clear even 60 percent of the vote.

It was proof of the suspicions that linger among many residents over whether Booker, who was raised in the suburbs and has made himself into something of a national celebrity, is really one of them. His willingness to undercut Obama on Bain, who enjoys super-human popularity in Newark, and to stand instead with the Wall Street crowd could exacerbate this image problem.

“I think there’s always going to be the story that he’d rather be with those kinds of people than with his own constituents,” Codey said. “And whether that’s something the people of Newark think and how they feel about it, that’s for them to decide.”

The next Newark mayoral race is in 2014. If Booker runs, the expectation is that he’ll get a serious opponent this time around. Two political legacies, Donald Payne Jr. and Ron Rice Jr., are both now vying in a special election for the Newark-based congressional seat vacated by the death of Payne’s father. Whichever of them falls short will probably look hard at the mayor’s race — another incentive, perhaps, for Booker to look outside Newark for his political future.