SALON

Tuesday, Feb 19, 2013 7:00 PM UTC

The Tea Party is beating Mitch McConnell

It's lined up a potential primary challenger, and already succeeded at pushing McConnell to the far-right fringe

By

Topics: The Tea Party, Mitch McConnell, U.S. Senate, Kentucky, The Right,

The Tea Party is beating Mitch McConnell (Credit: Jeff Malet, maletphoto.com)

If Mitch McConnell isn’t conservative enough for you, Matt Bevin may be your guy. The Kentucky businessman is reportedly considering mounting a primary challenge against the Senate minority leader from the right, and has been reaching out to local Tea Party groups to secure support, according to the Hill’s Alexandra Jaffe:

Sarah Duran, president of the Louisville Tea Party, told The Hill that Bevin had been in touch with her over the phone to discuss his run multiple times over the past few weeks, and that he met with the group two weeks ago to discuss his interest in the race. [...]

She added that other Tea Party groups had reached out to Bevin to encourage him to run, and that even “some people that have supported McConnell in the past” had been in touch with him about a potential bid.

Does Bevin have any chance of beating McConnell? Well, he’s wealthy and could presumably fund his own campaign, which would be crucial in taking on McConnell, who is sitting on a prodigious $7 million war chest. And McConnell is fairly weak — the least popular senator in the country, according to a recent PPP poll.

But Bevin’s campaign is a long shot, at best. McConnell is a savvy operator who will have the state’s entire GOP establishment behind him, endless supplies of money, and universal name ID, while Bevin is almost entirely unknown. And McConnell is hardly a RINO despised by the far right like Rich Lugar or other GOP senators who have fallen to Tea Party challenges.

Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, a more moderate, less powerful senator in a more conservative state, held on to his seat last year in the face of a Tea Party challenge. A primary challenge against House Speaker John Boehner fizzled harmlessly as well. Over 90 percent of senators who seek reelection win, after all.

Still, that doesn’t mean that a Tea Party challenge is unimportant. For the movement, a primary challenge can be successful even if it fails, as long as it succeeds in pushing the target further to the right and making him more responsive to the far right’s demands.

And by that measure, Bevin may have already won.

Rumors that the Tea Party might target McConnell started even before Election Day last year, and the Republican leader stepped up his outreach accordingly. In August, he held a large rally with fellow Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul, who is positioning himself as a national leader of the libertarian and Tea Party wings of the GOP, even though McConnell campaigned against Paul and the two have clashed in the Senate.

McConnell even hired Paul’s former campaign manager, Jesse Benton, to lead his own 2014 reelection bid. Benton also ran Ron Paul’s presidential campaign and has deep ties in the conservative activist community. “The year-long search that ended with Benton’s hiring was a major signal to Republicans that McConnell views support from the younger libertarian and tea party movements as crucial not only to his political future, but also to his party’s prospects nationally,” Politico noted at the time.

The bar is especially high for a leader like McConnell, who would like to not only win, but win by a large margin to discourage future challengers and show strength within his caucus back in Washington. Which is why he seems to be taking the threat seriously.

As he leads his party’s negotiations on sequestration, gun control, immigration and everything else in the next two years, he will know that it’s not just his colleagues’ reelections at stake, but his own as well. And that makes him less likely to cooperate with the White House and more interested in adhering to the hard-line positions set by the growing number of conservatives in his own caucus, whose support he will need next year. In other words, the Tea Party wins, regardless of the primary outcome.

Alex Seitz-Wald

Alex Seitz-Wald is Salon's political reporter. Email him at aseitz-wald@salon.com, and follow him on Twitter @aseitzwald. More Alex Seitz-Wald.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 14 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: Chekhov's story mirrors Russia's own

Recommendations