Friday, August 8, 2014

Primaries Show Republican Voters Wary of Tea party Candidates, Skeptical of Party Establishment

The standard thing to say about the various Republican primaries this year is that the tea party movement has lost one race after another. That's a defensible conclusion but also an oversimplification.
I see more turbulence and undercurrents among Republican primary voters than usual. The evidence is that incumbents -- both those the mainstream media call tea partyers and those they call the party establishment -- have been prevailing by tenuous margins in primaries that in the pre-tea party years would almost certainly not have been seriously contested.
Take Kansas. There Sen. Pat Roberts was renominated over challenger Dr. Milton Wolf by just a 48 percent to 40 percent margin -- a victory, but an embarrassingly low margin for someone who has been in Congress for 34 years.
Wolf, a second cousin of President Obama, made much of the fact that Roberts maintains only a nominal residence in the state. But the doctor was hurt when it was revealed that he circulated X-rays of wounded patients with macabre comments.

http://townhall.com/columnists/michaelbarone/2014/08/08/primaries-show-republican-voters-wary-of-tea-party-candidates-skeptical-of-party-establishment-n1875994 

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