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2 years ago everyone was pissed at the NRSC for supporting people in primaries (Chafee, Specter in 2002).

Damned if you do; damned if you don't.

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Sekula-Gibbs v. Olson does not exactly compare to Chafee or Specter. The issue - particularly with Chafee - was that the money could have been better spent elsewhere as opposed to a race where it was extremely unlikely, even if nominated, that Senator Fluff-for-brains could win.

If taking back a solid-R district like TX-22 shouldn't be a priority for the NRCC, I would ask: what should be?

Tom Cole has refused to allow the NRCC to pick candidates in the GOP primary. This is in contrast to how the NRCC worked before - see AZ 8, where they tried but failed to get the better candidate - and more importantly, this is directly opposite the approach the Dems take in both the House and Senate.

The Gibbs v. Olson matchup is just the latest example of this ridiculous policy. Cole should have endorsed Olson immediately after the first primary, and then steered money and support to him. Or, he could have done this more quietly. My main point is, if Olson loses this race, especially by a narrow margin, then it is far more likely that the GOP, with Gibbs as the nominee, will go on to lose the general election. And if that is what happens, than Tom Cole should be held responsible.

Republicans across the country have been SCREAMING at the Washington committees to keep out of the primaries (I have anyway, along with many of us here at RS).

He's doing as told, and I applaud him for it *despite* being in favor of Olson over SSG here.

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A horde of people on this site has attacked the committees for taking sides in primaries. Now we're seeing calls for them to do just that.

Of course, everyone's ideal is for the committees to back their preferred candidate every time. I don't have a strong opinion on this, but I don't see how we can argue for the NRSC to stay out of primaries and tell Cole to intervene in them.

Of course winning in TX-22 should be a priority so should keeping a PA SEN seat when we have an incumbent. Does that mean the NRSC was right to fight Toomey? I dunno.

But talk about mixed messages.

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Namely, ones where once candidate would ensure certain defeat, or would be so ideologically unacceptable as to be an impossible fundraising sinkhole and a negative to the Republican brand. Think David Duke.

I don't think anyone would say that the NRCC should have spent money for Pete - they have bigger fish to fry - but when every major Republican from Texas endorsed the man, it's a pretty clearcut situation. An SSG win tonight would've doomed the GOP's ability to retake the seat.

http://www.redstate.com/blogs/ben_domenech/2008/mar/06/pete_olson_gets_e...

I think Specter/Toomey is a tough call. I think wasting money on Chafee was phenomenally unwise. But NRSC is always tougher than NRCC - there tends to be more clarity at the Congressional level.

Everyone was pissed for the NRSC supporting liberals over conservatives. I also vaguely remember the NRSC saying that they would not support the eventual winner of the primary, if it were Laffey, but I can't find a reference for that right now.

That's a slightly different animal. Of course, the Republican party, and the NRSC in particular, are not conservative any more, so that's not a huge surprise.

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But in those two cases, that wasn't really a fair characterization, in my opinion. I'm not questioning that it's not a good policy, in general.

In retrospect, Specter hasn't been as bad as expected, and Chafee was a complete waste, as expected. So for those two, they batted 0.500. That's not horrible, and it's actually probably pretty good for politics. If they'd stayed out of both races, the outcomes would likely have been the same, without causing the dissention.

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Why?

"I ain't never votin' fo another Democrat so long as I can draw breath! I'll vote for a dog first!" - Leola Thomas

...and he makes McCain look like a partisan firebrand in the minority.

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Simply not true. On either level.

He's voted for every justice Bush has put up, he was tough with the D's during the Alito hearings, and he's currently threatening to stop the business of the Senate unless D's start holding hearings and votes on Bush's remaining nominees.

I'm not a huge fan of Specter, but you're being totally unfair here.

"I ain't never votin' fo another Democrat so long as I can draw breath! I'll vote for a dog first!" - Leola Thomas

So what did he do all of last year? What has he been doing this year?

I'll believe it when I see it from Senator Scottish Law, sorry.

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The committees should just pick whoever you like more and support that guy. Well that clears things up.

And I'd like to see a reference to the "won't support the winner." My guess is they wouldn't have spent money if Laffey had won and we would have lost by an even bigger margin in that anti-R climate.

The NRSC was supporting incumbents regardless of their viewpoint. People were pissed about that. So Cole is staying out of primaries. And now people are pissed about that.

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I found one here

"The National Republican Senatorial Committee, one of Chafee's largest supporters, recently announced it would not support Laffey if Chafee were to lose the primary."

I know I read it a bunch of places at the time. Essentially the NRSC was saying "if Laffey wins it's a lost cause, so we won't sink any more money in the race". At the time I saw it as perfectly reasonable behavior for the NRSC, and perfectly reasonable behavior for me to not ever give them another penny. Since then I've only given money to candidates I can back wholeheartedly, and not to committees at all.

I don't see where I said anything remotely resembling "The committees should just pick whoever you like more and support that guy. Well that clears things up." If I were to say anything like that, I'd say that "The Republican Party should pick whomever most closely believes in the Republican platform and ideals, and back them".

But that isn't the goal of the NRSC - their goal is strictly to maximize the number of Senators with an (R) after their name. If they could somehow convince 10 current Democrats to switch parties, without switching their voting patterns one bit, they'd do it in a heartbeat and then wholeheartedly support them, because to them, that's all being Republican means, having an (R) after their name. Many here would agree with them. To me, that would be a horrible thing, because I'm a conservative first, and a Republican second.

I actually think there is a defense to the Chafee and Specter actions. The NRCC and NRSC are arms of the party caucus - they consist of the incumbents, are chaired by incumbents, etc. I see no reason to expect them to turn their backs on incumbents who face primary challenges, whatever the perceived merits of the challenge might be. The decision on whether to spend money to save an incumbent is slightly different, and I agree that the landscape did not look good in Rhode Island, making the expenditure of money seem wasted.

But this race, along with the races in IL and in LA-6 are open seats. The NRCC is not defending one of its own, and so I think that it has to consider the Party's chances in coming to a decision. In cases like these, where one (or more) candidates in the field are clearly weak or deficient candidates who will put a solid seat at risk (or risk losing badly in a district that should be competitive), then the committee has something of a responsibility to make that fact known, even if it does not actively campaign for a particular candidate or send oodles of money into the primary. The NRCC should have made it clear that Olson was the better candidate, even if that's as far as they went - give the endorsement and let Olson spend his own money getting the word out.

In most cases this won't be an issue. Most races probably come down to two candidates who would run good solid campaigns, and while folks like us might argue about who is "better" based on issue positions or personality, neither candidate would be "risky." Example - we all preferred Toomey to Specter in 2002, but I don't think any of us seriously felt that Specter was dead in the water, or was a "flawed candidate" in the way we see Sekula-Gibbs - we knew he could, and probably would, win his seat even if we didn't like his politics. But where one side of the race clearly puts a seat out of reach or in unnecessary jeopardy we should encourage the congressional committees to step in.

The problem with thumbing your nose at the activists and backing incumbents is that they make themselves out to be AGAINST the activists.

That's no way to raise money, and that's why the NRSC and NRCC are lagging so far behind the DCCC and DSCC this year, while the RNC is much healthier than the DNC.

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and not one I disagree with. But there's your world and then there's reality. If you think that the chair of one of those committees - who is elected by the sitting Republican members - is going to support a challenger in a primary, you're fooling yourself.

At best, you should hope that the committees adopt Cole's "we take no position" approach. You will never get the NRSC to back a Toomey or a Laffey. But it seems we have an argument in the thread both for and against involvement simultaneously from the same people.

My point was that you can have differing positions depending on whether you have an incumbent or you have an open seat. With incumbents I think the reality is that the committees will support them, period - I don't think the "activists" will convince them otherwise. And in that case I think they are right - incumbents have such enormous advantages that to throw them to the curb would probably be the exact kind of foolishness that we are currently bemoaning in Cole's "no position" stance. But the rules can (and should) be different when we are talking about open seats. In that case, the only principle left to guide action (the other being that "we will defend members of the caucus") is "we should field the strongest candidate to maximize our chance to win this seat." And in cases where there is a clear difference in capacity to do that (as there was in this election tonight, and the one in IL and even in LA-6), it is imperative that the campaign committees get involved. But that involvement is just as likely to cause trouble, because "strongest candidate" is very subjective and is not always coextensive with "most conservative." Honestly, if Chafee and Laffey were running for an open seat in Rhode Island, I would expect the committee would pick Chafee again because the more moderate stance of Chafee would seem a better fit in liberal Rhode Island - though we here might differ with that.

In this case, Adam is probably right - Cole is in a no-win situation since we criticize him for staying neutral here and we'd criticize him as much if he had taken a position where it diverged from our own opinion of what was "best" for the Party in keeping the seat.

I agree with most of your argument here, although the incumbency protection part doesn't quite explain what happened in 2002 in NH. In 2002, the NRSC quietly backed Sununu over Smith, who had been acting like a crazy person and was a sure loser. I agreed with them. However, this was an exception, and I largely agree with you that the party committees should be expected to back the incumbents (absent corruption problems).

However, certainly in open seat races, where you have an almost definite loser - like Gibbs, Oberweis, and Jenkins - with huge unfavorables for the general election, or corruption problems, etc., the committees should choose the more viable candidate. The NRCC needs to follow this policy. This time we dodged ab bullet, as Gibbs was rejected by the GOP primary voters. But what about Oberweis and Jenkins?

BTW, this is not only about winning; without a majority, we have no control over the agenda of Congress, and important things, like FISA reform, don't get done. And with the Dems as irresponsible acting as they are today, we just can't afford to let them control things.

My guess, and it is just that, is that there are two sides in this debate and that those complaining about the NRCC not choosing sides in this one are not the same people as those complaining that the NRSC supported Chafee and Specter. Personally, I don't want the NRSC or NRCC involved in primaries regardless of the circumstances. Both would be better off focusing their efforts on the Democrat candidates.

www.republicansenate.org

Primaries are for the whole party. The NRCC and NRSC should hold their fire for the general.

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I guess we will just have to disagree then.

Even if supposedly they should get involved sometimes, why would they have gotten involved in this case? Olson won in a landslide. They were seeing the same numbers he was and knew he would win. Even IF they should get involved in primaries sometimes, they still shouldn't have gotten involved this time. Why spend money on a sure bet in the primary rather then leave it for helping that same candidate in the general?

"I ain't never votin' fo another Democrat so long as I can draw breath! I'll vote for a dog first!" - Leola Thomas

Eh, it is a runoff. Runoffs have very lousy turnout.

And decent turnout for one.

I live in TX-17. In the last two elections both the national party and the local party in Waco endorsed people that had no chance to win the general. In 2004 we had our best chance to beat Chet Edwards, but the establishment endorsed a nutjob who had no chance. The did the same thing in 2006. Now I'm afraid Edwards will keep his office until he retires.

Jindal in 2012!

Maybe GWB should run for Congress against Chet!

"I ain't never votin' fo another Democrat so long as I can draw breath! I'll vote for a dog first!" - Leola Thomas