Clean House at the @NRSC

It’s high time for something to be done about the group currently in charge at the National Republican Senatorial Committee. It is a group that is ineffective at best in securing the support necessary to gain and maintain Republican support for its candidates, and you need to look no further than this primary season to see the effects of that.

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Leon Wolf pointed out a few key things about the “safe” Republican incumbents in their primaries already:

And this year, the “victories” achieved so far are so embarrassing that they barely worth mentioning. Thad Cochran lost his first primary before barely scraping out a win in the runoff. Mitch McConnell barely topped 60%, which was the weakest primary showing by a Kentucky Senator of either party since 1938. Lindsay Graham didn’t even reach 60%. This despite the fact that these candidates in question had all the best and most experienced consultants, as well as more personal campaign experience and immensely larger warchests than their opponents.

And then comes this piece at The American Spectator, which includes such wonderful bits as this:

According to these conversations, some $800,000 was raised for Cochran by his Senate colleagues after the McDaniel victory in the primary’s first round, largely under the rubric of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. This wasn’t seen as a particularly controversial matter at the time; the NRSC is an organization by and for the Republican members of the Senate and Cochran had raised money for his colleagues in the past, so there would have been no reason to deny him help. “It’s just what you do,” said one of the staffers. “It’s generally accepted that we probably can’t win the Senate if we lose our own people, so when Cochran’s people ask for help raising money, the answer is yes.”

[…]

As such, the staffers say, it wasn’t until Wednesday, when the fallout began to descend, that Cochran’s tactics became an issue. And now, several senators are more than a little uneasy with those tactics, which they feel responsible for since they raised money for Cochran.

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Nearly one million dollars raised by Senate comrades “largely under the rubric” of the NRSC. The NRSC’s insistence to tie Chris McDaniel to a scandal he had the faintest of ties to, the constant trolling and berating of conservative candidates and activists, and their actions in the Nebraska race (which The Spectator story also touches on) show an open hostility to the conservative base that they end up relying on for their candidates to win.

But, the NRSC has proven how ineffective they are in both the Nebraska and the Mississippi race. Their candidate in Nebraska was beaten rather emphatically, and the voter turnout that pushed Cochran over the edge was a Democratic turnout, and that is largely attributed to the Barbour machine (if the NRSC was, in fact, involved in that tactic, then all the more reason to burn it to the ground and start over). If the NRSC were to claim victory in Mississippi, then they are aligning themselves with racist anti-Tea Party propaganda that further alienates the very base of the party they allege themselves to represent.

If you add the struggles McConnell and Graham faced to this, then you can see that the NRSC should, at the very least, not get involved in primaries in the future. At the very most, the entire organization should have a new staff the moment the 2014 cycle is over. If not sooner. There is a very real, very clear disconnect between the big wigs of the party and the people they say they represent. So, ask yourself if the candidates they are pushing really represent your interests. Or their masters’.

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