One cannot possibly dislike the idea of giving voters more choices. But can one draw any hard conclusions from the Murkowski campaign? The replicability of her model would depend on local political conditions and traditions. For one, the primary race has to be close. If the gap between winner and loser is an enormous chasm (as it was when Bob Bennett was bounced in the Utah GOP primary), an independent run by the emphatic loser would look politically—almost aesthetically—unbecoming, even indefensible.
To judge by the two most recent times an intra-party challenger has gone independent and successfully taken on the party’s own candidate—Joe Lieberman and 2006 and Murkowski in 2010—a necessary condition for the primary loser to emerge as the general election winner is that the other major-party candidate (the Republican in Lieberman’s case and the Democrat in Murkowski’s) be essentially a dead-ender.
That condition was absent in Delaware, a heavily Democratic state where the Democratic candidate, Chris Coons, was a perfectly plausible candidate—as it was in Nevada, Colorado, and Connecticut, other states in which Tea Party candidates took the GOP primaries. (Bob Bennett in Utah, arguably, might have been successful had he run as a write-in; but his early elimination in the primary crushed his spirit altogether, as well as subjecting him to the “optics” argument I made above). It also helps if your party opponent is seriously flawed (as Joe Miller, detainer of pesky journalists, proved himself to be). If he isn’t—as was the case with Marco Rubio, who was, in fact, seriously good—a challenge run is unlikely to succeed. (Adios, Charlie Crist.)
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