Challenging the conventional wisdom on the tea party

3. Establishment Failures

Let’s also remember that the 2012 elections weren’t just a Tea Party failure. The GOP establishment got its preferred candidates in Senate races in Montana, New Mexico, Virginia and Wisconsin. They all lost.

Now, it is absolutely true that candidates in these states had a tougher climb than the “anti-establishment” candidates who lost in Missouri and Indiana. With the exception of Montana, Barack Obama was winning in these states, rather than losing handily as he did in Indiana and Missouri.

But the point is that we have to be very careful in assuming counterfactual results. If Clint Didier had upset Dino Rossi in the 2010 Senate primary in Washington, we’d probably chalk that up as a “Tea Party defeat,” even though Rossi eventually lost. If Mark Neumann had defeated Tommy Thompson in the Republican Senate primary in Wisconsin in 2012, it might be compared to Christine O’Donnell’s upset of Castle. Of course, we know that Thompson would go on to lose by six points.

To reiterate, I believe that Thompson and Rossi probably performed better than Didier or Neumann would have performed (though Neumann had come reasonably close to winning a Senate election in the bad GOP year of 1998). It’s just a reminder that we don’t know the counterfactual here, and our assumptions can often be incorrect.