The press has wanted to say that the establishment is “winning” or “losing” the primaries, but there is no such overall pattern. In most of these races, the “establishment” and “tea party” factions have been rather loosely defined. It appears that at the center of the Republican electorate are many voters who are not hostile to either group. They do not think of tea partiers as a bunch of crazies, or the Republican hierarchy as a group of quislings. Their reflex is to support the most effective conservative, regardless of label. And so the races have, for the most part, turned on specific issues and candidate quality rather than on which faction claims each candidate for its own.
At the same time, the party is also starting to forge a new agenda. Much of this work is being done by tea partiers who came to the Senate in 2010: Mike Lee, Marco Rubio, and to a lesser extent Rand Paul. They have been proposing new conservative policies on everything from higher education to taxes to criminal justice: policies that could simultaneously unify the party, attract the public, and improve the country’s governance. One of Lee’s ideas is to break the accreditation monopoly of what he calls “the higher-education cartel.” It’s easy to see Ben Sasse, the tea-party winner, co-sponsoring legislation on it next year. But it’s just as easy to see Tillis, the establishment man, doing the same thing if he makes it to the Senate.
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