Conservative Review’s rapid response is part of bigger shift within the movement: A half-decade after the anti-Obama (and anti-Obamacare) revolution, the resurgent right flank of the Republican Party is growing up, displaying a new willingness, even an eagerness, to adopt the same tactics the establishment has used against them.
For one, they’re attacking incumbents early and often, even before they have a preferred candidate of their own. It’s what the establishment did to the right flank during the 2014 elections. The rightward-most Republicans began the cycle with what they believed to be a prize recruit in Kentucky Senate candidate Matt Bevin—only to watch him sink quickly under early, aggressive opposition attacks from incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his deep-pocketed allies. Their Kansas candidate, Milton Wolf, met a similar fate, as Sen. Pat Roberts’s allies focused millions of dollars on ads highlighting unsavory Facebook posts the radiologist had written in regards to dead bodies. This cycle, conservatives hope to reverse that timeline, making the incumbents the early opposition targets instead.
“Everyone has something you can put in a thirty-second ad, the question is who controls the narrative first,” said Conservative Review Senior Editor Daniel Horowitz, a former political director for the Madison Project. “If you make the first step bringing out the [challenger] … it’s almost tantamount to waving a slingshot without any armor and having the incumbent blow the guy up with a bazooka…. You need to start coming in with airstrikes against the other guy first.”
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