McDaniel v. Cochran

At Politico, Alexander Burns explains why Chris McDaniel, the conservative challenger to Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran, is the Republican most likely to take out a Senate incumbent in a 2014 primary:

Among the conservative activists challenging incumbent U.S. senators in 2014, McDaniel is the only one to receive the unanimous support of all the powerful outside groups that fuel campaigns on the right. When he announced last October, he won instant endorsements from the Club for Growth, the Senate Conservatives Fund and the Madison project; FreedomWorks and the Tea Party Patriots followed only a little while later.

It didn’t happen by accident.

As early as the start of last summer, McDaniel was reaching out to national conservative groups — including SCF, FreedomWorks and the Club — to ascertain their interest in a challenge to Cochran. The operatives who met with him came away wowed and heard from local activists who had urged McDaniel as early as 2012 to consider a challenge to Cochran.

“We heard he was looking into running for [the] House. We looked into him and heard so many good things about him that we pushed him to run for Senate,” said Daniel Horowitz, a strategist for the Madison Project.

McDaniel’s early outreach paid off handsomely. As of last week, the Club and the SCF had routed approximately $310,000 into McDaniel’s coffers, according to the two groups. (As of Dec. 31, McDaniel reported raising a total of $461,000 for his campaign.) He has hired the same consulting firm, Cold Spark Media, that is advising Kentucky activist Matt Bevin’s primary challenge to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Tea Party Study

Ronald B. Rapoport and colleagues have a new paper titled "Republican Factionalism and Tea Party Activists."  The abstract:

In this paper we examine Republican Party factional differences between Tea Party Republicans and non-Tea Party Republicans. We find, first, that at the mass level Tea Party supporters constitute a majority of Republican identifiers--particularly among those most active in Republican campaigns. We examine the large and significant differences between the two factions. We then turn to an examination of Tea Party (potential) activists, relying on a survey of almost 12,000 supporters of the largest Tea Party membership group: FreedomWorks.  lthough very similar to the mass sample of tea Party Republicans on issue positions, this group is  far more negative towards the Republican Party. We examine the sources of this negativity in ideology, issue priorities, partisanship and political style.

Illinois and Aftermath

At ABC, Gary Langer sums up the reasons for Romney's double-digit win in Illinois:

An improved sense that he understands voters’ problems boosted Mitt Romney to victory in the Illinois primary, as did a less religiously focused, less strongly conservative electorate than he’s faced in other contests, especially to the south. But a shortfall among less well-heeled Republicans marks his continued challenges.

Indeed exit poll results indicated that Romney owed his victory in Illinois to two groups: voters with more than $100,000 in household incomes and those with college degrees. Among those less educated, or less well-off, he only split the vote with Rick Santorum.

Other factors helped Romney. Six in 10 Illinois voters said he has the best chance of beating Barack Obama, better than his average in exit polls this year. And Romney narrowly led Santorum as the candidate who “best understands the problems of average Americans.” It was only the second state, of seven where the question’s been asked, in which Romney’s prevailed on empathy. The other was Florida.

Among other advantages for Romney, the Illinois primary was characterized by far fewer evangelicals than most of the Southern contests and fewer voters seeking a candidate who shares their religious beliefs, two groups in which he’s struggled. Forty-three percent were evangelicals, about half their share in Alabama and Mississippi last week. Nearly half in those states were highly focused on shared religious beliefs; it was just a quarter in Illinois, fewer even than in Ohio early this month.

Bloomberg reports:

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney got a boost for his campaign's effort to paint his nomination as inevitable after a win in the Illinois primary led to an endorsement from former Florida Governor Jeb Bush.

"Now is the time for Republicans to unite behind Governor Romney and take our message of fiscal conservatism and job creation to all voters this fall," Bush, the son of one president and brother of another, said in a statement today.

At  The Washington Times, Ralph Z. Hallow writes:

The organization that ignited the tea party as a national mass movement gave Mitt Romneyperhaps his biggest victory yet, deciding to drop its opposition to his candidacy, a top executive in the group told The Washington Times.

FreedomWorks, which organized the Sept. 12, 2009, mass demonstration on the Mall, says that while it will not give an explicit endorsement, the time has come for Republicans to unite around the former Massachusetts governor and focus on defeating President Obama.

“It is a statistical fact that the numbers favor Mitt Romney,”FreedomWorks Vice President Russ Walker told The Times on Tuesday. “We are dedicated to defeating Obama and electing a conservative Senate that will help Romney repeal Obamacare and address the nation’s economic and spending challenges.”

FreedomWorks GOTV & Super PAC

FreedomWorks held an activist boot camp on Saturday and Sunday.

Roll Call reports:

FreedomWorks, a nearly 20-year-old grass-roots advocacy organization led by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas), will take on a deeper and more sophisticated role in the 2012 elections than ever before. The organization has its eyes on 15 Senate seats, including Utah, and will target both Democrats and Republicans. The group aims to raise $10 million through a new super political action committee called FreedomWorks for America.

It is also establishing an 18-member debt panel to counter President Barack Obama’s bipartisan fiscal commission, which offered recommendations on how to reduce the federal deficit in late 2010.

“We’re not a protest movement anymore,” said Matt Kibbe, the group’s president. “It is a protest movement morphed into a get-out-the-vote movement. We are here to think nationally but act locally.”

The new PAC is part of that strategy. FreedomWorks for America can raise and spend unlimited sums of money from corporations, associations and individuals for independent expenditures. The group is barred from making direct contributions to campaigns, but that has never been FreedomWorks’ focus.

FreedomWorks will use the super PAC to let activists anywhere “help their brothers out” in other states. But that principle is what Washington Republicans find most concerning. Some Republicans grumbled about the group’s antics Monday, arguing that kind of thinking might have won primaries in 2010 but ultimately cost the party the Delaware Senate seat and caused an ugly recount in Alaska.