A similar pattern played out across the country, as establishment-favored candidates used massive war chests to beat back primary opponents from the right.
In Louisiana, where Democratic senator Mary Landrieu was deeply vulnerable after voting for the Affordable Care Act, a retired Air Force colonel (and self-professed alligator wrestler) named Rob Maness won the support of Sarah Palin, Phyllis Schlafly, numerous talk radio hosts, and more than a dozen Tea Party groups. But GOP leaders weren’t taking any chances. They drowned the state in financial and structural support on behalf of a centrist congressman, Bill Cassidy, whose allies roasted Maness for suggesting that he would have opposed the Hurricane Katrina relief package if he had been in Congress. Maness wound up taking just 14 percent in Louisiana’s all-party primary, and Cassidy easily topped Landrieu in the general election runoff.
In North Carolina, where another incumbent Democratic senator was on the ropes, a spirited conflict broke out between the GOP’s warring factions. On one side, a multitude of conservative leaders and organizations endorsed Tea Party activist Greg Brannon; on the other, party elders such as Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush, as well as McConnell and his allied groups, threw their weight behind Thom Tillis, the Speaker of the state House. Tillis out-raised Brannon by a nearly a four-to-one ratio, pulling away to win the primary and sparing Republicans “the kookiness of a candidate who thought Marbury v. Madison was wrongly decided and the U.N. was trying to destroy our suburbs,” as Slate’s David Weigel put it. In the year’s most expensive race, Tillis edged Democrat Kay Hagan by roughly 45,000 votes.
And on it went: In every contested Senate primary of the 2014 cycle, and in nearly every contested House primary, the forces of the establishment suffocated the right-wing insurgency.
Even more heartening to Republican leaders was the apparent lack of enthusiasm, or fresh thinking, on the left. President Obama’s party had become stale, as is customary six years into most any administration. Democrats across the country were struggling to find a coherent message to run on. Gas prices had dropped well below three dollars per gallon, and there were growing signs of economic recovery, but it still felt too sluggish for voters to reward at the ballot box.
In lieu of any powerful economic argument, many Democrats settled on cultural warfare, painting Republicans as extremists who would subjugate women and starve the poor. Abortion, once a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency issue for Democrats, was becoming a thematic cornerstone to the party’s campaigns, sometimes with disastrous results. In Colorado, incumbent Democratic senator Mark Udall spent so much time talking about “reproductive rights,” in television ads, on the campaign trail, and during debates, that he was nicknamed “Mark Uterus.”2 Rather than focusing on ISIS or climate change, Udall talked incessantly about birth control and abortion, prompting the liberal Denver Post editorial page to endorse his Republican opponent, Cory Gardner, because of Udall’s “obnoxious one-issue campaign.” Gardner, a top recruit of McConnell’s, would go on to flip the seat in November.
Throughout the year, however, there were hints of long-term trouble for the GOP’s shot-callers. Even as they flooded the competition with dollar signs in 2014, a new class of donor was emerging—not the archetype patron of the elite, the fiscally conservative and socially liberal elbow-rubber looking for an ambassadorship down the road, but the true-believing types with millions to burn and ideological firepower to spare.
In the spring of 2014, at the Club for Growth’s donor conference in Palm Beach, former congressman and MSNBC host Joe Scarborough was one of the headliners. He pandered to the audience by calling himself a “Club conservative” based on his old voting record, praising the group’s work to hold the GOP accountable. When he finished, a hand shot up. It belonged to a young woman many of the attendees did not recognize. She stood up and began dressing Scarborough down. “How dare you call yourself a conservative?” she asked him. “I’ve watched your show. I’ve watched you calling Ted Cruz a phony. You’re nothing but a pompous sellout.”
The donors murmured to one another. Who is that?
“Rebekah Mercer,” one Club staffer whispered to another.
THE ONE-SIDED RESULTS OF THE 2014 PRIMARY SCORECARD DID NOT always reflect a show of strength by the Republican elite. Rather, in certain races, the intraparty feuding exposed the fatal deficiencies of both teams.
The Mississippi Senate primary was one such instance. The contest signified rock bottom for Republicans in 2014, featuring race-baiting advertisements, dirty tricks aimed at unseating the party’s most endangered senator, and a last-second Hail Mary to save him.
Thad Cochran, a septuagenarian incumbent who faced serious and legitimate doubts about his capacity for executing the duties of a U.S. senator, was staring down defeat. Despite substantial assistance from GOP heavyweights in both Washington and Mississippi, Cochran was losing ground to his young primary challenger, Chris McDaniel. An attorney and bomb-throwing state senator, McDaniel had channeled the anti-Washington zeitgeist as well as anyone in 2014, winning the support of myriad Tea Party politicians and conservative outside groups and even an endorsement from Donald Trump.
The contrast couldn’t have been starker: While the animated young McDaniel enlisted the likes of Sarah Palin to draw enormous crowds, Cochran’s team kept the incumbent in a bunker, avoiding the public (and the media) almost altogether, certain that the decrepit senator would do or say something disqualifying to his reelection.
And then, six weeks before the primary, Cochran received a gift from the political gods. Sneaking into a local nursing home where the senator’s infirm wife lived, a local Tea Party activist and pro-McDaniel blogger snapped a photo of a bedridden Rose Cochran and posted it online, part of a smear campaign aimed at stoking speculation that Senator Cochran was cheating on his sickly wife with a younger woman.
The perp was arrested less than two weeks before the primary. Shortly thereafter, several other McDaniel allies were arrested as part of a police investigation into charges of exploitation of a vulnerable adult. The avalanche of negative publicity in the contest’s closing days resulted in McDaniel finishing with 49.5 percent of the vote—more than Cochran but just shy of the 50 percent threshold needed to avoid a runoff.
The ensuing three weeks offered a political soap opera for the ages.
Recognizing that McDaniel’s support among conservatives ran far deeper than did Cochran’s, allies of the incumbent senator schemed to turn out Democrats—specifically, black Democrats—in the runoff. This was perfectly legal. But the tactics toward that end were most unsavory: The political machine of longtime Republican governor Haley Barbour made covert payments to an African American activist group that in turn produced television ads and mailers accusing the McDaniel campaign of preying on racial divisions and attempting to suppress the black vote.3 McDaniel cried foul, justifiably so. Yet he was hardly a sympathetic figure; with the nursing home scandal and his history of racially incendiary remarks on talk radio, few Republicans felt inclined to jump to his defense. (Furthermore, it wasn’t until after the runoff had concluded that the truth behind the ad campaign fully materialized.)
Meanwhile, Cochran’s other allies looked for a cleaner but equally effective way to hit McDaniel. At the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Reed, its top strategist, decided that Cochran needed the jolt of a celebrity endorsement. His first choice would be a famous football player to vouch for the senator’s toughness in the pigskin-crazed state. The Chamber reached out to Archie Manning, the legendary New Orleans Saints quarterback, to star in a pro-Cochran ad. But Manning was recovering from surgery and had to pass. Reed then reached out to Manning’s son, Peyton, a future Hall of Famer in his own right. Peyton declined but recommended his younger brother, Eli. As it turned out, the Giants quarterback was indeed interested—until his agent stepped in and put the kibosh on any political involvement.