The primary objective of taking over the Republican Party is to get your favorite candidate nominated for the purpose of reducing the size of government or following the U.S. Constitution. It could be Peter Schiff. It could be Stephen Shoppe. It could also be Debra Medina or Adam Kokesh, all of whom didn’t fit the Republican in Name Only (RINO) mold, in which case they didn’t win the primary.
Conversely, your candidate could be Rand Paul. Rand Paul is one of the handful that actually did make it. He is one of less than ten such candidates for major office out of several hundred attempts.
Things Republican Activists Have Tried
Activists looking to work within the GOP are told to become members of their town committee or precinct, donate to a Republican candidate, hold signs, write letters to the editor and canvass for a candidate. These activities do boost GOP enrollment and overall interest in the party.
In the end, these things generally don’t help new activists or outsiders get an outsider the nomination. On paper, they make sense, and a group could theoretically capture a state GOP’s leadership structure. In fact, and in Nevada as well as Texas in 2008, points of order are simply ignored at conventions. In Nevada, John McCain supporters simply stalled until the lights could be turned off.
By the time you can get a case docketed or other members of the party can respond to a civil complaint, the primary may be well under way. By the time you can get past the discovery phase of a case, the damage is already done. It is true that you could petition for injunctive relief, but you would need to prove that a conspiracy to ignore party rules existed. Of course, this would be akin to bank robbers calling the police ten minutes before they arrived at the bank.
The Tea Party
The tea party has had many things in common with ICaucus, libertarians, gun owners and paleo-conservatives since Barry Goldwater. Specifically, the first is an inclination to ally with others in GOP circles. The second is that all have attempted to reform the GOP. Each group believes itself to be the first making the best attempt at capturing the Republican Party. Each runs into the same obstacles and is none the wiser, assuming no one was there before it.
In net terms, government’s size and scope has only increased after election cycles that swept Republicans into office. The party itself shares equal responsibility with the Democratic Party for everything the tea party was started to oppose.
The 2010 primaries have, with rare exceptions, produced an identical result. At the end of the day, the GOP hopes to capitalize on moderate candidates without a plan to reduce spending simply because they’re not Democrats. Those in the tea party who have embraced the nearest Republican simply because he or she isn’t a Democrat, and for no other reason, suffer from a political form of Stockholm Syndrome.
Conventional Explanations as a Failure Analysis
Connecticut is an excellent case study on an unsuccessful attempt to apply conventional explanations for failure. The most common of these are centered on money, name recognition, grass roots support and platforms.
Linda McMahon, who won the Connecticut GOP primary, had $50 million to commit to the race. However, Mark Greenberg, who unsuccessfully ran for the GOP nomination for Congress in Connecticut’s fifth district, had several hundred thousand dollars more that either of his opponents. Greenberg came in third.
Name recognition is frequently argued, and it was something that former Congressman Rob Simmons had in the CT GOP primary. However, Linda McMahon won for other reasons, although she had about the same name recognition. In fact, Simmons came in second even though he’d released all his campaign staff.
The candidate who came in third in Connecticut, Peter Schiff, had by far the vast majority of volunteers. This support that allowed him to collect more than 8,600 valid signatures over the course of three weeks to qualify for the Republican primary. Schiff was the first candidate to petition his way onto the ballot in a major party primary.
This was an unusual feat because the signatures could only come from Republicans, who comprise only a fifth of all voters in Connecticut. However, Schiff came in third. His supporters represented the vast majority of all volunteers the Connecticut Republican Party had to draw on.
It definitely wasn’t about detailed stances on the issues. Schiff, like other candidates who had detailed, comprehensive positions, lost the primary.
It’s about who you know and where you are. The GOP base in Kentucky simply supported a different direction. In Connecticut, it was a question of knowing all the insiders and hiring them.
So How Do You Save the Republican Party?
Overall, you don’t. The idea is that no platform or policy changes. The idea is also that by participating, the institution continues on as if nothing occurred. Granted, there will be a few isolated instances of tea party activists or conservatives getting their way. However, less than a dozen out of several hundred primaries is not a sea change.
