Karl Rove is happy that Sen. Thad Cochran defeated tea party challenger Chris McDaniel Tuesday night in Mississippi...
Dems hyperventilating RE: Cochran win; consoling themselves by rehashing Cantor's VA-7 loss. Worried how they'll cope if GOP takes Senate.
— @KarlRove
...but as you can tell from that tweet, he still sucks at trolling. Meanwhile, Rush Limbaugh
appears to be having an aneurysm over the election:
"I wonder what the campaign slogan was in Mississippi the past few days, 'Uncle Toms for Thad'? Because I thought it was the worst thing you could do as an African American, vote for a Republican. The worst thing you could do," Limbaugh said on Wednesday. "But somehow they were made to believe that voting for old Thad would be fine and dandy. And why? Because they were told Thad's done a lot for black people in Mississippi. Must be the first time they were told that."
Well, Chris McDaniel might have swung and missed at his chance for the Senate, but at least now he can aspire to be as offensive as Rush Limbaugh one day. Elsewhere in right-wing land, tea party crank Amy Kremer
declared this to be the end of the Republican Party, and was joined by a couple of other cranks, including Sarah Palin, in
talking about forming a third party.
Here's some free advice for them: If you can't win a primary in your own party, things are only going to get worse for you in a third. But I sincerely hope they don't listen to me.
Meanwhile, inside D.C., Club for Growth president Chris Chocola seemed to be trying to backpedal as quickly as he could from the fact that his organization just took a beating.
Before the election, his spokesman had taunted lobbyist Haley Barbour over the prospect of losing influence in D.C. with Cochran out of the Senate. But now:
Chocola tried to tamp it all down on Wednesday. “People like us when they like us and they don’t when they don’t,” Chocola said. “It’s all a matter of perspective. We don’t take too much personal because we’re on the same side.” He called Cochran “a nice guy.” The fight, he said, is about policies, not personalities.
Continue below the fold to see how Republicans in Alabama are reacting to the Cochran victory—and the way he won.
Back in the South, Republicans in Alabama are reacting to Cochran's victory by trying to change elections rules in their state so the same thing doesn't happen in Alabama:
[Alabama Republican Party] Chairman Bill Armistead said Democrats could determine the outcome of a Republican runoff in Alabama, just as they apparently did in Mississippi.
"I think what happened in Mississippi last night definitely sends a strong signal to us in Alabama that until we have party registration that same kind of thing could happen here in our state," Armistead said.
For my money, the most
interesting reaction was that of Rand Paul, however:
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a potential 2016 presidential contender, declined to support tea party critics of Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran's efforts to mobilize non-GOP voters to win the Republican nomination.
"I'm for more people voting, not less people voting," Paul told reporters Wednesday.
That's not what you expect to hear from a tea party icon, but Paul has his wingnut credentials pretty well locked up, and I suspect he realizes his dad's newsletters are much bigger potential problem for him—even in a GOP presidential primary—than seemingly staking out a position that would be unpopular in the tea party, especially when he's not actually taking a position on a concrete public policy issue. As long as someone like Ted Cruz doesn't run, Paul isn't going to have a whole lot of competition on the far right, so taking chances like this to sound like an iconoclast could be a relatively pain-free way for him to soften his image with establishment-type Republicans.