SMRs and AMRs

Monday, February 11, 2013

Rove needs more than a new super PAC to earn back Republican trust

New Rove Group Could Backfire on G.O.P.

By NATE SILVER, NYT

The strategist Karl Rove and his allies last week announced the formation of Conservative Victory Project, a new “super PAC” designed to lend support to what they see as more electable candidates in Republican Senate primaries.

The effort makes plenty of sense on the surface. Republican primary voters nominated a series of inexperienced and extremely conservative candidates in Senate races in 2010 and 2012, often with the support of the Tea Party and other insurgent groups. It can be argued that they lost as many as a half-dozen Senate races as a result, including the contests in Delaware and Nevada in 2010 and in Missouri and Indiana last year.

But conservative groups and activists have reacted very harshly to the announcement, while some conservative candidates who are potential targets of the group, like Representative Steve King of Iowa, have already sought to raise money off the backlash to it.

An analysis of Republican Senate primaries in 2010 and 2012 suggests that money is usually the least pressing problem for the incumbents and other establishment-backed candidates whom Mr. Rove’s group might be inclined to support. Instead, some insurgent candidates won their races despite having been at more than a 10-to-1 fund-raising disadvantage heading into the primary.

(More here.)

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