The leader of Kansas' moderate Republicans said three weeks of attack ads from conservative groups, including those with ties to the Koch brothers, are to blame for Kansas Senate moderates' losses during Tuesday's primary.Senate President Steve Morris (R-Hugoton), who lost his own seat to state Rep. Larry Powell in the primary, confirmed that internal polls showed moderate Republicans in the lead until roughly three weeks ago when a series of conservative groups launched radio and television attack ads on moderates, tying them to President Barack Obama and claiming they supported Obamacare. Seventeen out of 22 moderate Republican Senate candidates were defeated Tuesday, a culmination of a bitter GOP war that has engulfed the state since 2011."They tried to tie our folks to President Obama even though we had nothing to do with him," Morris told HuffPost. "They said we all supported Obamacare and that's not true. It's effective. The campaigns we did were positive and informational. The campaigns against us were very nasty. Evidently negative campaigning must work."Morris, the president of the National Conference of State Legislatures which is holding its annual summit meeting in Chicago this week, said conservative groups including Americans for Prosperity, the Club for Growth, the Kansas Chamber of Commerce and Kansas Right to Life spent between $3 and 8 million.Morris noted that the Koch brothers also helped fund the campaign, using Kansas as a testing ground for their ideas. "They said it will be an ultraconservative utopia," Morris said of the Kochs. "It depends on your definition of a utopia.The Huffington Post
Steve Morris, Kansas Senate President, Blames Moderates' Defeat On Conservative Attack Ads
John Celock
Do I sense the Big Tent cracking?
3 comments:
Moderate Republicans went extinct quite a while back.
Moderate Republicans went extinct quite a while back.
Based on extrapolating anecdotal evidence, I think they were displaced. A lot of them are now independents. Many are freaked about the John Birch Society insurgency, oops, I mean, the Tea Party.
A case study for this this year will be the House race in the Michigan 11th district. The 11th, which contains Mitt Romneys hometown of Bloomfield Hills, is the definition of the old-school GOP stronghold. The residents there are right leaning moderates of the mid-20th century era GOP mold and the district went narrowly for Obama in 2008.
However, the districts congressman, Thad McCotter, recently completed one of the all time great political self-immolations. After a vanity run for the Presidency, he apparently forgot to collect enough signatures to appear on the ballot for his House seat's GOP primary, resulting in the arrest of 4 of his staffers for attempting to forge signatures and McCotter resigning in disgrace.
That left only one Republican on the ballot, a political novice name Kerry Bentivolio. Bentivolio is a hardcore Ron Paul- Austrian econ acolyte. After surviving a write in campaign from an establishment GOP former state senator in the primary, Bentivolio will indeed be the Republican nominee in November (he was helped by hundreds of thousands of dollars in outside SuperPac money from a wealthy college-age Ron Paul supporter from Texas!).
Bentivolio's opponent, Dr. Syed Taj, is an Indian-American with mostly generic centrist Democrat views. The way the residents of a district like this vote will be indicative of how the last remnants of the moderate wing of the Republican Party will go in the Presidential election.
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