In Backing Insurgents, Republicans Face November Risks
by Nate Silver @ 6:15 AM
In a column on Friday, the Wall Street Journal's Kimberly Strassel asserted that Democrats -- not Republicans -- are more at risk of harming themselves with ideologically-driven primary challanges:
What do Joe Sestak, Bill Halter and Colleen Hanabusa have in common? The left loves them. This is yet another reason Democrats are in trouble this fall.
Given the obsessive coverage of the Republican "civil war," you may not realize Democrats are also feuding.<...>
While some Republican primaries are proving bloody, most are turning out candidates largely in tune with today's public frustration with Washington.
The Democratic primaries, by contrast, are generating nominees who are embracing, or even going beyond, the president's unpopular agenda. This is the feud that may have the bigger consequences for this fall's midterms.
Although Strassel's position is well-argued, it isn't really supported by the evidence**. If she had consulted the polling, she'd learn that, while insurgent Republican candidates are generally polling worse than their establishment counterparts, the same is not usually the case for Democrats.
Let's first look at the Republicans. In almost every place where there's a competitive Republican primary for the U.S. Senate, we can fairly clearly identify one or more establishment candidates (who are generally more moderate), and one or more insurgent candidates (who are generally more conservative). What's interesting is that, in every single case, the establishment candidates are polling better than the insurgents when one takes a simple average of the last five general election polls:
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