The Tory Anarchist

Amit K. Singh, the foreign-policy realist and limited-government conservative I’d been covering for TAC, lost his primary race against one-time “compassionate conservative” Mark Ellmore for the Republican congressional nomination in Virginia’s 8th district yesterday. Dave Weigel, Richard Spencer, and I attended the Singh victory party, which unfortunately wasn’t a victory — technically, anyway. Singh performed reasonably well, getting 44 percent of the vote against Ellmore’s 56 percent. Ellmore had been running for two years, since losing a primary bid in ‘06, and he capped off his campaign in the final weekend with some spectacularly negative (and false) advertising. Weigel has an excellent write-up on the night at Reason, he quotes one Republican activist saying of Ellmore’s tactics, “Stuff like that can hurt the whole ticket.”

I had a feeling of deja vu: the outcome reminded me all too much of the Ron Paul campaign, where youthful energy and principle, and strong fundraising (Singh didn’t raise millions, but he did outraise Ellmore handily) did not translate into winning vote totals. Weigel notes the youthfulness of the victory party crowd — the candidate himself, at 33, may have been the oldest person in the room. I noticed the same thing at a Singh fundraiser two weeks ago. There’s a silver lining in that: although young people don’t vote in very large numbers, youthful activists who cut their teeth on campaigns like Paul’s and Singh’s will be around for a long time to come and will only become more skilled and effective. And the GOP right now needs new blood. For all the attention that’s been paid to the turmoil in the Democratic presidential primaries this year, the Republicans have a quieter but perhaps even bigger problem: the middle-aged and elderly Republican die-hards who vote in presidential and congressional primaries are out of phase with the rest of the country. They’re still selecting candidates in the mold of George W. Bush and Old Man McCain. Ellmore beat Singh by painting Singh as a disloyal Republican and himself as a McCain stalwart. That can win a Republican primary, but how is it going to play up against Jim Moran in November? Moran won’t even have to notice Ellmore. It would take a miracle for Ellmore to perform better than Moran’s last Republican challenger, Tom O’Donoghue, who garnered only 30 percent against him in ‘06.

Singh wouldn’t have beaten Moran, but he would brought some new voters into the Republican fold and he would have thrown Moran for a curve — after all, Moran would actually have been philosophically closer to Bush than Singh would have been, and the Singh team were prepared to make that an issue. But it’s not to be, at least not this year. Singh is in a strong position to run again in 2010, if he’s so inclined. The 44 percent that supported him this year will, I think, continue to back him, and now he’s a seasoned candidate and a more familiar name to the kingmakers in the district. (Some of whom, from what I hear, supported Ellmore just because they thought it was his turn — and some of whom, I also hear, came to regret their pre-emptive support for him once Singh got into the race.)

The Ron Paul revolution has produced impressive results in Republican congressional primaries in Maryland and North Carolina. Murray Sabrin’s defeat in New Jersey and now Singh’s loss in Virginia are of course disappointing. But what seems most important to me, considering that none of these candidates would have been likely to beat their Democratic rivals in November, is that Ron Paul Republicans and traditional conservatives keep building their forces steadily, gaining political experience, perfecting the areas in which they’re already strong (fundraising and youth outreach) and cutting into the party-loyalist base. The Christian Right didn’t throw in the towel after Pat Robertson’s failed campaign in ‘88, they kept organizing and provided shock troops for the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994. They also seized control of Republican parties in several states. (The national Christian Coalition has long since lost its bite, but state-level Christian Coalition groups and other religious Right organs still carry a lot of weight.) It took six years for the Christian Coalition to come into its own. It’ll take a few years for the Ron Paul revolution to get up to speed as well. Singh’s campaign, even though it didn’t get the nomination, was a good start. It’s a foundation on which to build for the future.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 11th, 2008 at 12:45 pm and is filed under Politics, Ron Paul, Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.