The closest and most relevant election Tuesday may turn out not to be any of those on the Eastern Seaboard that have been soaking up the media’s attention—for governor in Virginia and New Jersey, and for mayor in New York and Boston—but rather the special Republican primary for an open House seat in the deepest Deep South, in and around Mobile, Alabama. The primary has emerged as the first post-government shutdown battleground between Tea Party Republicans (represented here by wealthy businessman Dean Young) and establishment business-oriented Republicans (represented by Bradley Byrne, a former Democrat turned Republican officer-holder). Despite heavy spending by business groups, Young holds a slight edge in recent polls, which is causing grave disquiet for establishment Republicans who realize that the way back to the mainstream for their party is probably not continuing to elect people like Young, who declares that homosexuality “always has been, and always will be” wrong. Politico's Alex Isenstadt reports:
Should Young win, it would come as a shock to the business and Washington power brokers who’ve rushed to Byrne’s aid during the final days of the race. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has spent about $200,000 on Byrne’s behalf, and the group Ending Spending, funded by TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts, has poured in around $75,000 on TV and radio ads boosting him.
Others backing Byrne with campaign money include House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), as well as dozens of Washington-based political action committees, including the National Association of Homebuilders, Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers of America, and the National Beer Wholesalers Association.
A recent New York Times piece listed some of the other business backers for Byrne: political action committees run by Caterpillar, AT&T, Pfizer and the BASF Corporation.
Some of these supporters rushing to Byrne’s aid struck me as oddly familiar. Why? Maybe because I’d seen them very high on the list of the biggest backers to … Tea Party Republicans cut out of just the same cloth as Dean Young. Tom Graves of Georgia, who led the shutdown movement in the House, ranks among his top 20 donors Eric Cantor’s leadership PAC, the beer wholesalers, and AT&T, which hosted a fundraiser for him at Nationals Park the very night that he voted against the deal to end the first debt ceiling crisis, in 2011. Marlin Stutzman, the Indiana Republican who famously declared of the shutdown, "We have to get something out of this. And I don't know what that even is”? His top source of funds is Cantor’s PAC; his fifth largest is Honeywell, the company led by David Cote, who has come to embody the sober “business community” elite that is seeking an end to brinkmanship. Randy Neugebauer, the Texan who berated a U.S. Park Service ranger over the closure of the World War II Memorial, counts among his top five donors both the homebuilders and beer wholesalers. John Culberson, the suburban Houston Republican who compared the shutdown caucus to the passengers seeking to overcome the terrorists on Flight 93, counts among his top 20 donors AT&T, the beer wholesalers, Honeywell and the homebuilders. As for Joe Ricketts, another one of the aforementioned Byrne saviors—you may recall him as the oh-so-moderate fellow who had a short-lived $10 million plan to run ads against Barack Obama last year portraying him as a follower of "black liberation theology" who had lied to the country in 2008 by casting himself as a "metrosexual, black Abe Lincoln."
None of this is to say that the “business community” can’t be undergoing a true change of heart as a result of last month’s government shutdown and credit default flirtation, though it’ll take more than one House special election to judge if that’s the case. But it is to say that it’s awful late in the day for these corporations and business groups to be coming to the realization that having people like Dean Young in Washington is perhaps not in their best interests. The likes of Tom Graves have not exactly been making a secret of their intentions these past few years, and yet they were showered with business establishment support nonetheless. If Dean Young holds on to win Tuesday, it will be a gross oversimplification to declare that he did so despite the opposition of the business establishment. No, his victory would very much be yet another legacy of the close alliance between Tea Party and Chamber of Commerce Republicanism that is only now starting to show cracks, long after the horse broke out of the barn and headed for the Hill. The Republicans may be stuck inside of Mobile with the Tea Party blues again, for quite a while to come and deep inside their heart, Mama, they know they can't escape and this really may be the end.