Post-mortem analysis is always a tricky game, and things that seem inevitable in retrospect, like J.D. Hayworth’s primary loss to Sen. John McCain Tuesday, are often far less so in reality.
Certainly, Sen. McCain’s advantages were sizeable. There is no shame in losing a primary challenge to your party’s most recent presidential nominee, especially when you are as massively outspent as Hayworth was (though candidates do bear the ultimate responsibility for their fundraising, and Hayworth’s was less than stellar).
But here’s the thing: McCain was ripe for a challenge, and a better candidate running a better campaign could have provided one.
For many reasons, Hayworth’s campaign never became a national movement, as he had hoped and, perhaps, expected.
To unseat McCain, his candidacy needed to take on a signifying resonance beyond that of an average campaign. The race needed to be this election cycle’s ultimate test of the power of conservative ideology. Hayworth needed every conservative talk show host, think tank, and Tea Party group to beat the drum for him relentlessly. He needed to be the face of the new conservative wave. He also needed the race to be simple. Conservative versus moderate. The past versus the future.
That simple narrative was complicated by several factors. Hayworth, perhaps because of his six terms in the rejected Republican majority, never seemed like the future. His record in Congress, while more conservative than McCain’s, was not nearly as consistent as his supporters argued.
McCain’s record, too, is more complicated than Hayworth needed it to be. While he was vulnerable because of his support for things like cap and trade and campaign finance that conservatives dislike, those positions are more difficult to explain to the average voter quickly and effectively than his positions on, say, immigration. There especially, McCain deserves credit for understanding his weakness and addressing it quickly, if crudely.
Hayworth also never made the affirmative case for himself in a persuasive manner. In a political climate thirsting for something new, he was more of the same. And if the race was only a referendum on John McCain, it was always a race Hayworth was going to lose.
In the end, McCain and Hayworth both made it acceptable for even a very conservative primary electorate to vote for the more moderate senator.
For McCain, even in convincing victory against a challenger he clearly did not like, complete satisfaction is probably still missing.
This race was run under the shadow of his presidential bid. The losing effort colored perceptions of him both for liberals, who believe he ran a right-wing campaign at odds with his core beliefs, and for conservatives, some of whom believe he pulled his punches against President Obama in a way that he would never think of doing against Hayworth.
These perceptions are not necessarily fair, but they have lingered.
From where he was two years ago, as his party’s nominee for president, with a fighting chance at the Oval Office, Sen. McCain’s current position can only be seen as a disappointment. Over 40 percent of the Republican base just voted against him. The national media now questions his commitment to principle. Always a maverick, John McCain is now very nearly a party of one.
A better example of how to run a Republican primary challenge comes from the primary for Maricopa County Attorney, where Bill Montgomery easily defeated the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors’ venerable and handpicked candidate, Rick Romley.
Montgomery ran a race that was tough, but principled. He drew stark contrasts on issues, like Hayworth tried to do, but had no baggage to cloud the simple narrative. He considered Romley a political opponent, not an enemy, and Romley, in turn, was classy in defeat.
The Republican primary for Senate is a lesson in missed opportunities and political regret. But Montgomery’s victory still gives conservatives a model to follow in future primary challenges.
Reach Will at wmunsil@asu.edu
