What the Tea Party Cost

John Avlon has an important column spelling out the damage caused for the GOP by the tea party's most radical candidates.

John Avlon has an important column today:

In Nevada, voters elected as governor the pro-choice Republican Brian Sandoval at the same time as they rejected Republican senatorial candidate, Sharron Angle. Avlon points out:

[R]oughly 20 percent of Sandoval’s voters split their ticket to support Harry Reid rather than Sharron Angle when it came to the Senate. She might have raised $15 million in national activist cash last quarter, but for one-fifth of Nevada voters—even with 14 percent unemployment—Sharron Angle was simply too extreme to send to the Senate.

How badly did Christine O'Donnell perform in Delaware? This badly:

[T]thanks to the fact that Democrat-leaning Delaware only has one congressional seat, it’s possible to make an apples-to-apples comparison of their election prowess. In the Democratic midterm wave year of 2006, the Republican Castle won re-election with 57 percent of the total. In this week’s Republican wave, O’Donnell won only 40 percent of the vote, for her third Senate defeat in five years.

And more :

The Tea Party movement can be considered a Western conservative movement but in the archetypal western state of Colorado—home to many early Tea Party chapters—the wheels came off the Tea Party Express. It’s not just that centrist Democrat and Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper was elected governor with 51 percent of the popular vote—it's that the Tea Party insurgent and GOP nominee Dan Maes got only 11 percent of the total. His vote was split by the even more conservative former Congressman Tom Tancredo, who has developed an unprecedented record of ugliness and incitement but still managed to seem comparatively responsible next to Maes and captured 37 percent of the vote—as well as Sarah Palin’s endorsement.

But the real marquee loss for Colorado conservatives came from Tea Party favorite Ken Buck, a social and fiscal conservative who seemed poised to win the seat from the uninspiring incumbent Michael Bennet, who had been appointed to the post only 20 months ago. Bennet was decidedly centrist, having to fight off a Democratic primary challenger from the left, and the former Denver school’s superintendant (and investment banker) didn’t exactly reek of the mountain west. But as statements about Buck questioning the constitutionality of separation of church and state surfaced—and Bennet ran ads pointing out Buck’s opposition to abortion even in cases of rape and incest—the Democrat defeated the Republican to hold onto the Senate seat, aided no doubt by Hickenlooper’s strength at the top of the ticket.

Read it all, and weep.