Republican incumbents face final challenge

by Agency Reporter

Republican efforts to win control of the US Senate face their last big internal hurdle this week with several key primary battles between establishment incumbents and more conservative Tea Party-backed candidates for the party’s nomination in November’s midterm elections, The Guardian reports.

The results, which begin trickling in on Tuesday night with a battle between Kansas senator Pat Roberts and his conservative challenger Milton Wolf, could clear the way for a relatively unified slate of candidates to take on Democrats in November.

Despite the shock defeat of House majority leader Eric Cantor by Tea Party favourite Dave Brat in June’s Virginia primaries, the primary season has been less bumpy than expected for the party’s Senate leadership – with once vulnerable senators such as Mitch McConnell in Kentucky and Lindsey Graham in South Carolina comfortably defeating rebel challenges from the right.

Opinion polls point to a similar win for Roberts in Kansas on Tuesday against Wolf, who coincidentally is a second cousin of Barack Obama, followed by a predicted win for senator Lamar Alexander over challenger Joe Carr in Tennessee on Thursday.

Nevertheless, opinion polling in primary elections, in which turnout is often low, is notoriously unreliable and failed to pick up on the growing dissatisfaction against Cantor in Virginia.

There are also a number of important House primaries this week, beginning with races in Missouri and Michigan on Tuesday, that could yet see the party hierarchy embarrassed.

In Michigan, it is the Tea Party that has the incumbency in the shape of Justin Amash, who represents the state’s third district in the House. He has been a frequent thorn in the side of the GOP’s Washington leadership on matters ranging from the government shutdown to NSA surveillance.

Amash is widely expected to hold on to his party’s nomination for the seat despite a well-funded campaign against him by local investment adviser Brian Ellis.

And Democrats, who have typically seen less heated internal contests, also face an unusually competitive primary of their own in Obama’s home state of Hawaii where senator Brian Schatz was appointed by the governor after the death of Daniel Inouye and now faces his first challenge at the polls from local representative Colleen Hanabusa on August 9.

Obama has been unusually active raising money for Democratic Senate candidates across the US as polls show there is a serious danger of his party losing control of the Senate in November.

Most recent poll analysis shows some improvement for Democrats but a small overall lead remaining for Republicans in the Senate races due largely to the fact that those seats up for grabs are predominantly in states lost by Obama in the last presidential election.