My must read of the day is "GOP Primary Begins With Tea Party Defeat," in Time:
North Carolina House Speaker Thom Tillis overcame Tea Party opposition Tuesday to nab the GOP nomination for the Senate race, winning a key battle for establishment Republicans as the party seeks to win a majority in the Senate.
Tillis will be running against Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan, a vulnerable first-term incumbent in a purple state that has been at the center of the national debate over the president’s health care law.
In Tuesday’s primary, Tillis fended off a Tea Party-backed libertarian and a Baptist pastor, and was endorsed by establishment groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Right to Life Committee, and GOP moderates such as former presidential candidate Mitt Romney. By winning the race with a solid 48 percent of the vote, Tillis avoided a costly runoff that could have weakened Republicans in the race against Hagan, the Associated Press reports.
Many of the headlines describing this race are exactly like this one—reducing the results to "the tea party lost and the establishment won." Sure, that match up was part of this race, but Tillis was far ahead of everyone in the primary. He was expected to pick up the most votes, the question was would it be that 40 percent required in North Carolina to avoid a runoff. It was, and now there will not be a runoff—that is the most important part of the story, not that the "establishment" won.
If Tillis did not receive 40 percent of the vote, a runoff would last nearly two-and-a-half months. Additional time and money would have been spent fighting amongst Republicans instead of targeting Hagan.
A runoff would have been an enormous victory for Hagan. It didn’t happen, and that’s the big take away from Tillis’s win—the person who lost yesterday was really Hagan.