When Republicans Stopped Moderating to Win

Seth Masket: “We hear a lot of claims these days about the differences between the two parties, and about how today’s politicians are different from those in the past. But it’s not always that easy to step back and examine this systematically. Yet a look at the behavior of US senators shows that Republicans are now acting very differently from their Democratic colleagues in election years.”

“Research by Mike Cowburn and Sean Theriault has found that Republicans, at least, have been changing their approach to elections since the rise of the Tea Party. That is, Republican senators seem to have stopped moderating in election years, and might even be behaving more conservatively to stave off ideological challenges in primary elections.”