Weigel

The Anti-Incumbent PAC Had a Better Record Than Rove

I mean, basically everybody had a better record than Rove, but as we get more results, we’re seeing fairly solid victories for smaller PACs. The Campaign for Primary Accountability came out of nowhere this year, throwing money into tight primaries against incumbents. Any incumbents. They just wanted to defeat people.
They had a decent Tuesday. The CPA’s Curtis Ellis emails:

California Congressmen Joe Baca and Pete Stark were on the Campaign for Primary Accountability’s target list and they were defeated last night after a number of other outside groups including Mayor Michael Bloomberg helped fund their challengers, Gloria McLeod and Eric Swalwell.   Our Super-PAC had a better success rate than Karl Rove’s.  We demonstrated how Super-PACs can have a positive influence empowering voters and changing Congress in a cost-effective manner. We achieved success by using the voter identification and mobilization techniques used successfully by the Obama campaign yesterday - identifying low-propensity voters and motivating them to turn out on election day.
Actually, it looks like they made the impact by targeting lower-impact races. Let’s give it some time, until actual vote-counting is done at the end of the month, but we’ll probably be able to see the Super PAC impact at its highest in state legislative races and second-highest in congressional races. Senate races? They just became part of the din.