Getting tagged with the dreaded "Washington insider" label is not good business for politicians these days, and members of the tea party apparently are not immune to it either.
According to a story in the Washington Examiner, mainstream House Republicans might have found a blueprint to weed out members of the Freedom Caucus in their primaries — slap them with the derogatory "Insider" label.
"I think the model is replicable," Tom Davis, former chair of the NRCC, told the Examiner. "It shows you what the path to victory is."
Case in point: Tim Huelskamp lost his Kansas primary by 13 points to a political novice earlier this week.
While many factors were at play at the local level, painting Huelskamp as an "Insider" fed into an anti-Washington movement that has been an offshoot of Donald Trump's rise as the ultimate outsider, the Examiner reported.
It appears to be a working strategy to weaken the 42-member House conservative caucus, which as a voting bloc has caused headaches for leadership dating back to John Boehner, the Examiner reported.
"I think that the results of that race should send chills down the spine of every conservative in the country," Jason Pye, spokesman for FreedomWorks, a Tea Party group that backed Huelskamp, told the Examiner, who added that the GOP mainstream has "put a bounty on these guys' heads."
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