“Candidates matter,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). “It was a good night for Republicans but it could have been a better one. We left some on the table.”

Referring to the debate within the right about whether the party was better off losing the Delaware seat than winning with a moderate Republican like Rep. Mike Castle, who lost the GOP primary to Christine O’Donnell, Graham was even more blunt.

“If you think what happened in Delaware is ‘a win’ for the Republican Party then we don’t have a snowball’s chance to win the White House,” he said. “If you think Delaware was a wake-up call for Republicans than we have shot at doing well for a long time.”

Republicans took extra care to blast DeMint, who lavished millions on Tea Party candidates, like O’Donnell, who were not the preferred pick of the establishment. Conservatives were quick to fire back that the NRSC wasted $8 million in California on a fool’s errand trying to unseat Sen. Barbara Boxer (D) — money that could have been better spent in tight races.

But does the GOP establishment’s blame game have any merit? On an race-by-race basis, the answer is most likely yes. Castle was a popular House representative who could have easily won Delaware, while Sen. Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) negatives were high enough that only a figure as polarizing as Angle seemed capable of making him look like the lesser of two evils to Nevadans.

Candidates don’t run in a vacuum, however, and blaming the Tea Party for the loss of a few seats misses the point that the movement undoubtedly provided the energy and enthusiasm to win an historic wave in Congress. Without the Tea Party, in other words, Republicans might have beaten Reid, but it’s unlikely that longtime Democratic congressmen like Reps. John Spratt (S.C.) and Ike Skelton (Mo.) and Blue Dogs like Reps. Baron Hill (Ind.), Zack Space (Ohio) and Patrick Murphy (Pa.) would have all been defeated.

You don’t have to go far back in time to get another example of this phenomenon. The Netroots largely failed in getting liberal candidates — like Ned Lamont — elected to statewide office, but few would deny the important role the Online Left played in generating momentum for Democratic wave years in 2006 and 2008.

The Republican National Committee, headed by Chairman Michael Steele, is losing influence as interest groups increase their independent spending. (Flickr: pamhule)

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, many groups, from independent political action committees to the Republican National Committee, decided to test the waters and file cases against the Federal Elections Commission arguing that they, too, should enjoy the ability to solicit unlimited donations for spending on specific, non-coordinated campaign activities. In the case of the RNC, the group sought to reverse the longstanding “soft money” ban in McCain-Feingold campaign finance legislation that prevented the parties from raising unlimited sums of money for “party building” and other activities not directly related to elections. While the challenge failed, the three-judge panel that ruled against the RNC did express worry about the implications of a growing divide between the fundraising capacities of outside groups and the traditional party committees.

[Economy1] “Under current law,” the panel wrote in a footnote to its opinion, “outside groups — unlike candidates and political parties — may receive unlimited donations both to advocate in favor of federal candidates and to sponsor issue ads. We recognize the RNC’s concern about this disparity, which, it argues, discriminates against the national political parties in political and legislative debates. But that is an argument for the Supreme Court or Congress.”

In the absence of any such intervention in Congress, however, that potential disparity is looking increasingly like a reality. After countless election cycles in which the traditional party committees — the RNC, the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) and their Democratic counterparts — dominated the landscape of independent expenditures on behalf of candidates, they are being substantially outgunned this time around by a nexus of outside spending outfits that represent a variety of special interests. According to data compiled in mid-October, 59 percent of all independent expenditures are coming from non-party-aligned groups — a substantial reversal from the previous midterm election cycle in 2006, when party committees accounted for 82 percent of all spending on such ads.

This election cycle, the bulk of independent expenditures — particularly among conservative groups — have in many ways mimicked the former role of the now-enfeebled RNC. As of Oct. 20, conservative outside groups have combined to spend over $99 million on ads to support Republicans and attack Democrats, more than twice as much as the NRSC and the NRCC. And the biggest conservative non-party players — like American Crossroads, Crossroads GPS, the 60-Plus Association, and Americans for Job Security — are linked both to each other and the Bush-era GOP by operatives such as Bush advisers Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie, who informally advise and raise funds for the groups.

Election experts and campaign lawyers argue that the changed landscape has broad implications for the future of how elections are fought and won. Fueled by the anonymity afforded by the tax status of many outside groups on one side and the laws enforcing tight fundraising limits for the parties on the other, the shift in the landscape threatens to weaken the party committees’ ability to enforce discipline over the messaging it would like to adopt and the candidates it might want to run in different races around the country. Meanwhile, the shadowy and transient nature of many new groups entering the scene has the potential to usher in a decidedly more reckless era of campaign spending, in which outside spending entities that lack the accountability and reputational considerations of the national parties continue to seize a more prominent role in the national discourse.

*****

When the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law passed in 2002, it drew praise from reform groups as a way to limit the influence of money in elections. Now, however, many admit that after lax enforcement by regulatory agencies and court rulings like Citizens United, McCain-Feingold ultimately just caused that money to migrate to groups outside the umbrella of the traditional parties. Following the law’s passage, new independent groups began exploiting various sections of the tax code in earnest to serve as an outlet for the soft-money political contributions that previously made their way to the national party coffers.

“The soft money ban, no question,” said Caleb Burns, a partner at Wiley Rein, a law firm that specializes in election law, in response to a question about the cause of the declining influence of the party committees. “You can point right to that and the congressional testimony where the rise of independent third-party groups was predicted on the floor of the U.S. Congress.” Some groups opposed the bill’s basic principle of limiting any form of campaign spending, but to others, said Burns, “it was a policy objection among people who feared we’re going to legislate away the power of political parties. I don’t have a judgment as to whether the RNC is any less powerful in relation to American Crossroads or whomever, but by hamstringing the parties in terms of the money they can raise for similar activity, that can’t not be detrimental.”

The party committees aren’t in danger of disappearing anytime soon — the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, NRSC and NRCC are all still among the top ten groups makings independent expenditures — but experts note that their decline in relative importance in funding races could affect the bridging role they often play in crafting a common message among different interest groups in the parties.

“In coming up with a platform, in our country the parties tend to be umbrella groups that prevent splintering among allies, like social and fiscal conservatives in the Republican Party, or labor unions and ethnic minorities in the Democratic Party,” said Loyola Law School professor Rick Hasen, an elections law expert. “If parties were weaker, I think that you could potentially see some shift in the two-party system, but I don’t think it would ever come to that because the people who control the rules are also a part of the parties.”

But even if the two-party system remains intact, there is evidence that the new campaign finance landscape has already come to the aid of outside candidates who were, at times, opposed by party leadership. “I think you’re seeing a perfect example on the right with the rise of the Tea Party,” said Burns.

Indeed, in many low-turnout primaries across the country, outside spending groups like the Club for Growth and the Tea Party Express were able to leverage conservative anger into upset primary victories for hyper-conservative candidates through large, last-minute infusions of cash in states like Kentucky, Alaska and Delaware. And while the Republican Party has temporarily put its internecine conflicts on hold in an effort to win majorities in Congress, the party’s divisions following the election could quickly be magnified once again by the outside spending outfits that have risen to support the different factions.

“Republicans don’t really have that consensus on where to go and who’s in charge right now,” said Paul Blumenthal, who studies political spending at the Sunlight Foundation, which advocates for greater transparency in government. “Where do they line up in the Republican [presidential] primary? How do they go after each other? That’s the next story.”

And while most outside spending efforts in the current general election cycle are informally acknowledged as a sort of auxiliary wing of the Republican and Democratic parties, there’s no guarantee that this will remain the case in elections to come.

“What we’ve seen up till now is the Republican leadership in exile control the party and decide who can get elected and who can’t, but it’s conceivable another group of people or corporations not in Republican leadership could do the same thing,” said Blumenthal. “While we haven’t directly seen that in many cases, there have been some groups, like [Alaskans Standing Together] running ads for Lisa Murkowski, that are made up entirely of corporations. This is just the first instance where such a landscape exists and I’m sure it will continue to surprise us.”

*****

As to whether this infusion of outside cash at the expense of the parties’ ability to enforce discipline represents a positive or negative trend for policy debates — and democratic discourse in general — it’s simply too soon to tell. On one level, said Burns, “as much as one might disagree with a group’s message, you’re increasing the amount of public debate and bringing in more voices, and that’s always a net positive.”

Yet non-party actors tend to bring an element of recklessness to political contests as well. “Outside groups tend to be more negative because there’s less reputational costs for doing so,” said Hasen. “If the Republican Party runs an ad that’s really negative, it could hurt the party brand, but a group like Swift Boat Veterans for Truth is gone by the next election cycle.”

Analyses of the nature of ads during the current election cycle by the Wesleyan Media Project bear these predictions out, at least in part. While the overall percentage of negative ads isn’t up significantly over the 2008 cycle, the Project concludes that “one effect of increased interest group activity is that outside groups are increasingly becoming the source of negativity.”

One in every three attack ads in Senate races, according to the study, is brought by an interest group — a rate that’s up about 7 percentage points from 2008. A growing division of campaign labor has emerged, in other words, in which candidates in many races — most notably Republican Senate candidate Ken Buck in Colorado — pledge to run clean campaigns while relying on outside spending outfits to perform their dirty work for them.

“Campaign financing tends to be dynamic,” said Hasen. “After every election cycle there’s often a response.” But if recent trends continue and Congress doesn’t act, it’s possible the traditional party committees could eventually find themselves in an unfamiliar place — just one special interest group among many.

It’s a clever tack, and one that gets to the heart of Manchin’s current difficulties in his race against relatively unknown Republican businessman John Raese for the Senate seat previously held by the late Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.). The problem for Manchin is that even though he enjoys quite high favorability ratings as governor, West Virginians have been slowly but steadily undergoing a seismic shift in their opinions towards the Democratic Party over the last couple decades — a shift that culminated with the once reliably blue state voting for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) over Barack Obama by a solid 13 percentage points in 2008.

So while West Virginians seem plenty happy with Manchin as their governor, they’re a lot less pleased with Democrats in Washington and not immediately eager to ensure that the party has another vote at their disposal. Manchin is still the favorite in the race, but the NRSC’s play makes it clear the group thinks the state is very much in contention.

Politico reports that the DNC raised $6.6 million — about $150,000 more than the RNC. The DNC also has a $1.9 million cash-on-hand advantage, though that is partially because the committee spent about $1 million less than the RNC.

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee also beat its Republican rival, raising $1.4 million more. The National Republican Senatorial Committee had the last laugh here, though, as CQ Politics reports that the committee ended up with the financial advantage at the end of the month. The Democrats’ committee held a 2-1 lead in banked money just last fall.

Meanwhile, the National Republican Congressional Committee outraised the DCCC by $300,000. However, the DCCC ends the month with a $16 million-plus advantage and has raised $17.8 million more than the Republican committee over the entire election cycle.

While May was a major primary month — one that saw a number of high-profile electoral battles — both national committees and the NRSC reported that fundraising was down from April. The DSCC raised about $800,000 more than the month before.

Senate candidate Trey Grayson, Kentucky’s Republican secretary of state, received the early backing of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and soon became regarded as the favored GOP candidate to succeed Sen. Jim Bunning (R). The NRSC created a joint fundraising committee with Grayson, Dick Cheney and other GOP figures offered their endorsements, and other lawmakers quickly signed on to support Grayson’s campaign.

But then Grayson began to sink in the polls and GOP anti-Washington candidate Rand Paul, eye doctor and son of Ron Paul, began gaining traction. Sarah Palin, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and Bunning all came out with endorsements for Paul, and Focus on the Family chairman James Dobson switched his support from Grayson to Paul.

As we head into tonight’s race, Public Policy Polling has Paul leading Grayson by 18 percentage points.

Back in Pennsylvania, Specter has seen his status go from “major coup” for the Democratic party to candidate for whom the party isn’t willing to trot out the top brass. Vice President Joe Biden was actually in Pennsylvania yesterday, but chose not to make a stop for Specter. Barack Obama last appeared with Specter at a rally in September.

Voters in Pennsylvania did see Obama’s image in a campaign commercial this cycle, but the ad used old footage and was financed by Specter’s campaign. When asked about the White House’s involvement in the race, Specter told The Associated Press: “They’ve done everything we’ve asked them to do.”

Specter tonight faces Democratic Rep. Joe Sestak; polls show the race is a toss-up.

In Arkansas, Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D) is being challenged from the left by Lt. Gov. Bill Halter, and the two appear likely to be forced into a runoff (a candidate must win a majority tonight to avoid a runoff, and there are more than two candidates present in this competitive race.) Though the president did not personally step in to help Lincoln, he did record a robo-call for the senator. Additionally, Lincoln’s party is attempting to protect her legislatively by delaying a vote on her derivatives language.

Polls show Lincoln’s chances of coming out ahead tonight are better than Specter’s and certainly better than Grayson’s, although an outright majority may be out of reach.

Either way, considering the anti-incumbent/anti-Washington mood in the country these days, behind-the-scenes help instead of visible support from Washington may be just what candidates are looking for this cycle.

In other races around the country tonight:

• Pennsylvania 12: The special election to choose a successor to John Murtha will coincide tonight with the state’s regularly scheduled primary. Democrat Mark Critz, a former aide to Murtha, is competing against Republican businessman Tim Burns for the chance both to serve out the remainder of Murtha’s current term and to appear on the November general election ballot to serve out the next full term beginning in January.

• Kentucky Senate (D): State Attorney General Jack Conway and Lt. Gov. Dan Mongiardo are locked in their own competitive primary for the Democratic nomination. Additional Democrats are running. A competitive general election race is expected for this open seat in November.

• Oregon Governor: Voters are choosing candidates for the open gubernatorial race tonight. On the Democratic side, former Gov. John Kitzhaber is the likely leader over former Oregon secretary of state Bill Bradbury. Chris Dudley, a former professional basketball player, is regarded as the top Republican heading into tonight’s race.

• Arkansas Senate (R): Former Rep. John Boozman is expected to place first in tonight’s GOP primary, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll be able to avoid a runoff. Former state Sen. Jim Holt appears likely to come in second in the GOP race.

Of course, another way of reading that might be that liberals’ schemes to slow down climate change — the ones that don’t involve drilling, baby, drilling — are inherently comical.

The timing is important here. On Jan. 5, Rasmussen Reports released a poll showing Democratic candidate Martha Coakley up only 9 points on Brown. On Jan. 6, Coakley launched her first general election ad, having been beat to the punch by more than a week by Brown. It was pretty thin gruel, the sort of thing an attorney general candidate might run, compared to Brown’s attention-getting ads comparing his agenda to JFK’s and filming him as he traveled in a pick-up truck.

It’s not surprising that Republicans spotted an opportunity there. But at a rally in North Andover yesterday, I asked Republican National Committee member Jody Dow if the national committees had done enough to help Brown. She smiled wryly. “They’ve done what they needed to,” she said.

Does Harry Reid believe that as the self-proclaimed “most powerful Senator,” it’s acceptable and appropriate for him to make such comments and for them to have no consequence? Do the rules of civility and a society that makes no distinctions based on skin color and other matters not apply to the “most powerful Senator?”

This is a “society that makes no distinctions based on skin color”?

Senata Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) (WDCpix)

Moments before midnight on Friday, Marc Ambinder blogged at The Atlantic about some of the “juiciest revelations” in “Game Change,” a behind-the-scenes book on the 2008 presidential campaign by journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann. According to the authors, Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) was bullish on Barack Obama’s chances at becoming the first African-American president because he was “light-skinned” and had “no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”

The White House immediately leaped to Reid’s defense, but for Republicans, this was manna from heaven. The National Republican Senatorial Committee blasted out three press releases on Reid’s “embarrassing” secondhand quotes. “For those who hope to one day live in a color-blind nation,” said NRSC spokesman Brian Walsh, “it appears Harry Reid is more than a few steps behind them.” On Sunday, after no Democrats had stepped out to criticize Reid, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele rebounded from a tough week of attacks on his extracurricular book tour by demanding that Reid resign as Senate majority leader.

[GOP1]“If the standard is the one set by the Trent Lott incident,” said Steele, referring to the speech that felled the then-leader of Senate Republicans in 2002, “where he was wishing happy birthday to Strom Thurmond and talked about him as a possible president at the time, you know, 1948 or whatever, compared to calling a candidate for president, you know, light-skinned, Negro… there is this standard where the Democrats feel that they can say these things and they can apologize when it — when it comes from the mouths of their own. But if it comes from anyone else, it’s racism.”

The comparison between Reid and Lott, and the suggestion that he needed to resign his leadership post, was echoed across the Sunday shows by Sens. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) and Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) and on Twitter and blogs from party activists. “Reid is simply getting a taste of the medicine he has so eagerly dished out to others,” wrote the blogger Patterico. “Unacceptable,” tweeted Ryan Frazier, an Aurora, Colorado councilman who’s one of the GOP’s leading African-American candidates for Congress. “Democrat Harry Reid should step down as Senate Leader.” One goal was to weaken Reid for a 2010 re-election campaign that’s flagging despite months of TV ads on his behalf. Almost as important, Republicans were attempting to do what they have had trouble doing since the rise of Barack Obama: to make the Democrats sweat and suffer for a perceived racial gaffe and to get revenge for Lott’s downfall. On Sunday, Democrats and other analysts struggled to see the comparison, pointing out the history that made Lott’s remark so damaging and the politically incorrect-but-accurate thrust of Reid’s remark. But Republicans stayed on message.

“The media covered up [Reid's] statement for nearly two years,” argued Michael Zak, a conservative writer who penned the “GOP Heroes” section of the RNC’s website, built to highlight the party’s African-American leaders of the past. “Had a Republican made such a racist statement, the media would have reported it immediately. As for whether Senator Reid should resign, both Barack Obama and Harry Reid called for Trent Lott’s ouster for a remark less offensive than Reid’s ‘Negro dialect’ remark.”

This isn’t the first time that Republicans have tried to recreate the Lott controversy and bring down a Democrat. In February 2005, then-Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean joked that Republicans couldn’t fill a room with non-white members “unless they invited the hotel staff in.” Mississippi Republicans sprang to action, sending their African-American leadership out to demand Dean’s resignation. “Ask the Democratic party do the same thing to Dean that Republicans and other Democrats did to Senator Lott,” said Charles Evers, an African-American GOP activist and veteran of the Civil Rights movement.

But a contrast between Lott and any other politician is hard to make. When Lott made his remarks–unlike Reid, he did it in front of video cameras–he added that a Thurmond presidency would have prevented “all these problems over all these years.” Lott’s office was unable to explain what “all these problems” were. In the following days, two more instances of Lott waxing nostalgiac about Thurmond’s segregationist 1948 presidential bid surfaced. By comparison, Republicans like Steele have not produced more evidence of Reid racial slip-ups, focusing instead on his hypocrisy for criticizing Lott in 2002. Even Zak agreed that Lott, a member of the Council of Conservative Citizens who left the Democratic Party during the Civil Rights era, had a credibility problem when he tried to combat charges of racism.

“A statement by Trent Lott was one of the reasons I decided to write my history of the GOP,” said Zak. “At a Capitol Hill meeting with some Young Republicans I attended in the late 1990s, he said his all-time favorite Republican was Jefferson Davis. Of course, Jefferson Davis was a Democrat, as were nearly all the leaders of the Confederacy.”

Clay Steinman, a professor of media, humanities, & cultural studies at Minnesota’s Macalster College who has analyzed the how racial imagery influences voter and consumer decisions, criticized Republicans for comparing Lott’s statements with Reid’s. “That denies the significance of Lott endorsing Thurmond’s segregationist campaigns,” said Steinman. “It’s not sensitive to history.”

According to Steinman, Reid’s comments, however clumsy, were borne out by the experience of non-white candidates. In 2008, an Indian-American candidate named Ashwin Madia ran for, and lost, an open House seat in Minnesota. The National Republican Congressional Committee ran ads that portrayed Madia with noticeably darker skin than he really had. “Reid’s general sentiment was consistent with what we know about how people respond to bodies, and skin color, and accents,” said Steinman.

What research there is about voters and racial identity backs up Steinman’s take on Reid. A 1993 study by Nayda Terkildsen found that white test subjects were more favorable to light-skinned black candidates than dark-skinned candidates. In 2009, a study led by University of Chicago Prof. Eugene Caruso found that liberals who supported Obama said he was “best represented” by a photo in which he looked lighter; conservatives who opposed Obama said the opposite, picking a darker photo. “Liberals, who are going to think that Obama is generally good and generally American, may have these subtle associations linking him to the concept of white, which is reflected in their representativeness ratings,” Caruso explained. “The opposite would be true of conservatives.”

While there’s less research about the effect that candidates’ dialects have on voters, Reid’s remarks haven’t yet been challenged on that count. “Reid implied that Black English is lesser than standard English and that it’s therefore good that Obama doesn’t use it in public,” argued John McWhorter, an African-American scholar in linguistics whose work has been embraced by conservatives, in an article for The New Republic. “This is not about whether black people have to sweat to speak standard English; it’s about whether Black English is as good as standard English. Most of America black as well as white is at the exact same point in understanding vernacular speech and its proper evaluation as Reid is.”

On Sunday night, Republicans kept up the pressure on Reid, demanding that he explain how, at least, his comments didn’t reveal a jaundiced view of race in America. “The implication seems to be that in Reid’s view, if the President had darker skin and had a ‘negro dialect’ then he might not have been as well positioned to win the Presidency,” Walsh told TWI. “So he should explain what he meant because on its face it is in fact a racially insensitive statement.”

Still, Republican strategists told TWI that the party was ill-positioned to do much more damage to Reid. The senator had defended himself with political cover from the president, the Congressional Black Caucus, and Rev. Al Sharpton. And the details of the Lott scandal might not bear scrutiny in a way that hurts Reid. In 2002, as the incoming Lieutenant Governor of Maryland, Steele called Lott a “compassionate and tolerant statesman” whose apologies were enough to save his job.

“I know Trent Lott personally,” said Steele in 2002, “and I know that this is not his intent. But it’s still unfortunate. And I think he needs to apologize a little bit more.”