Politics is a Team Sport

This piece today from Johnathan Cohn, on the way the Republican Senate candidate in Massachusetts is running away from his party, is a good reminder.  Gabriel Gomez, like our Mark Kirk, may take more moderate positions than his party, and he may in fact make a point of disagreeing with his party on some issues.  But none of that matters when he goes to Washington and contributes his very first vote to making Mitch McConnell and not Harry Reid the Senate Majority Leader.

Politics in a legislative body like the Senate or the House is a team sport.  What matters is what the party does.  The individual players, whatever positions they may take or want to take on specific issues, tend to fall in line and vote with their party (that’s especially true of the GOP, a highly disciplined party).  And even in the rare case where they’re willing to stand up to their leadership, they often don’t get a chance because the leadership has foreclosed that option.  Right now the Republican party is a party of extremism, and a vote for any Republican is a vote for that extremism.

Here’s Cohn:

But the most important vote Gomez would take as senator would be the one he makes for Senate leadership. Control of the Senate is very much up for grabs in 2014, which means control of its agenda and its committees are up for grabs too. If Republicans are in charge, it won’t matter that Gomez supports background checks or a higher minimum wage, because the bills probably won’t get out of committee. And when it comes to legislation that must pass—like annual appropriations—it won’t make much difference that Gomez is less committed to a Tea Party agenda. The Senate proposals are going to look more or less like the Republican budgets we’ve seen before, with big tax cuts for the wealthy and substantial spending cuts for domestic programs. And that will change the budget debate as a whole.

It’s naive at best to think you’re “voting for the individual” in a legislative race.  The party is everything in those races.