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The Tea Party took down a Senate veteran on Tuesday, tossing Republican Senator Dick Lugar from office in a heated Indiana primary that saw Lugar’s opponent beat him by an astounding 22 percent.
With most precincts reporting, Treasurer Richard Mourdock had 61 percent of the vote to Lugar’s 39 percent, sending Mourdock to a November matchup against Democratic Rep. Joe Donnelly.
A year ago, few people gave Mourdock much chance against Lugar, an Indiana icon regarded as one of the U.S. Senate’s leading statesmen on international affairs.
But Mourdock managed to cast Lugar as out of touch with the state that elected him 36 years ago, convincing not just tea partiers -– who supported Mourdock overwhelmingly -– but also many other Republicans that Lugar was too close to the Democrats.
Mourdock praised his beaten foe in his victory speech, but laid out a vision for the rest of the campaign and for governing that was at odds with Lugar’s history of working across the aisle.
“Hoosier Republicans want to see the Republicans inside the United States Senate take a more conservative tack, and we’re looking forward to helping do that,” Mourdock told cheering supporters.
And while Lugar advised in his concession speech not long before that Mourdock would need to work together with lawmakers in the Senate, the new nominee stuck to the belligerent tone he maintained in the campaign, warning that Democrats and socialists were destroying the nation.
