Regarding North Carolina's Republican Senate primary, two observations. First, the establishment candidate, Thom Tillis, did not face "steep competition" from "his right," as the Washington Post rather melodramatically reports. The second observation flows from the first: no such competition was possible, since the establishment is the right.
It's true that those recrudescent voices of conservative establishmentarianism, Karl Rove's American Crossroads and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, spent big on Tillis (about $2.5 million). It's just as true that Club for Growth stayed out of the Senate primary, that FreedomWorks spent only six percent of the Crossroads/Chambers total, and that Tillis's opposition was divided seven ways. As Politico puts it, Tillis lacked a "credible rival"--or rather a "more" credible rival than any of the tea-partying buffoons he faced. So much for the Post's tommyrot about Tillis's "steep competition."
As for much of the political press's newest narrative love--that Tillis's victory is strong evidence of a High GOP Establishment revival against the Tea Party's low evangelical nutjobs--it's but a love of the fleeting sort. NC State House Speaker Tillis takes a second, reactionary pew to no man: he opposes a federally mandated minimum wage; he denies the science of climate change; he supported a state constitutional ban on same-sex marriage and further restrictions on a woman's right to abortion; and of course as a NC prophet of national Republican totalitarianism, he just can't get enough of voter suppression.
Aside from strapping on armbands with spidery logos--probably politically inadvisable, even for NC's Republican primary contingent--how were Tillis's tea-partying opponents to maneuver any farther to the right? The GOP establishment already occupies that terrain, for GOP radicalism pushed it there long ago.