WASHINGTON (By Dan Balz, Washington Post) September 16, 2010 — Call it a civil war, an insurrection or merely an insurgency. By any measure, the establishment leadership of the Republican Party has lost control and is now being pulled along toward an unpredictable, uncertain future.

What happened Tuesday in Delaware, where conservative Christine O'Donnell shocked moderate Rep. Michael Castle in the Senate primary, may have been the snapping point inside a party whose leaders have watched nervously as "tea party" activists delivered a series of embarrassing rebukes to establishment-backed candidates in primaries across the country.

The overnight reactions split dramatically inside the GOP, judging from e-mails flowing in the wee hours, as party strategists and others attempted to digest what by all accounts was the most stunning outcome in a year of surprises.

Good for the tea partiers, said some GOP strategists. They are the leading edge of an anti-Washington movement that will wipe out the Democrats in November and threaten President Obama's reelection hopes in 2012. Message trumps messenger and the message this year is stop the madness in Washington. People in, Washington out!

Not so, others argued. Politics is about addition, not subtraction. The tea party forces have substituted purity for common sense and are engaged in a purge of the Republican Party that now makes winning a Senate majority far harder in November. Whatever the outcome, the tea party movement's conservatism could leave the center of the political spectrum open to Obama and the Democrats, if the president is smart enough to reclaim it.

These arguments will continue to rage between now and November and very likely after the results of the midterm elections are known. There will be no certain answers about the future for the Republicans; there never are in a political climate that can shift as dramatically as it has from 2004 to 2006 and 2008 and now to 2010. No election outcome can predict the shape of the electorate two years into the future.

But there is no question that Republicans are riding a tiger in the tea party movement. Delaware wasn't the only shocking result Tuesday. In New York, Republicans turned against the establishment candidate for governor, former representative Rick Lazio, in favor of a bombastic conservative businessman, Carl Paladino.

Whatever happens in November, the leadership of the party is on notice that the grass roots is watching, sternly, and is prepared to punish anyone who strays from what they perceive as party orthodoxy.

"Voters just smashed the establishment right in the teeth," said Kevin Madden, a GOP strategist. "The voters in Delaware were thoroughly uninterested in aligning themselves with the perceived status quo, to the degree that they're even willing to risk losing a Senate seat."

Republican John Weaver said the upheaval is a natural outcome of the sins of Republicans when they were last in power, and lost the confidence of their conservative base with spending, earmarks and scandals.

"It is clear no one is in charge," he said. "No one person. No one entity. Nor is there a unifying theme. It is natural that our party would be in the wilderness, searching for the right way. And it is natural there will be political bloodletting in the process, between conservatives and extreme conservatives."

But he added: "The victories we're about to achieve in November have not been earned by us, but rather given to us by an out-of-touch, big spending president. We better learn our lessons quickly or this wilderness march will last much longer."

Ed Rogers, a Washington lobbyist and veteran GOP strategist, said he worried that the tea party movement will cost Republicans in November. "The energized minority wing within the GOP that was supposed to help the party have major gains in November is instead, killing a few of our best candidates in the primaries," he said. "The 'Party of No' is being run by its leaderless 'Hell No!' caucus. I fear on election night, we in the GOP will revel in our purity while Pelosi and Reid celebrate their reelection."

But Alex Castellanos, another Republican strategist, said the only people who could have been surprised by the Delaware result, after what happened in Kentucky, Nevada, Colorado, Alaska and elsewhere, were those in an out-of-touch "royal establishment" who think the country wants more business as usual in Washington.

"Americans don't want government to work," he said. "They want it to stop working because they suspect every time it does work, they pay a price. Harry Reid ought to be quaking in his shoes."

Also taking a hard line was Keith Appell, a conservative strategist. "Grass-roots conservatives are sending a message that a congressional majority is worthless if liberal Republicans are going to cave and vote with Democrats on key issues," he said. "Conservatives and independents want responsible leadership that listens to the people instead of lecturing them. The party must respond to this or any majority it wins will be short-lived."

Republicans like Castellanos point to Nevada as an example of how conventional wisdom has been tossed into the trash can this year. Sharron Angle, the tea party candidate, won a divisive primary and was promptly written off as too conservative and too unreliable to beat the unpopular Senate Democratic leader. But Angle remains competitive against Reid months after having been written off.

The same holds for Kentucky, where libertarian Rand Paul, the tea party-backed nominee, leads Democrat Jack Conway. Could the same pattern play out in Delaware? Much depends on how O'Donnell conducts herself in the next few weeks, but what many Republicans were saying Wednesday morning is that the purity of her message, whatever her personal flaws, will energize the conservative base.

"In politics as in war, insurgencies are very hard to handle," said Republican Alex Vogel. "Just as GOP establishment candidates haven't figured out to how to deal with it, I would argue that Democrats should take no comfort in [Tuesday's] results. . . . I reject the argument that there is a tea party fighting against the Republican Party. The last time I checked, all of these candidates were running for the Republican primary. As long as they have an 'R' in front of their name on the ballot, I think it spells a rough November for Democrats."

Democrats did not discount the power of the anti-Washington express that is now rolling toward November. "I think it's too optimistic to think that any tea party candidate in any race is going to lose because they are too conservative," said Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg. "But, in certain places, I think we now have a better matchup in these elections."

Democrats also see opportunities ahead. "There has been a grass-roots coup against the Republican establishment, and as a result the Republicans have become for all practical purposes the party of Sarah Palin and Jim DeMint," said pollster Geoff Garin. "Ronald Reagan's party of the big tent no longer exists."

That was certainly the message coming out of Delaware, where Castle had been a pillar of the GOP establishment for more than two decades, a liberal Republican in a Democratic state who had prospered politically knowing his electorate and his party's principles. But in 2010, inside the Republican Party, that's no longer acceptable.

Anti-Washington passions still point to a big election for Republicans in November. But the party leaders will still be left with agonizing challenges about how to chart the party's future, which will shape the 2012 GOP nomination battle and color their prospects for building the kind of broad-based coalition all parties need to prosper.