Andrew Pavelyev advances a novel argument: “While a lot has already been said about throwing away winnable Senate seats in Delaware,Colorado and Nevada, the blame for that failure lies not only with the losing anti-establishment candidates but also with the victorious ones — such as Marco Rubio and Rand Paul.” If Republicans had instead nominated safer candidates, he maintains, the party could have spent massively on candidates like Carly Fiorina in California.

Umm, Marco Rubio ran nearly 20 points ahead of Charlie Crist. Rand Paul won 56 percent of the vote. Carly Fiorina got perhaps 43 percent, not as close as Sharron Angle, nowhere near as close as Ken Buck, and only three points better than Christine O’Donnell. Maybe all the money spent on the Florida and Kentucky Senate races would have made a difference if spent in California. But the evidence since 1992 suggests it is more likely that any money spent there would have just been thrown down a rathole.

Most Republican primary voters want a majority that will actually do something, not simply a collection of people with the letter “R” next to their names. That may strike Pavelyev as “no good reason” to vote overwhelmingly against establishment-backed candidates in certain primaries. But it strikes most other people as no good reason to take seriously so-called reformist conservatives whose political analysis is often spectacularly wrong and generally vacilates between wetting the bed over any Republican electoral setback and condescension toward actual conservatives.