Whereas the Republicans were caught off guard by the Tea Party in 2010 and 2012, this time, the Republican Party took the challenges seriously and prepared for them. South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham is detested by the Tea Party for, among other things, having supported an immigration reform bill that compromised with Democrats, but he put together a good ground game and headed off some of his potential challengers, convincing them not to run. Left with no credible challengers - his top challenger, Lee Bright, was a neo-Confederate secessionist - Graham won 56 percent of the vote in the primary, and his challengers split the remainder of the vote, with Bright winning 15 percent. Graham is leading by 46 percent to 30 percent in the latest polls.

Two older incumbents didn't campaign well - Thad Cochran of Mississippi and Pat Roberts of Kansas - but both of them survived with help from the Republican Party apparatus. Cochran had to rely on a last minute appeal to African-Americans, traditionally not a Republican voting block, to win a run-off after neither candidate in the race won 50 percent of votes in the first round of voting. While over 90 percent of blacks traditionally vote for Democratic candidates, many blacks did turn out for the Republican primary runoff to vote against Cochran's Tea Party challenger Chris McDaniels, who had made controversial comments as a radio host and had spoken at Sons of Confederate Veterans meetings. (McDaniels cried fraud after the runoff.) Mississippi is such a strongly Republican state that McDaniels probably still would have won the seat in the general election, but it may have required direct GOP campaign spending in the state, and McDaniels' controversial views might have hurt the GOP's reputation nationally. As it is, Cochran is cruising to an easy victory.

On the other hand, Pat Roberts, after having defeated a primary opponent (Milton Wolf) who compared Democrats to Nazis, is now struggling to beat independent candidate Greg Orman in Kansas's general election, with the polls virtually tied. It's hard to say what would have happened if Roberts hadn't won the primary. When Orman rose in the polls, the Democratic candidate dropped out, hoping to unite anti-Republican votes behind Orman, but Orman hasn't definitively said which party he will caucus with if he wins. If Wolf had won the primary, the Democratic candidate might have remained in the race. At any rate, if the Republicans win five seats in other races and lose Kansas, they will have 50 seats total, and control of the Senate will come down to Orman.

The most important thing the Republicans have done by defeating the Tea Party is an avoided Todd Akin moment. Akin, then a member of the Congressional Tea Party caucus, won the Republican nomination for Senate in Missouri in 2012 with support from Christian right figures like Mike Huckabee and Phyllis Schlafly. Akin then suicide-bombed the Republicans in a radio interview in which he claimed that "legitimate rape" does not often result in pregnancy. His turn of phrase caused controversy in and of itself, but the broader meaning behind his comments was that he wanted to ban abortion in any and all cases - even in the case of rape - an extreme and unpopular position. National GOP campaign organizations tried to get him to drop out of the race by denying him funds, but he stayed in the race and lost.

Later, Richard Mourdock, a Republican who defeated Indiana's long-serving Senator Dick Lugar in the primary, said "Life [i.e. pregnancy] is that gift from God, even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape. It is something that God intended to happen," comments that were tied in with Akin's. Mourdock also lost.

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