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The political toll of GOP’s civil was also evident Georgia, where a seven-way Republican Senate primary devolved into a nasty circular firing squad, with candidates racing to see who could get furthest to the right. The campaign is now going into a runoff between slick-talking businessman David Perdue and Representative Jack Kingston. Both candidates are clearly more palatable than their Tea Party-backed primary opponents—including the Akinesque congressmen Paul Broun and Phil Gingrey. But it’s still Georgia we’re talking about, so differences in pro-life, pro-gun, anti-Obama orthodoxy tend to be more of degree than substance. Kingston, for example, thinks poor children should perform janitorial work in exchange for free school lunches. Perdue, meanwhile, has a tendency to come off as a huge dick, like when he dismissed challenger Karen Handel as “a high school graduate” who couldn’t understand complex policy issues. The two candidates have already spent $5 million attacking one another, and it’s unlikely that either emerges from the coming two-month runoff campaign unscathed.And then there's the problem of the alleged stalker running for Senate in Oregon. Heading into Tuesday’s primary, pediatric neurosurgeon Monica Wehby was billed as the new face of a newer, softer Republican Party—a pro-choice, anti-Obamacare conservative who the left couldn’t accuse of hating women and babies. Establishment leaders like McConnell, Mitt Romney, and John McCain fell over each other to endorse her. But in all the excitement over a lady Republican who could win statewide office in the land of Portlandia, no one vetted Wehby as thoroughly as they should have. If they had, they might have learned, as Politico reported last weekend, that she “was accused by her ex-boyfriend last year of ‘stalking’ him, entering his home without his permission, and ‘harassing’ his employees,” according to a police report. A second article, from The Oregonian, showed that Wehby was also accused by her ex-husband of harassment during their 2007 divorce proceedings.To make matters weirder, it turns out that the ex-boyfriend has also donated money to a super PAC that has been running ads against Wehby’s primary opponent. That group, the oddly named If He Votes Like That in Salem Imagine What He Will Do in Congress, was created by the wealthy Nevada donor Loren Parks, a hypnosis hobbyist who has posted a series of YouTube videos on how hypnosis can help treat MS, cancer, “parents divorce trauma,” and “women’s sexual guilt,” among other afflictions.Despite the high-profile slow-motion disasters in these select races, the Republicans could still win a majority in the Senate. But don’t mistake the establishment’s victories Tuesday as an end to the GOP’s internecine wars. The Tea Party’s influence may be diminished, at least for now, but the right-wing rage and alienation that drove the movement are still an underlying force in the conservative movement, one that exerts a powerful gravitational pull toward the fringe.Follow Grace Wyler on Twitter.