Conservatives rightfully have been displeased for years with the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which has a long history of doing things big and small to help more “moderate” or “establishment” Republicans while leaving more solid conservatives in the cold. Well, now there’s a chance for the NRSC to do a little something to get back in the good graces of conservatives. The RNC has just sent another $4 million to its senatorial counterpart. In effect, this is “found money,” for the NRSC, over and above anything it expected. Of course, even an unexpected windfall should be spent wisely, not recklessly. But by virtue of being unexpected, the money also lends itself to taking a little bit more of a roll of the dice on a longer-shot proposition. It’s as if you are in a casino and amazingly find a $100 chip in your stack: It doesn’t hurt, on your way out, to take, say, $20 and put it on a one-time bet on the roulette wheel. If you miss, you’re still ahead $80 for the night. If you get lucky, suddenly you have another $720.

That’s the attitude the NRSC should take with a small portion of its $4 million windfall. Of course it makes sense to put, say, 75 percent of it, or maybe even 80 percent, into races right on the razor’s edge — the 50–50 races that everybody is watching, to see which party controls the Senate. On the other hand, those same races are ones where fundraising has been relatively easy anyway, and there is such a thing as a saturation point for effective advertising. At the margins, then, if the NRSC is going to send a lot more to Colorado on top of the millions already spent, and do the same for Arkansas and North Carolina, then it really might not matter much whether each gets, say, $600,000 or each gets $750,000.

But to a candidate such as Jeff Bell in New Jersey, whose entire campaign has raised less then $400,000 all year but who yet is within at lest theoretical striking distance of incumbent Cory Booker, an extra $300,000 spent on his behalf by the NRSC would make such a huge difference, percentage-wise, as to have an outsized effect. Bell is within single digits without running a single TV spot. Can you imagine what $300,000 could do for him by introducing him, for the very first time, to those voters (and there are many of them) who get almost all their political exposure via TV?

This would be especially valuable in New Jersey, where a scorched-earth, but entirely true and accurate, set of attack ads against Booker might really have an effect. Booker is a serial fabulist (one hesitates to say “congenital liar”) who’s also accompanied by more than a whiff of ethical questions. Surely he is vulnerable, among swing voters who don’t pay a lot of attention until the last few weeks of a campaign and who might not know about Booker’s T-Bone lies and other fabrications, to a well-documented, just-the-facts set of attack ads.

Likewise in Virginia, incumbent Mark Warner suddenly is under an ethical storm cloud due to a story in the Washington Post about what seemed like a tacit attempt to dangle a job in return for a political favor. Might not another $150,000 from the NRSC for GOP candidate Ed Gillespie, who by all accounts is closing the gap in that “purple” state, achieve outsized results?

Another long-shot state — but not impossible for the GOP — is New Mexico. If the NRSC, in sum, spent $3.2 million of its $4 million in found money on the apparent toss-up states, but sent, say, $300,000 to New Jersey, $150,000 to Virginia, $150,000 to New Mexico, and $100,000 each to Michigan and Minnesota, they might hit the jackpot in one of those five states and steal an extra, unexpected Senate seat. I’m partial to Bell and Gillespie — and an attempt to help Bell, especially, would help start to ease the longstanding rift between the Right and the NRSC.

So how ’bout it, guys? How ’bout hitting the roulette wheel?