How Missouri Senate primary fits into tea party strategy for Election 2012

While Missouri has one of the nation's largest conglomerations of tea party groups, Tuesday’s primary differs significantly from last week’s GOP primary in Texas, where the tea party favorite, Ted Cruz, beat the establishment candidate, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, by a shocking 14-point margin to become the likely successor to retiring Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison.

In Missouri, tea party support is spread across all three candidates, with Ms. Steelman receiving an endorsement from Sarah Palin, Mr. Akin receiving one from US Rep. Michele Bachmann, and Mr. Brunner being endorsed by the tea-party-friendly FreedomWorks group in Washington. 

Polls show Brunner and Steelman as most likely to fare best against McCaskill. But all three have campaigned on limiting Washington’s power and reach. 

McCaskill, who is trying to distance herself from Obama and other Democratic leaders (in part by skipping the National Democratic Convention in Charlotte, N.C.), is likely to try to define the narrative as the Missouri race heats up: She is already fighting back by appealing to Missourians’ sense of moderation against the possibility of a radicalized Senate heavily influenced by the tea party.

“They’re all the same,” McCaskill tells Politico. “They all want to get out of the UN, they’re all for privatizing Medicare, they’re all for privatizing Social Security. They all want the federal government out of the student loan business.”

National Democrats have also picked up on the surging tea party and the prospect that the movement may wield greater influence in the US Senate. 

“The bigger issue there is that [Senate minority leader] Mitch McConnell is now going to have, potentially, a much more tea-party-oriented caucus and we have all seen the damage that has done,” Sen. Patty Murray, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee chairwoman, tells ABC News. “I think it’s more of their problem than ours.” Senator Murray declined to put any odds on the Democrats’ chance of holding onto the Senate.

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