Tea Party Tally

Mitt Romney greets supporters after a rally in Naples, Fla., on Sunday. (Warren Richey/The Christian Science Monitor)

Newt Gingrich the tea party favorite? Not necessarily in Florida. (+video)

By Linda Feldmann, Staff writer / 01.30.12

Amid a sea of Romney supporters, there it flies: a bright yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” flag, the banner of the tea party movement – at a rally Sunday in downtown Naples, Fla., for the former governor of Massachusetts.

“I know that’s a contradiction,” says Cheryl Blackburn, the flag-waver. “But in the last few weeks I’ve decided [Mitt Romney] is the one to follow. He has the integrity, and when all is said and done, he’s the most electable.”

No major tea party leaders are backing Mr. Romney, who is seen as too willing to compromise on conservative principles. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is the candidate boasting the largest roster of tea party leaders in his camp. But the low-tax, small-government movement is highly decentralized, and among rank-and-file tea partyers, it’s anything goes. 

A straw poll of Florida tea party supporters taken Sunday night, following a tele-forum hosted by the Tea Party Patriots with three GOP presidential candidates, showed Mr. Gingrich ahead with 35 percent of the vote. Former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania came in second with 31 percent, and Romney was third with 18 percent. Texas Rep. Ron Paul, who is not campaigning in Florida and did not take part in the tele-forum, got 11 percent.

But more-scientific polls of likely Florida GOP primary voters show a different picture. A Quinnipiac poll released Monday shows Romney beating Gingrich among self-described tea party supporters, 40 percent to 35 percent (and winning among all Florida Republicans 43 percent to 29 percent). Although an NBC/Marist poll released over the weekend shows Gingrich slightly ahead of Romney among Florida tea party supporters, 36 percent to 34 percent, it also found Romney winning in Florida overall 42 percent to 27 percent.

The disparities may come in who self-identifies as a tea party supporter. Anyone can tell a pollster that they support tea party principles, but it’s the real die-hards who serve in leadership positions, take part in tele-forums, and attend tea party rallies.

Byron Donalds, a member of the leadership council of the Naples Tea Party, is still deciding between Gingrich and Mr. Santorum – and did not go near the Romney rally on Sunday.

“I believe Newt is brilliant,” says Mr. Donalds, who is running for Congress. “What we’re concerned about is, will he be disciplined enough, both in the campaign and in the White House.”

Donalds says he likes Santorum’s vision for the country but isn’t sure he can get through to voters in time. Regardless of what happens in Florida’s primary Tuesday, Donalds does not think Gingrich should drop out. And he is not concerned that Gingrich’s vow Sunday to “go all the way to the convention” will leave the party divided and unable to rally effectively around its nominee. After all, he says, “It helped Barack Obama to have a long primary against Hillary Clinton in ’08.”

Tea party activists see in Romney another John McCain – the Republican Party’s unsuccessful nominee in 2008. Like Romney, Senator McCain had run before unsuccessfully for the nomination, and he did not excite the party’s base.

The tea party movement, which formed soon after Mr. Obama took office, has provided a loose structure to conservative activism, but is aggressively decentralized. Still, with so many groups sprinkled around the state, it is a ready source of activism for a candidate seeking to tap into the movement’s energy.

Some tea party leaders see Romney as missing a big opportunity by not wooing tea partyers aggressively.

"Romney just totally ignored the tea party," Everett Wilkinson, chairman of the South Florida Tea Party, told the Sun-Sentinel. "Most of us are going with Newt, just because he's got an outreach program. His people are actively trying to get you to back him, making calls and setting up meetings and rallies.”

If Romney wins the Florida primary without the largest share of tea party supporters, it will be a first for this primary season. So far, exit polls show that the candidates who won the Iowa caucuses, New Hampshire primary, and South Carolina primary also won the most self-identified tea partyers.

The fact that three different candidates won the first three contests gives Gingrich more fuel for his argument that he should not give up if he loses Florida. It has been a volatile GOP primary season, and tea party supporters are far from monolithic.

Some, in fact, thoroughly reject the argument that Gingrich best represents their movement.

“Gingrich is a total hypocrite,” says Robert Rappaport, wearing a Tea Party Patriots T-shirt at the Romney rally in Naples. He’s for Santorum, but wanted to see what Romney had to say for himself.

“When Gingrich went after Romney on Bain Capital, I wrote him off,” says Mr. Rappaport, referring to the private-equity firm that Romney cofounded and that Gingrich has attacked for being “exploitive.” Rappaport also doesn’t think that Gingrich’s idea of setting up moon colonies makes any sense, given the nation’s huge debt. “And,” he adds, “I’m a space nut.”

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Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich attends the South Carolina Tea Party Convention in Myrtle Beach, S.C., Monday. (Eric Thayer/REUTERS)

Is tea party 'dead' if Newt Gingrich fails in South Carolina?

By Patrik Jonsson, Staff writer / 01.20.12

Since it was incorporated into the presidential primary calendar in 1980, South Carolina has been an important tool for the Republican establishment.

Coming after nominating contests in Iowa and New Hampshire, the reliably conservative Southern state has served as a check on those states' sometimes-eclectic tendencies, making sure an "establishment" candidate gets a chance to gain momentum. Indeed, since 1980, it has picked every eventual Republican nominee.

This year, however, South Carolina could do the exact opposite, upending the momentum of the "electable" candidate (Mitt Romney) and resuscitating the campaign of a man few in the GOP establishment want (Newt Gingrich). It would be a reversal potentially with significant meaning for the almost-forgotten tea party. 

Barely more than a year after it changed the face of Washington in historic midterm elections, the tea party has yet to leave any clear mark on the GOP nominating process. Iowa and New Hampshire have given momentum to Mr. Romney, whose perceived ideological squishiness is anathema to the tea party insurgency. The Jan. 31 primary in Florida could virtually seal his nomination.

But standing in his way is South Carolina, a tea party heartland where four of five congressmen, as well as the governor, are tea party supporters. As a result, South Carolina is emerging as a litmus test for the movement: If the tea party can't flex its political muscle here, then where can it?

“South Carolina has become the only possible firewall for the conservative base that hopes to stop the front-runner,” writes Matt Bai in a New York Times Magazine article. “If the discontented activists who stormed the party in 2010 can’t find a way to take out the establishment’s chosen nominee here, of all places, then they might as well slap those Romney/Rubio bumper stickers on their S.U.V.’s now and get it over with.”

A Romney win would be read read as a sign that the tea party is now a spent political force, or – perhaps even worse, to some tea partyers – has abandoned its principles to back an "electable" candidate. If a surging Mr. Gingrich, who has coveted the tea party mantle, manages to win, though, it could suggest that the movement retains some of its antiestablishment mojo. 

To be sure, Romney's inability to pull away from the field despite overwhelming establishment support might be one sign of how the tea party ethos has infused the GOP primary season, both in South Carolina and elsewhere. But the movement's inability so far to coalesce around any alternative has made Romney's path to the nomination easier, raising questions about whether the tea party has lost its influence. 

“It is almost impossible to believe and downright sickening to accept that in light of the clear mandate of the tea party that the GOP stands on the cusp of returning to ‘establishmentarianism,’ ” writes conservative columnist Kevin McCullough in an opinion piece for Fox News. “But it appears that for all the big talk, tens of thousands of local rallies, and the single largest non-inaugural event to ever occur on our nation’s mall, the tea party has died. Which is sad.”

For those seeking to stop a Romney nomination, however, South Carolina is an ideal stop for the campaign. Public Policy Polling's Thursday survey of likely Republican voters in the South Carolina primary found Gingrich had a 6 percentage point lead on Romney, 35-29. One reason: Tea party voters favored him, 46-21 percent.

In South Carolina, the tea party vote matters. A recent Winthrop poll found that 61 percent of South Carolinians approved of the tea party, compared with 20 percent of Americans nationwide.

“The polling that we do in states all over the country tells us that in Southern states most people who say they are Republicans basically embrace the same general philosophy as the tea party,” says Matt Towery, CEO of the Atlanta-based polling firm InsiderAdvantage.

The question is whether voters on the tea party fringe – those who, Mr. Towery says, simply have a "tea party state of mind" – will be willing to back Romney because he is seen as having a better chance of defeating Mr. Obama in November. 

“My overall impression has been that the tea party itself, in terms of an actual organized movement, is not that big," says Towery. "So the idea that a tea party group is going to tell most South Carolinians how to vote, that's been overblown by the national media.”

It raises the prospect of a tea party that behaves differently in local, state, and even congressional elections – where national "electability" is irrelevant – versus presidential elections. Tea party organizers across the country say they continue to revamp local GOP party structures in their image, laying groundwork for what they see as the more important goal of taking over state legislatures and boosting their role in Congress.

But a compromise with the party establishment on Romney could water down the intensity of the pugnacious grass-roots movement.

“In 2010, the Tea Party appeared to help Republican candidates, as best as we can tell with the available data,” writes political scientist John Sides on The Monkey Cage blog. “But it’s a much more open question whether the Tea Party’s energy and enthusiasm can be mustered for 2012, especially if Romney is the nominee.”

Already, some political analysts see signs of the tea party moderating its insurgent ways. In South Carolina, many local leaders have been courted by candidates like Gingrich and have risen as power brokers in their own right, with all the attendant problems – including the need for compromise – that participation brings, says Jeffrey Peake, a political scientist at Clemson University.

“The interesting and really odd thing here is that, yes, the tea party is frustrated with a Republican party it sees as talking out of both sides of its mouth,” says Professor Peake. But at the same time, activists have come to realize that “you cannot be this ideological and still govern effectively.”

In the end, the rise of the “tea party state of mind” alone – which has made this primary season such a rough ride for Romney – may ultimately prove the most powerful contribution to the nation's political direction, activists say.

Then again, with Gingrich showing signs of a come-from-behind victory in South Carolina Saturday, the tea party might yet gate crash the GOP's hoped-for coronation. 

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Republican presidential candidate former House Speaker Newt Gingrich autographs a book before a campaign stop at Global Security Services in Davenport, Iowa, Monday. (Chris Carlson/AP )

How Newt Gingrich won over the tea party

By Patrik Jonsson, Staff writer / 12.20.11

Newt Gingrich topping Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann, and even tea party champion Ron Paul in a 23,000-person tea party straw poll on Monday might seem like another headscratcher in the GOP's bewildering and manic rush to come up with a candidate to unseat President Obama.

The former House speaker tallied support from 31 percent of the tea partyers surveyed. The straw poll results came as national polls show Mr.Gingrich's support eroding. He's now in a dead heat with Mr. Romney, who has approached the tea party more cautiously.

Meanwhile, Representative Paul, sometimes called the godfather of the tea party, came in with only 3 percent of the straw poll vote. (Representative Bachmann received 28 percent, and former Massachusetts Governor Romney took 20 percent.)

Gingrich's record is long, complicated, and hardly the picture of philosophical rigor that the tea party movement seeks to employ in Washington. So, how did Gingrich win over the tea party?

Gingrich's appeal among tea partyers has its roots in a number of factors, including his early support of the movement, his scorched-earth maneuverings in the 1990s that helped guide the country toward balanced budgets and even surpluses, and the fact that he's being targeted for takedown by the same Republican establishment that the tea party has vowed to depose via electoral insurgency.

Gingrich can "express conservative views in ways that are, to that conservative audience, interesting and motivational, and those are his political assets,” says Merle Black, a political science professor at Emory University, in Atlanta. 

Democrats have wasted little time playing up Gingrich's tea party connections. Gingrich was “a tea party politician even before there was a tea party," Debbie Wasserman Schultz,chair of the Democratic National Committee, recently said. "He supported gutting funding for education and Medicare to fund a tax cut for millionaires and shut down the government over it, and those are the same policies he supports today,” she said.

Gingrich's recent slip in the  polls indicate that his record is susceptible to attacks, like the ads playing in Iowa that highlight his work as a consultant for mortgage giant Freddie Mac, which paid Gingrich $1.6 million over six years. Gingrich has said he was paid for “strategic advice,” not lobbying.

"I think as tea partyers concentrate on that ... they'll say, `Wow, this really isn't the guy that would represent our views,' " Romney told reporters in Charleston, S.C., on Saturday. "I think the tea party is anxious to have people who are outside Washington coming in to change Washington, as opposed to people who stayed in Washington for 30 years."

Yet Gingrich's tea party strategy, at least for now, keeps paying off.

Without the financial resources or campaign structure to keep up with Romney, Gingrich has actively courted tea party adherents, much as Herman Cain did before he left the race amid accusations of infidelity. Gingrich was an early signer of the Contract From America, a tea party position statement patterned on Gingrich's own Contract With America. Gingrich also threw his support behind the 2009 tax day rallies, helping to give early legitimacy to the tea party movement.

He courted tea party organizations so aggressively in South Carolina that Bachmann cried foul, alleging that the Gingrich campaign was paying for support. There is no evidence of that occurring, and Gingrich's campaign has flatly denied it, as have tea party members in that state.

Gingrich's campaign has hired local tea party leaders in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.

“Gingrich has been very clever in using the energy of the movement to propel his campaign in ways that Romney has just been tone deaf,” Michael Patrick Leahy, co-founder of the Nationwide Tea Party Coalition recently told Owen Brennan, writing in the conservative Weekly Standard magazine.

Gingrich is no tea party shoo-in. He will have to prove that he's more committed to conservative principles than he's let on in the past. And that he's seasoned and disciplined enough to take on Obama.

“There's certainly positions he's taken that would find a lot of support in the tea party, but the problem for Gingrich is that he's taken a lot of positions over the years, some of them consistent with the philosophy of the tea party, but others that would not be,” says Professor Black, at Emory.

The straw poll win for Gingrich came with cautious approval from Jenny Beth Martin, a Tea Party Patriots coordinator. “An overwhelming number of activists from around the nation showed they are serious about electing a candidate who advances tea party principles,” she said. "Just as in 2010, candidates like Newt Gingrich will need to show they will be fiscally responsible and protect the Constitution in the White House."

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A man dressed as Captain America poses as dozens of tea party supporters rallied in July near the US Capitol, in opposition to raising the national debt ceiling. Tea party backers have been holding fewer sign-waving rallies, a hallmark of their early opposition to bank bailouts and President Obama's health-care reform. But the movement is regrouping. (Jonathan Ernst/REUTERS/File)

Where did the tea party go? Into the trenches

By Patrik Jonsson, Staff writer / 12.16.11

The tea party energy that drove Republicans to a House victory last year seems for now the high point of the populist movement of "constitutional conservatives" that began with a TV reporter's rant about a proposed mortgage bailout in early 2009.

Taking heat for the congressional standoff over the debt ceiling this summer, and seen by many Americans as dangerously inflexible and even a cloak for a resurgence of xenophobia and social conservatism, the tea party has seen its general support dwindle in the polls even as its once boisterous street protests have quieted.

Yet for folks like Bill Evelyn, a founder of the State of Georgia Tea Party, the revolution has only begun. Having learned lessons from the past two years – including the necessity of vetting big-office candidates and trying to channel endorsements to avoid splitting tickets – the loosely organized tea party movement has thrown its anchor in the muddy trenches of local politics, reviving the GOP's moribund precinct nomination system, grooming candidates from the ground up, and setting into motion an audacious ground game patterned in part on the Democrat playbook of door-to-door canvasing and kitchen-table convincing.

As the tea party has become more politically savvy and organized, the problem activists face is mounting pushback from Democrats as well as establishment factions of the Republican Party, which have been at least partly able to raise questions about whether a tea party nation is really what America wants.

"When this whole thing started," says Mr. Evelyn, "the energy was unbelievable, but people didn't know about hard money, they didn't know the Bill of Rights was meant as a restraint on the federal government, and they voted for someone just because they had an 'R' or 'D' next to their name. Let me tell you, it's not like that now." He adds, "There's a radical change going on in the country, and the only people who don't realize it are in Washington."

Unseating President Obama remains a top tea party priority. While national media attention has focused on the shrinking field of Republican presidential candidates and the extent of their tea party bona fides, tea party activists say their strategy is to pack Republican precincts – the 1,500 building blocks of the US political party system. By doing so, the tea party hopes to win seats in state legislatures, the House, and, ultimately, the US Senate, where Democrats hold a four-seat majority and where 23 seats are up for grabs next year.

That process is already well under way in states such as Georgia. Nearly all GOP county and district committees now have tea party chairmen or key officials. The State of Georgia Tea Party's "tactical operations plan" is built around group mailing lists of as few as 20 people, with key activists in each precinct reaching out to five or six politically active families to help win local party board seats, and stack the state GOP convention with tea partyers.

"The funny thing about it," says Mr. Evelyn, "is it's working."

In Georgia, local radio hosts and small-town preachers are taking to the airwaves and pulpits, "teaching the morality of a representative republic," Evelyn says.

Such groundswells are happening outside the Peach State, too. Across the country, GOP conventions have seen an influx of new faces and candidates, pushed up by tea party takeovers of local precincts. In many places, resistance from longtime Republican activists at the local level has been futile, in part because the national party today focuses largely on state GOP committees and national advertising for messaging and candidate support.

As a result, political consultants now regularly tell hopeful politicos to "go visit the tea party ladies up the street" who wield the kind of small-town mailing lists that proved to be electoral gold in last year's elections. Dozens of modest tea party political action committees have sprung up to support state legislative races, where candidates need anywhere from $35,000 to $50,000 to be competitive.

In Ohio, a successful, though largely symbolic, referendum in November allowing Ohioans to opt out of the mandated federal health-care law was orchestrated by a tea party group running a savvy campaign, dependent on, as activists have said, "boots on the ground."

Last year, a disparate network of Indiana tea party groups nominated four separate candidates in what became a failed bid to take on Dan Coats, nominated by the GOP to replace retiring Sen. Evan Bayh, a Democrat. Lesson learned, Indiana tea party groups this fall organized their own state nominating convention to elect state Treasurer Richard Mourdock to challenge veteran Sen. Richard Lugar, who lost tea party support when he voted for the DREAM Act and confirmed Mr. Obama's two Supreme Court nominees. While the odds of unseating Senator Lugar are daunting, tea party activists are engaged in a  door-to-door canvassing effort across Indiana.

Similar efforts to nominate potential tea party senators are under way in Texas, Wisconsin, Ohio, Utah, Texas, and Florida.

The fundamentals of political activism have helped the tea party forge a pragmatic "synthesis" with the Republican Party, according to political scientist Dan Woodard of Clemson University, in South Carolina. (It's a shaky alliance that may eventually require a major intraparty reckoning if Republicans take over either the Senate or White House, or both, after next year's elections.)

But even with an improved ground game, the tea party no longer has the element of surprise, which some political experts say played a role in their success in the 2010 elections.

There are other problems. National polls indicate growing disagreement with the tea party. A November Pew poll showed that 27 percent of people disagree and 20 percent agree with the tea party – a near-flip from a year earlier, when 27 percent agreed and 22 percent disagreed.

"The Tea Party still don't seem to be in a majority position in the electorate," James Henson, a politics professor at the University of Texas in Austin, told Reuters recently. "The question is whether there will be uneven voter mobilization in the primaries. Will moderate Republicans show up in greater numbers? There is a lot of cleavage within the Republican Party at the national level, but the Tea Party may meet more resistance this time."

But detailed state polls tell a more nuanced story of tea party support.

A November poll by Clemson University showed that while only 12 percent of South Carolinians said they had attended tea party events, 38 percent of respondents said they generally support its principles of lower taxes, less regulation, and an end to deficit spending. Meanwhile, a mere 4 percent said they opposed the tea party. That meant that more than 50 percent showed at least some implicit sympathy, just by virtue of not being actively against the tea party, says Mr. Woodard at Clemson.

Among Republicans, the view from the precinct strategy is even rosier for the tea party, with two-thirds of Georgia Republicans, for example, agreeing with the "general views" of the tea party movement, according to a November poll by the Atlanta-based firm InsiderAdvantage.

"If you look at the 38 percent support the tea party gets [from the Clemson poll], and the fact that South Carolina voters say federal spending is their top concern, you can kind of put the pieces of the puzzle together to see that they're working hand in glove with the electorate," says Woodard. "Whatever they're saying, the electorate is echoing as well."

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Tea party activists hold a flag during a rally at the Capitol in Richmond, Va., in January. The Richmond Tea Party faces an audit from the city, prompting accusations of political favoritism. (Steve Helber/AP)

Tea party activists audited by city. Would that happen to Occupy protesters?

By Patrik Jonsson, Staff writer / 11.29.11

Tea party activists in Richmond, Va., watched as liberal Occupy Wall Street protesters paid nothing to use the same park that conservatives paid $8,500 to use for three of its "tax day" rallies. So the tea partyers pushed the issue by demanding a full refund of their fees.

Instead of a check, the Richmond Tea Party received a letter from the city saying it may have failed to pay taxes on ticket and food sales – and it should immediately prepare for an audit.

The city denies allegations that the audit warning was some kind of political retaliation or harassment. But for tea party groups, the city missive highlights long-running complaints of a double standard in the treatment of tea party activists.

The spat in Richmond also underscores how a new era of street protests are forcing cities and courts to reassess free-speech regulations. In many cases, they're trying to ensure that heat-of-the-moment decisions don't violate longstanding principles of public assembly and protest – or favor one set of protesters over another.
 
Local assessments of costs, public safety, and health concerns "cannot be a mask for an assault on protesters, either tea party or Occupy, for their viewpoint," says Gene Policinski, executive director of the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. "Ultimately, the courts will have to say: Is this [incident and others] truly a content- or viewpoint-neutral circumstance, or is this a hidden tactic to attack one group or another?"

While Occupy protesters say they're being punished by cities for engaging in legal civil disobedience, tea party activists have noted instances of public solidarity with the Occupy protests that suggest different free-speech standards based on political affiliation. Such solidarity has been expressed by mayors like Villaraigosa in Los Angeles and Dwight Jones in Richmond.

Tea party activists say they've paid their way and followed the law. But US taxpayers have had to underwrite a grand total of $13 million in Occupy Wall Street-related expenses since the movement began on Sept. 17, the Associated Press reported recently. By some estimates, Richmond taxpayers paid $7,000 to supply the Occupy protesters with portable toilets and other services during the two weeks they camped at Kanawha Plaza.

City spokeswoman Tammy Hawley told Fox News that allegations of political retaliation "are just completely unfounded." The tea party group, she said, was one of 700 groups and businesses that came up during a review as having paid no excise taxes for admissions, lodging, and meals in 2010.

Richmond tea party activists say they had made it clear to the city that they collected no such revenues during their rallies. “The Richmond Tea Party stands for constitutional adherence, and clearly this has been unequal treatment under the law,” tea party member Colleen Owens wrote on the Right Side News website. What's more, she wrote, "We challenged the mayor’s unequal treatment between groups and he responds with even more unequal treatment.”

Law scholars have been in disagreement about the extent to which the Occupy encampments are a legitimate free-speech venue. Of course, civil disobedience is a long-honored form of protest, but when it's been practiced through long-term camping in public parks, that's challenged officials and opened them up to charges of preferential treatment. This is despite the fact that, in many of those same places, mayors have ordered riot police to run protesters off.

Complaining about what seemed to be political preference expressed by the mayor of Portland, Ore., for the Occupy movement, Lewis & Clark Law School professor Jim Huffman said recently that the decision to bend the city's no-camping ordinance was "content-related."

"The mayor was so forthcoming in his agreement with their position," Professor Huffman told the Willamette Week website. "The tea party and lots of other groups have jumped through hoops, applied for the permits, and then done their rallies or whatever they wanted to do."

Courts have already begun to address the sorts of legal challenges to public assembly that haven't been seen since the civil rights and antiwar protests of the 1960s. On Nov. 23, US District Judge Richard Kyle ruled that Occupy protesters in Minneapolis can "assemble any hour of the day," but that local officials can also enforce an overnight-sleeping ban.

“Hence, the parties are going to have to ‘learn to live’ with one another," Judge Kyle wrote.

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Firefighter Tom Sullivan campaigns against Issue 2 outside a polling location in Strongsville, Ohio, on Tuesday. Ohioans decided not to limit collective bargaining for 350,000 unionized public workers. The issue toppped the Election Day list of ballot questions before the state's voters. (Mark Duncan/AP)

From personhood amendment to Ohio Issue 2, not a banner election for tea party

By Patrik Jonsson, Staff writer / 11.09.11

At first glance, the tea party movement that crashed the 2010 congressional midterm election took an elbow to the nose in Election 2011.

Two tea party-backed candidates – one in Michigan and one in Arizona – were dethroned in rare recalls. Voters in Ohio rejected a law, pushed by small-government conservatives – that limited unions' collective bargaining power, and voters in Maine smashed the Republican-led ban on Election-Day voter registration.

Those and other developments suggest voters recoiled a bit from their stance in the 2010 election, when tea-party-backed conservatives won power at the state level and took control of the US House of Representatives. Subsequent political standoffs over the national debt limit and rising tensions in Washington over the direction of the country appear to have soured the public.

But if the tea party is chastened, it is not beaten.

There were tea-flavored victories large and small, as well as hints as to what independent voters – who swung big for Barack Obama in 2008 and equally big for Republicans in 2010 – like and don't like about the conservative small-government movement.

"If you look at the recall of [a tea party-backed state representative] in Michigan and [tea party hero Sen. Russell Pearce, architect of Arizona's get-tough immigration law] in Arizona, I think it certainly shows there are serious limits to the power of the tea party this year. Or, put differently, the tea party has successfully roused an opposition movement to it," says Charles Franklin, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin, in Madison.

But even in Ohio, where the attack on collective bargaining went down, voters approved a measure that renounced the part of Mr. Obama's health-care reform law that requires people to buy health insurance – and by a bigger margin than the collective bargaining measure. 

"What's striking in Ohio is that Governor [John] Kasich lost his signature issue but Obama lost his signature issue on the same day, on the same ballot, among the same voters," says Professor Franklin.

Gubernatorial races, political recalls, and ballot initiatives ranging from voter rights to culture-war issues – they all took place Tuesday as millions of Americans cast ballots to determine issues ranging from worker rights in Ohio to whether Atlanta residents can buy beer on Sunday.

Results from Tuesday's election, writ large, were more muddled than declarative, say political analysts. For example, while Republicans seem poised to gain a super-majority in Virginia by taking control of the Senate, the Mississippi "personhood" ballot measure, an anti-abortion proposal that would give legal status to a fertilized egg, failed. And while Democrats retained the governorship in Kentucky, that's hardly a boost for Obama and the Democrats, because Kentucky is likely to remain firmly in the GOP column in national elections.

Combed even finer, Tuesday's results teased out two distinct tea party tangents – liberterian versus Christian conservatives – that may hint at the movement's future prospects. In Mississippi, social culture-war issues, like the "personhood" initiative, fared worse Tuesday than did a "personal liberty" ballot measure that limits eminent domain (the ability of government to seize private property), which voters approved handily. That result fits with the tea party's libertarian strain, says Franklin.

Those results hint that culture-war issues "aren't the issues Americans want to hear about right now," says Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University, in Atlanta. "When Republicans in the House spend time on things like defunding Planned Parenthood, that sends the wrong message to these swing voters."

At the same time, the results could offer some wind in the sails for Obama, whom New York Times statistics blogger Nate Silver recently gave only a 50-50 chance of reelection amid high unemployment and a gloomy economic outlook.

The lessons of Election 2011 may be greater for the Republican Party and its wing of tea party conservatives than for Democrats, says Mr. Abramowitz. "Ultimately, these results don't tell us very much," he says, "but there is a hint here that if the Republicans nominate a [presidential] candidate seen as too extreme, too far to the right, that could be damaging."

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Republican presidential candidate, Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., speaks at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, Thursday, Oct. 20, 2011. (Jeff Chiu/AP)

Is Michele Bachmann dragging the tea party down with her?

By Peter Grier, Staff writer / 10.29.11

Is Michele Bachmann dragging down the tea party as a whole as she sinks in the polls?

Don’t look at us – we’re not the first to raise this question. We’re just repunditing an idea from Ned Ryun, head of the tea party group American Majority.

On Thursday, Mr. Ryun posted a piece on the American Majority blog entitled, “Bachmann’s Floundering Can Damage Tea Party.” In it, he argues that since Rep. Bachmann won the Ames, Iowa straw poll her campaign has been hampered by a loss of staff, poor fundraising, and an apparent lack of direction. He anticipates that she will shift even further right in coming weeks as she competes for votes in conservative Iowa, straying from the core tea party message of fiscal responsibility.

Election 101: Ten facts about Michele Bachmann and her presidential bid

Her campaign has become less about government reform and more about her personal effort to stay relevant and sell books, according to Ryun.

“It’s time for Michele Bachmann to go,” wrote Ryun.

First, props to Ryun for sampling the classic Dr. Seuss book, “Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now!” We read that to our kids to try to get them to go to bed. Interestingly, Dr. Seuss himself apparently meant the book as a political allegory about Richard Nixon and Watergate.

OK, maybe Ryun didn’t link Bachmann with Nixon on purpose. But he’s right that her polls are sinking.

She’s fallen to 3.8 percent in national polls of prospective GOP voters, according to the RealClearPolitics rolling average. That puts her dangerously close to the Santorum Line – the 2 percent threshold, from which a campaign teeters over the abyss.

She’s no longer doing well in Iowa, either, which for her might be even worse news than her national numbers. Her flavor-of-the-month period began after her win in the Ames straw poll. She was born in Iowa, comes from a nearby state, and has made Iowa the strategic focus of her campaign. But at the moment she’s in sixth place in Iowa, too, with only about 7 percent of the potential Iowa caucus vote.

But is she hurting the tea party as a whole? There’s no evidence of that at all. Yes, she’s head of the House Tea Party Caucus, but do voters really look to her as the embodiment of the movement? We doubt it – Rick Perry and Herman Cain have tea party links too. Cain’s doing great, to the point where he’s unofficially graduated from flavor-of-the-month to phenomenon-of-the-quarter. Would Ryun argue this boosts the tea party in total?

Let’s look at the polls. According to a Pew Research survey from October 24, 32 percent of the US public supports the tea party at least somewhat, while 44 percent oppose it.

Those aren’t great numbers – Occupy Wall Street does a bit better in the same poll – but they don’t appear to be reflective of a sinking trend line. A Pew survey from August came in with about the same results. And that’s when Bachmann was doing much better.

Bachmann herself thinks the American Majority slam was a Rick Perry plot.

“People have told us that these are Perry supporters and they went out with this and this was meant to be a stealth move and it was clumsy,” said Bachmann on CNN’s “The Situation Room”.

Bachmann campaign officials point out that the tea party movement is highly decentralized and no one person or one organization can claim to speak for it. They say she won’t be getting out of the race just because one individual tells her to.

No, but unless her polls get better, Iowa Republicans might send her the same message in January. Given the focus she’s put on the Hawkeye State, it seems unlikely her campaign could survive a single-digit showing in the caucuses.

Election 101: Ten facts about Michele Bachmann and her presidential bid

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Republican presidential hopeful businessman Herman Cain speaks as former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman listens at the Republican presidential debate at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. (Scott Eells/REUTERS)

Tea party fuels rise of Herman Cain. So how can it be racist?

By Patrik Jonsson, Staff writer / 10.13.11

Back in March, when he was simply one among many candidates vying for the top spot in the GOP presidential contest, former pizza magnate and Atlanta talk show host Herman Cain wrote about his relationship with tea party voters: "Could the people who are part of this massive citizens' movement be looking past the color of my skin?"

As Mr. Cain surged for the first time to the top of the GOP field in one poll on Thursday, buttressed by strong tea party support, his rhetorical question appears prophetic. A new NBC-Wall Street Journal poll gave Cain a 69 percent "favorable" score among tea-party backers.

Most tea partyers credit the blunt, plainspoken, and happily iconoclastic Cain for being "real" and "not a politician" as the cornerstones of their support. But to many who decry the charge that the tea party is racist, Cain's rise is a none-too-subtle pushback.

"I find it funny that the 'racist' tea party is now rallying behind a black candidate," said one female tea party adherent from Texas who responded to the NBC-Wall Street Journal poll.

Cain's surge this week provided a new twist on the notion that the tea party is merely hiding its racism behind a black candidate, as some critics have contended.

"Part of this debate, and what people are having a problem with, is how Cain's tea party support is tied to groups of people who don't recognize systemic racism," says Andra Gillespie, a political science professor at Emory University in Atlanta. "And that feeds into this 'token' argument, that he's being duped or exploited by the tea party in order to prove that they're not racist."

For his part, Cain has defended the tea party, saying its supporters are simply ideologically aligned with his own beliefs that, while racism may still play a role in America, it's no longer a defining factor guiding each individual's plight.

"People sometimes hold themselves back because they want to use racism as an excuse for them not being able to achieve what they want to achieve," Cain told CNN's Candy Crowley this week.

To many liberals, Cain's viewpoints peg him as a "bad apple," in the words of singer Harry Belanfonte. Other black commentators hit harder: Cain is marketing himself as "the dark-faced puppet of those who are afraid to touch the issue [of race]," writes Syracuse University professor Boyce Watkins on the website, News One.

But to many tea party activists, those charges come off sounding desperate and offensive. Moreover, they say, the idea that Cain is a "puppet" ignores how tea party conservatives helped elect an Indian-American, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley; a Hispanic, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida; and Rep. Tim Scott, a conservative African-American from a largely white district in South Carolina.

Some analysts suggest Cain, if he gets the nomination, won't be able to peel off more than 15 percent of the black voting bloc. In addition, some conservative whites may ultimately be turned off by a black candidate.

Indeed, there is evidence that some tea partyers, by a higher margin than most Republicans, view blacks more negatively than they do whites.

A 2010 survey by the University of Washington has been cited as the strongest indication of a racial dimension to the tea party. In that survey, 73 percent of "strong" supporters of the tea party said blacks would be as well off as whites if they just tried harder, compared to 33 percent of strong tea party opponents who thought the same thing. "Support for the tea party makes one 25 percent more likely to be racially resentful than those who don't support the tea party," Christopher Parker, the author of the survey, concluded.

But the depth and consequence of that resentment is clearly being tested by Cain.

He is presenting the political right with a unique opportunity, says Professor Gillespie at Emory. "The best thing that Herman Cain and other black Republicans can do is to push the Republican Party to be more cognizant of how they frame issues" in order to appeal to conservative blacks who, as of now, don't trust the GOP.

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In this July 14 file photo, Hank Williams Jr. performs during the recording of a promo for ESPN's broadcasts of 'Monday Night Football,' in Winter Park, Fla. (John Raoux/AP/File)

Hank Williams Jr. cites tea party in defense of 'Hitler' comments

By Patrik Jonsson, Staff writer / 10.04.11

The “Hitler” signs that popped up at some early tea party rallies had an echo on Monday, when country singer Hank Williams Jr. likened President Obama to the late Nazi dictator.

Mr. Williams, a tea party supporter, appeared on “Fox & Friends” on Monday morning. When asked about his pick for president next year, he pointed to a golf game between Mr. Obama and House Speaker John Boehner this summer, saying it was "one of the biggest political mistakes ever."

"It'd be like Hitler playing golf with [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu," he said, adding that he considered Obama and Vice President Joe Biden "the enemy."

As word of the remarks spread, ESPN yanked its intro to “Monday Night Football,” which featured a takeoff of Williams’s hit song “All My Rowdy Friends.” The song has been an “MNF” staple for 20 years and has earned Williams four Emmys. ESPN has not said whether it will use that music again.

As many tea party protesters have learned, drawing analogies between the man who ordered millions of Jews killed and modern-day US politicians may be potent political theater, but it’s not a good way to broaden your base.

From its beginning in 2009, some critics have called the tea party "racist" and "extremist" because of various signs at tea party rallies and allegations that a racial epithet was directed at black members of Congress from a tea party crowd during passage of the health-care reform law.

The tea party eventually toned down its sign rhetoric. It activists maintain that the core of the movement is about peacefully bringing constitutional principles and fiscal responsibility back to Washington.

Williams himself alluded to the tea party in a statement that partially apologized for his comments (“I have always respected the office of the President,” he wrote).

“Every time the media brings up the tea party it’s painted as racist and extremists – but there’s never a backlash – no outrage to those comparisons," he said.

In the statement, Williams also buckled down on the point he had been trying to make: that the American people are tired of business as usual in Washington, from both Democrats and Republicans.

"Working class people are hurting – and it doesn’t seem like anybody cares. When both sides are high-fiving it on the ninth hole when everybody else is without a job – it makes a whole lot of us angry. Something has to change. The policies have to change," he said.

Williams’s political commentary on “Fox & Friends” is likely to discomfit many Americans, including some who may be tired of politics as usual.

"As an American, to compare any American President to Hitler is disturbing and speaks volumes to the hate these media clowns spew forth every day," said one commenter at The Tennessean news website in Nashville, where Williams is considered the heir to the king of country music, the late Hank Williams. "If you don't like the President vote him out but to say things like that just makes the south look like it always has ... stupid!"

But others said Williams shouldn't have to apologize for, as he himself said, having "strong opinions." More than 60 percent of respondents in an informal poll on The Tennessean site said ESPN was wrong to call a foul in using "All My Rowdy Friends."

Country musicians don’t tend to do well when broaching politics. When the Dixie Chicks told an audience in 2003 that the band was "ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas," the group was quickly blocked from a majority of country radio stations.

But Williams, who campaigned for John McCain in 2008, may find more sympathy in Middle America for his comments than the Dixie Chicks did, writes The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's Jay Bookman.

"I hope this doesn’t become a career boost for Williams, but I can imagine it happening. I can imagine DJs putting his songs on air because of what he said, rather than despite it. I can imagine him becoming a martyred hero in certain eyes, and that reality is more troubling than what some in-over-his-head, not-so-bright, trying-to-live-up-to-a-stereotype entertainer had to say on national TV."

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