Tea Party Tally
What has the tea party wrought? Tea Party Tally keeps tabs on tea party-affiliated candidates whether they soar or stumble and the movement's effect on the country and Election 2012.
Republican U.S. Senate candidate Rand Paul and his wife Kelley wave to supporters as they arrive for his victory celebration in Bowling Green, Ky., Tuesday. After the tea party's big win, will they have to learn to compromise in the Senate? (Ed Reinke/AP)
Rand Paul's big Senate test: Can tea party compromise?
Rand Paul's victory in the Kentucky race gives perhaps the tea party's most ardent booster a seat in the Senate. He is joined by Florida's Marco Rubio and a wave of Republicans swept into the House on tea party momentum.
It gives the tea party its first real opportunity to grab the levers of power. It could also jam the congressional works worse than ever.
Mr. Paul, whose at-times controversial comments didn't prevent him from cruising to what looks like a comfortable win over Democrat Jack Conway, vowed in his victory speech to establish a tea party caucus in the Senate (the House already has one) and "send a message" to what he called "the world's most deliberative body."
But converting the tea party's newfound populist power into actual governing will be a tough task, especially in the august, complicated, and sometimes dysfunctional machinery of the US Senate.
How tea partyers such as Mr. Paul, Mr. Rubio, Dan Coats in Indiana, and John Boozman in Arkansas will react when they begin deliberations on cutting deficit spending, for example, is a major question, political scientists say. It will test the breadth of the tea party's message and even its relevance to the 2012 presidential election.
"There's a huge question of what governing looks like if tea party folks get elected to the Senate, where each individual can tie the Senate into knots by themselves," Charles Franklin, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin, told the Monitor before Election Day. "It's hard to see how Congress adopts a governing program that would satisfy most of the people in the tea party movement."
Even as Paul promised to ask the Senate to deliberate on stopping deficit spending, Sen. Jim DeMint, who won reelection as a tea party favorite in South Carolina, struck a more cautious note. While saying he would join Rand's proposed tea party caucus, DeMint added that, "I don't want to spend the next six years saying no."
The degree of separation between Rand and DeMint represents two emerging poles of the tea party. Rand represents the more fervently ideological wing of the a potential tea party caucus – standing firm on principles. DeMint might lean toward greater practicality, wanting Washington to move forward on meaningful fiscal policy that will get the economy going again.
A recent Pew Research Center poll noted that a majority of Americans actually don't want to see federal spending frozen.
"Many still mistake the tea party as one large group, sharing common interests, which our research shows is incorrect," write David Kirby and Emily Ekins in a recent Cato Institute column.
Whether the new Senate dynamics actually help Washington get the economy going again or whether it gridlocks meaningful legislation could play a role in the 2012 presidential election, which, for many tea partyers, is the movement's ultimate prize.
"With the Senate closely divided, Republicans will have to work with Democrats to get things done," writes Kate Zernike in The New York Times. "Tea Party lawmakers who refuse to go along may find they become irrelevant – certainly not the goal of all the noise and passion of the last two years."
The libertarian advocacy group Freedom Works, which has worked to get many tea party candidates elected, says the GOP should follow Paul's lead and not compromise on core tea party values such as cutting taxes and reining in spending. "The success of the GOP will not merely benefit from the Tea Party vote, it will depend on it," the organization writes in a press release.
But DeMint hinted at the idea that it will largely be up to Democrats to move toward the center in order to make room for compromise, as the GOP aims to flex some tea party muscle in upcoming debate.
"The big problem we have in Washington right now is that the Democrats are so tied into special interests that they cannot move back to the center, [meaning that] we can't work together on how to cut budget spending," says DeMint."I'm not sure how this is going to sort out."
U.S. Republican Senate candidate Marco Rubio (L) waves beside his daughter Amanda during his victory speech at a rally in Coral Gables, Florida, Tuesday. Rubio and fellow winning tea party candidates Rand Paul and Marco Rubio have helped propel the GOP to the top of midterm elections. (Hans Deryk/Reuters)
How the tea party helped GOP find a path to Election Day successes
Concerns that the nascent tea party movement would hamper a return to relevancy for Republicans are quickly giving way as Election Day results suggest that in fact, the decentralized conservative protest movement helped give the GOP a roadmap to success.
"The biggest tea party is today," said Sen. Jim DeMint, a big tea party favorite, in a victory speech in his homestate of South Carolina. On Tuesday night, Rand Paul, a Senate candidate from Kentucky, called his victory a "tea party tidal wave."
Tea party-supported Republicans Marco Rubio in Florida (US Senate), John Boozman in Arkansas (US Senate), and Nikki Haley in South Carolina (governor) also were coasting to convincing victories Tuesday, even as one of the most famous tea party candidates, Christine O'Donnell, failed in her bid in to win a Delaware Senate seat. Glen Urqhart, also a tea party candidate in Delaware, lost his bid for a House seat, as well.
But more importantly, the tea party, which at first worried and, frankly, scared both Democrats and mainstream Republicans, helped to give roiling anger over the economy and stubbornly high unemployment figures a national vent. Exit polls Tuesday gave the GOP a clear edge on turnout and passion, pointing the way for a Republican-controlled House of Representatives.
At 9:17, CNN predicted that Republicans had won control of the House of Representatives.
"The primary effect of the tea party for was that it generated enormous intensity for Republicans, and for Republican candidates up and down the ballot," Whit Ayres, a veteran GOP pollster, told the Wall Street Journal's Gerald Sieb.
Of course, the general depressive effect of the economy on Democrat turnout, an unpopular health-care bill, and President Obama's own leadership stumbles played big roles in Republicans' quick reversal of the Democrats' coalescing victory in 2008.
Though scorned by many liberals, the loosely organized tea party – which has among its principles an audit of the federal reserve, repeal of the national health-care law, and tax cuts – managed to capture the mood of the country, with some polls indicating that as many as 48 percent of Americans had a somewhat positive view of the movement.
"The Tea Party victories by Rand Paul of Kentucky and Marco Rubio of Florida, underscored the extent to which Republicans and Democrats alike may have underestimated the power of the Tea Party, a loosely-affiliated, at times ill-defined, coalition of grass-roots libertarians and disaffected Republicans," writes Michael Cooper in the New York Times.
To be sure, some Republicans, including former Bush strategist Karl Rove, have scoffed at the unpolished caliber of candidates – including Ms. O'Donnell in Delaware – the tea party has supported in some races. (O'Donnell's loss could contribute to the Senate remaining in Democratic hands.) And it's still far from clear to what extent tea party-linked candidates will be able to force Congress to hold the line on government spending once they're in office.
But during the vociferous health-care debate and after the surprise election of Scott Brown to Sen. Ted Kennedy's Massachusetts seat in February, many Republicans chose to embrace the cantankerous and often unwieldy tea party message going into Tuesday's election.
In August, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky told NBC's "Meet the Press" that the tea party's rise indicated "broad public support for doing something about too much spending and too much debt."
Sen. McConnell went on to say: "I think [the tea party] has been extremely helpful. It's produced a lot of excitement in our primaries, and I think it's going to produce victories in November."
Tea party members at an election night party in Washington, Tuesday. European liberals have called tea partyers stupid, ignorant, gullible – and worse. (Ann Heisenfelt/AP)
Vote 2010: Why European liberals see the tea party as 'a circus of fools'
You thought a lot of American liberals don't quite cotton to the tea party? You should hear the Europeans.
From Britain to Germany, newspaper editorialists – albeit for mostly liberal and leftist party publications – have in turn called those who sympathize with the small-government, antitax tea party movement that sprung up in early 2009 "ill-educated," "drooling imbeciles," "rednecks," and even a "traveling circus of fools."
To be sure, going into Election Day many Americans also had choice adjectives to describe tea party folks. The allegation that the tea party is a Republican fringe over-fixated on race and the past is at the heart of much of the criticism against the movement in the US.
VIDEO: Voices of the Tea Party
But the fiery European epithets have four very different, and key, causes:
1) Some Brits, holding on to a decades-old characterization of the former colonials as gullible and naive, still view Americans as obtuse and at times irresponsible upstarts on the global stage. The Financial Times' Clive Crook summed the sentiment up in a Monday column about the changing – and, in his view, worrying – dynamics of the American electorate on Election Day. He called the tea party driven by "pure stupid nativism."
2) The American two-party system is fundamentally foreign to Europeans. "US politics has almost always had disorganized, decentralized movements like the Tea Parties – and they have had a significant impact," writes John Judis in the New Republic. "In Europe's multiparty systems, movements cohere more easily into parties, but in the US, the two-party system discourages the transition from movement to party except when the movement takes over one of the two parties."
3) As tea party-inspired groups begin forming in countries like Britain and Israel (there's now a European Tea Party Facebook page devoted to fight "the burden of big government"), many Europeans are worried that growing frustration over large debt burdens, pensions, and immigration could coalesce around a broader tea party-style movement.
"Rather than commend the Tea Party movement as a refreshing and enviable display of American political energy, European media elites have launched an all-out propaganda assault on the movement and its supporters," writes Soeren Kern, a senior analyst at the Madrid-based Grupo de Estudios Estrategicos on the Pajamas Media news site. "The main tactic has been to seek to discredit Tea Party sympathizers as ... the exact opposite of ideal European citizens and their elite masters."
4) For many Europeans, however, concerns about the tea party center less on how the movement will affect what America does and more on what it won't do in the world. Tea party stalwart Rep. Ron Paul of Texas can only reinforce that fear with his foreign-policy philosophy: “A return to the traditional US foreign policy of active private engagement but government noninterventionism is the only alternative that can restore our moral and fiscal health.”
"The world needs cooperative leadership – leadership based on a will for dialogue in financial policies as well as in other areas," counters Norwegian Labor Party Secretary Raymond Johansen on the Huffington Post. "Inward-looking austerity and Tea Party populism is not the answer, neither for the US nor for Europe."
A sticker to support Prop 19, a measure to legalize marijuana in the state of California, is seen on a power pole in San Francisco, Oct. 28. (Mike Blake/Reuters)
Marijuana legalization: why tea party might support Prop. 19
Ronald Reagan didn't start the war on drugs, but he made it a mainstay of his presidency. So it would make sense for tea party members who are inspired by Mr. Reagan to oppose Proposition 19 in California, which would legalize marijuana possession.
But conventional wisdom and current small-government electoral fervor may meet in a strange (and potentially smoky) place on Election Day.
Instead of opposing Prop. 19, parts of the tea party – including some of its stalwarts like Tom Tancredo in Colorado and Rand Paul in Kentucky – have hailed drug legalization as an ideological linchpin in the fight between progressivism (a broader role for government) and the ideals of states' rights (get the government out of living rooms).
Whether or not tea party conservatives and libertarians – the two main strands of the powerful political insurgency movement – will help put Prop. 19 over the top is an open question. But some commentators are seeing anecdotal support among many tea partyers for marijuana legalization in California.
In the end, the Prop. 19 vote could provide a key insight into whether the tea party can breach the GOP's culture-war walls – or whether law-and-order drug enforcement will remain the conservative party line.
"I thought Prop. 19 was going to be more of a liberal Democratic thing, and then suddenly I find, hey, I'm wrong," says Leo Laurence, a former California sheriff's deputy and currently a writer and pro-legalization activist at Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP). "I had written that the tea party would probably oppose it, but then I got phone calls saying, 'No, you're wrong on that.' Tea party people have a very strong position that the government has no right to get involved in your private affairs ... when you're not hurting yourself or somebody else. And that's basically Prop. 19 in a nutshell."
If Prop. 19 passes and the Obama Justice Department challenges it in court, as it has promised to do, the tea party could paint a crackdown as more evidence of an overarching government that has little respect for the rights of states to self-determine.
Yet the poll numbers don't necessarily indicate that things will turn out this way. Republicans oppose the measure by 65 percent to 25 percent, and those over age 60 are against it by 63 percent to 29 percent, according to the nonpartisan Field Poll.
Don Polson, a columnist and Realtor in Tehama County, Calif., chimes in with a more traditional assessment of marijuana legalization, even citing a tea party group: "Tea Party Patriots and the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association say: Prop 19 NO [F]or obvious reasons pot should not be further encouraged among our young people," he writes in the Red Bluff Daily News.
What's more, overall support for the initiative has been flagging amid opposition from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) and most of the state's newspaper editorial boards. Down from a peak of 49 percent support, polls now put it at 42 percent, again according to the Field Poll.
Still, as the marijuana-legalization movement matures, it could become a rallying cry for tea party-style politicians. When Mr. Tancredo, a gubernatorial candidate in Colorado, made a speech in support of drug legalization, his poll numbers shot up.
Even some outright Republicans have eased their opposition to marijuana legalization, with support growing by 7 percent since 2005, according to Gallup. Nearly 50 percent of independents – whom both parties are energetically wooing – support legalization, also according to Gallup.
"The Tea Party movement runs parallel to the Republican Party, which traditionally has taken a very firm law-and-order, just-say-no approach to the drug question," writes the Richmond (Va.) Times-Dispatch in an editorial. "But the Tea Party movement also has a strong libertarian streak, and its live-and-let-live approach to issues of personal morality troubles social and religious conservatives who think government should manage people's private lives."
In a July story entitled "Why the tea party is the hidden force behind legal pot," Esquire magazine pointed to the growth of libertarianism as well as concerns about Mexico's violent drug war as reasons for the shift among many US conservatives toward legalization. Mexican drug cartels make up to 70 percent of their profits from illicit sales of marijuana in the United States.
More simply, "People don't want government telling them what they can use to unwind with after work," Mike Meno of the Marijuana Policy Project told Esquire.
But Charles Postel, a political historian at San Francisco State University, says the emerging model of tea party-GOP relations can be most clearly seen in Texas. There, the tea party-inspired platform of the Republican Party espouses libertarian economic ideals but vows to ratchet up marijuana misdemeanor offenses to felonies.
"There's a very strong conservative tradition in this country, and part of it has been libertarian on questions of the economy [but] has always had a very strong repressive streak on other issues," says Mr. Postel. "I don't think it's ever been easy to separate those two things."
Republican US Senate candidate Rand Paul appears with his father US Rep. Ron Paul, (R) of Texas, during a campaign event in Kentucky. Going into next week’s election, tea party favorite Rand Paul is clearly ahead. A recent lengthy article in the Atlantic magazine describes the elder Mr. Paul as “the tea party’s brain.” (Ed Reinke/AP)
Where does the tea party philosophy come from? One hint is in its name.
It’s still unclear what contribution the tea party movement – its grass-roots element, its behind-the-scenes funding apparatus, and the surging national candidates it’s brought forward – will make to the good of the republic.
But one thing for sure: It’s a dream come true for political science departments around the world. It may well do for poli sci what Watergate heroes Woodward and Bernstein did for journalism. Let a thousand doctoral dissertations bloom!
In a nutshell, the movement’s philosophy can be summed up in its name and imagery: “Taxation without representation,” which in the 21st century means the size and complexity of government. Strip away all the sillier elements (President Obama’s birth certificate) and sometimes threatening fringe (guns and occasional hints of racism) and that’s pretty much it.
Does it line up with big business types pushing the same agenda for many years through K Street lobbyists and Chambers of Commerce? (That’s you, Koch brothers.) It matters not to most tea partyers.
Many news outlets (including the Monitor) have tried to figure out the tea party, not an easy task since there is no such thing as the “Tea Party” per se. It’s more scattered than organized in any traditional sense, and sometimes there are conflicts within the movement.
The “Tea Party of Nevada,” for instance, has its own candidate running for the US Senate even though GOP candidate Sharron Angle – who may well send Senate majority leader Harry Reid into involuntary retirement – has been endorsed by Sarah Palin and the Tea Party Express.
STORY: Tea Party 101: Who are its followers and what do they want?
Two recent articles attempt to look at the historical roots of the tea party movement.
In the magazine The Atlantic, senior editor Joshua Green lays out the case for concluding that US Rep. Ron Paul (R) of Texas is “the tea party’s brain.”
When the Great Recession hit, Mr. Green writes, libertarian Paul “was ready and waiting.”
“He is not the Tea Party’s founder (there isn’t one), or its culturally resonant figure (that’s Sarah Palin), but something more like its brain, its Marx or Madison,” he writes. “He has become its intellectual godfather – and its actual father, in the case of its brightest rising star, his son Rand Paul, Kentucky’s GOP Senate nominee.”
“The Tea Party has overrun the Republican Party everywhere from Alaska to Kentucky to Maine, and a version of Paul’s bill to audit the Federal Reserve just passed the Senate unanimously en route to becoming law,” Green reports. “Today, on matters of economic politics, Paul is at least as significant as any of the Republicans he shared the stage with in the 2007 South Carolina [presidential primary] debate. And has anyone noticed that he’s a fixture on Fox News?”
For Ron Paul, a libertarian gadfly within the Republican Party, his political philosophy was formed when he was in medical school and he read Austrian economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek’s 1944 work “The Road to Serfdom.” This led him to Mr. Hayek’s mentor, Ludwig von Mises, and to Mr. von Mises’s argument against any government interference in free-market capitalism.
Many tea partyers (indeed, many Americans) may not be familiar with Hayek or von Mises, but the work of these Austrian economists undergirds much of what the tea party movement is all about, writes Green. “With the Tea Party gathering force, [Ron] Paul is at last where he has always wanted to be: in the vanguard of a national movement.”
Now flip over to the New Yorker and Sean Wilentz’s recent piece titled “Confounding Fathers: The Tea Party’s Cold War Roots.” (OK, OK. The Atlantic and the New Yorker may be seen as elitist publications, but let that go for now.)
Mr. Wilentz, a Princeton University historian, goes straight for Fox News commentator Glenn Beck, whom he describes as “both a unifying figure and an intellectual guide” for the tea party movement.
But it’s not just Mr. Beck’s pro-tea party broadcast shtick, which draws millions of listeners and viewers every week. Or the “Beck University” he launched last summer, an online program offering a “unique learning experience bringing together a variety of experts in American History.” (One month for $9.95 or a full year for $74.95.)
Wilentz’s point is that “Beck’s version of American history relies on lessons from his own acknowledged inspiration, the late right-wing writer W. Cleon Skousen, and also restates charges made by the John Birch Society’s founder, Robert Welch.”
And, he adds, “The popularity of Beck’s broadcasts, which now reach two million viewers each day, has brought neo-Birchite ideas to an audience beyond any that Welch or Skousen might have dreamed of.”
Wilentz walks the reader through the history of Birch-derived thinking and political activity through the post-war era to the present.
Will everybody agree with his analysis or conclusions, or with Green’s in The Atlantic? Of course not. But they’re a good place to start in trying to understand one of the most interesting political phenomena in recent decades.
STORY: Tea Party 101: Who are its followers and what do they want?
Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin shakes hands with Kathleen Miller, wife of Republican US Senate candidate Joe Miller, during a rally for Miller in Anchorage, Alaska on Thursday Oct. 28. Tea party favorite Miller appears to be running behind incumbent Lisa Murkowski, now running as a write-in candidate. (Rob Stapleton/AP)
Are tea party candidates helped or hurt by three-way races?
Three-way races usually have a political dynamic that far exceeds the sum of their parts, and this is true – maybe even more true – as the tea party insurgency drives many of this year’s elections.
Consider two closely-watched US Senate races at diagonally opposite corners of the country: Alaska and Florida, where the presence of a third candidate has had very different results on the apparent fortunes of the tea party favorite.
In Alaska, incumbent GOP Senator Lisa Murkowski did not go quietly into the night when Joe Miller – who’d gotten more than $600,000 from the Tea Party Express funding organization, plus the backing of Sarah Palin – beat her in the Republican primary. Instead, Ms. Murkowski declared herself a write-in candidate – a very long-shot attempt at vindication. (The last one to successfully do so was Strom Thurmond in 1954.)
Democrats thought for sure that this would split the Republican vote, giving victory to their candidate, Scott McAdams, the mayor of Sitka.
But things haven’t turned out that way. Instead, it became a horserace between Mr. Miller and Murkowski with Mr. McAdams lagging in the rear.
And now, with Miller admitting that he “lied about what I was doing” in inappropriately using government computers when he worked as a part-time lawyer in the Fairbanks North Star Borough, Murkowski apparently leads both her rivals. (A new poll of 500 likely voters has Miller running third at 23 percent with 29 percent for McAdams and 34 percent for "write in candidate" – presumably Murkowski.)
In Florida, meanwhile, Republican Governor Charlie Crist (a moderate favored by the establishment GOP) pulled out of the US Senate primary rather than lose to tea party favorite Marco Rubio, the attractive young Cuban-American conservative who’d been Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives.
As their nominee, Democrats chose someone who appeared to be an equally strong candidate: Kendrick Meek – a former state trooper (the first African-American to reach the rank of captain), serving as US Representative for Florida’s 17th Congressional District.
But Gov. Crist has stayed in the race as an independent, figuring his previous statewide election success would overcome his lack of party organization support and put him in the lead.
Things haven’t turned out that way. While the race may have tightened as Election Day draws near, Rubio maintains a fairly comfortable lead over Crist with Democrat Meek lagging in the rear.
Although it’s impossible to know where things would stand if Crist hadn’t stayed in the race, it’s apparent that his presence has changed the campaign’s dynamic in a way that helps Rubio.
If anything, Crist’s warning against “extremism … the road Sarah Palin, the tea party, and Marco Rubio want to take us down” has solidified tea party support for the front-runner. So much so that in a last-minute attempt to turn the tide, former President Bill Clinton reportedly has urged Democrat Meek to drop out of the race and endorse Crist.
Does that make Crist a spoiler? Would the Democratic Party have put more effort into Meek’s campaign if he’d only had Rubio to run against? Again, impossible to know.
One thing is obvious, though. In both Alaska and Florida, the Democrat in these three-way races is not doing well.
In this publicity image, former Republican vice presidential candidate and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is shown by the family boat in Dillingham, Alaska, in a scene from the reality series 'Sarah Palin's Alaska,' which premieres on TLC on Nov. 14. (Gilles Mingasson/AP Photo/TLC)
Sarah Palin for president? It's possible, she says.
Is Sarah Palin just toying with us about running for president in 2012? Or did she really mean it when she told "Entertainment Tonight" she could run.
Interviewed at her home in Wasilla, Alaska, for a segment to be broadcast Thursday evening, Ms. Palin told the show's Mary Hart:
“I think, still, it is too early for anybody to get out there declaring what their intentions are. For me, Mary, it’s going to entail a discussion with my family, a real close look at the lay of the land, and to consider whether there are those with that common sense, conservative, pro-Constitution passion – whether there are any candidates out there who can do the job.”
But then she added, “If there’s nobody else to do it, then of course I would believe that we should do this.” (It was unclear whether she was using the collective “we,” the editorial “we,” or the royal “we.”)
No reaction yet from Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, Tim Pawlenty, Newt Gingrich, Mitch Daniels, Jim DeMint, Mike Pence, or the other Republicans frequently mentioned in the same sentence as “2012.”
One who has reacted to the notion of a “Palin for President” campaign is veteran Republican political operative and megafundraiser for this year’s midterm elections is Karl Rove – her fellow Fox News analyst.
Mr. Rove told the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph that Palin lacked the "gravitas" to be president in 2012, presumably referring to her main activities – giving well-paid speeches to the party faithful, tweeting 140-character policy pronouncements without elaboration, and having her own reality show titled “Sarah Palin’s Alaska.”
“Appearing on your own reality show on the Discovery Channel, I am not certain how that fits in the American calculus of ‘that helps me see you in the Oval Office,’ ” Rove told the Telegraph. (For the record, the show is actually on TLC, which is owned by the Discovery Channel.)
But these days, it’s uncertain whether “gravitas” – at least as defined by the political establishment – is what voters are looking for. If it’s traditional “gravitas” (of the left or the right), then many tea partyers are having none of it.
Speaking of which, Palin’s political clout is on the line in her home state right now with the flagging US Senate campaign of tea party favorite (and Palin endorsee) Joe Miller.
Under court order this week, Mr. Miller had to admit that he “lied about what I was doing” (as he wrote in a 2008 e-mail) in inappropriately using government computers when he worked as a part-time lawyer in the Fairbanks North Star Borough.
Miller beat incumbent Sen. Lisa Murkowski in the Republican primary, and until recently he had been neck-and-neck with Senator Murkowski as Democrat Scott McAdams was relegated to third place behind the two front-runners. But a new poll of 500 likely voters paid for by a labor union and released Thursday has Miller lagging behind at 23 percent with 29 percent for Mr. McAdams and 34 percent for "write in candidate" – presumably Murkowski.
There’s never been any love lost between Palin and Murkowski, so Alaska’s US Senate race is a bit of grudge match between the two.
At a rally Thursday night in Anchorage, Palin will be trying to generate support for the tea party favorite. Later, there’ll be time to think about 2012.
Local supporters turned out Wednesday Oct. 27 to see Republican U.S. Senate candidate Marco Rubio kick off his "Road to Reclaim America" bus tour in downtown Pensacola. Rubio is ahead of Democrat Kendrick Meek and Gov. Charlie Crist (running as an independent) in recent polls. (Katie King/The News Journal/AP)
How is the tea party doing in Senate races?
If the 2012 elections are all about outsiders pounding on the door of the political establishment – mainly in the form of the tea party insurgency – it’s worth taking a look at how their most prominent figures are doing the last few days before we’ve all voted and can concentrate on the World Series. (You heard it here: Giants in seven.)
The tea-fueled GOP is all but certain to take control of the US House of Representatives. So we’ll stick with the Senate, where the D’s have more than a fighting chance of hanging on to their majority.
Sharron Angle in Nevada
Expert poll watcher Nate Silver, who blogs at FiveThirtyEight.com for The New York Times, says Sharron Angle “has been improving her position in our forecast in recent days, and for the first time since the spring has better than a three-in-four chance to win her race against Harry Reid.”
A TIME/CNN/Opinion Research survey this week has Ms. Angle up four points over Senate Majority Leader Reid.
Using a complicated online formula, prognosticators at the Daily Beast’s “Election Oracle” give Angle a 60 percent chance of winning. More on this methodology here.
But allegations of early voting fraud and voter intimidation in Nevada may be setting the scene for a legal battle after next Tuesday. Lawyers from both parties are getting ready for a fight that could delay election results. Did someone say “hanging chads?”
Joe Miller in Alaska
Joe Miller’s main threat comes not from Democratic candidate Scott McAdams but from incumbent Republican and write-in candidate Sen. Lisa Murkowski. And from his self-made image problems, like finally admitting under court order this week that he “lied about what I was doing” (as he wrote in a 2008 e-mail) in inappropriately using government computers when he worked as a part-time lawyer in the Fairbanks North Star Borough.
CNN finds Mr. Miller and Senator Murkowski essentially tied among likely voters with Democrat Mr. McAdams lagging behind. But a new poll of 500 likely voters paid for by a labor union and released Thursday has Miller running third at 23 percent with 29 percent for McAdams and 34 percent for "write in candidate" – presumably Murkowski.
Murkowski got a boost this week when the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that voters can see a list of write-in candidates when they go to the poll. At least that’ll help people remember how to spell “Murkowski.”
"Murkowski has run a smart campaign and dedicated a lot of resources to educating voters about how to vote for her," a senior GOP strategist told Washington Post political blogger Chris Cillizza. "Next to a hapless McAdams and disastrous Joe Miller, she has a decent shot to make history.”
Rand Paul in Kentucky
The TIME/CNN/Opinion Research poll has Rand Paul ahead of Democrat Jack Conway, the state's attorney general, by a comfortable 7 percentage points (50 to 43) – including a whopping 63 to 26 among independent voters.
A Rasmussen Reports poll for Fox News gives Mr. Paul that same 7 point edge. The Daily Beast’s “Election Oracle” gives Paul an 80 percent chance of winning next week.
But Paul’s message got “stomped on” this week when a couple of his male supporters wrestled to the ground a female activist from the liberal group MoveOn.org. A photo of one the pro-Paul guys pressing his foot to her head ricocheted around the media.
Kentucky seems to be tea party country. Seventy-two percent of those polled say they are either "dissatisfied" or "angry" about the way the federal government is working. Still, questions remain about Paul, whose father – US Rep. Ron Paul (R) of Texas – is described in a long Atlantic magazine profile as “the tea party’s brain.”
In the Rasmussen survey, 42 percent said they are "concerned" that Paul is "too extreme," and just 43 percent said he "shared their values."
Christine O’Donnell in Delaware
The Senate candidate, who bested the GOP establishment’s US Rep. Mike Castle in a rancorous primary, is far behind Democrat Chris Coons – 21 percentage points (57 to 36) in a survey by her alma mater, Fairleigh Dickinson University.
Christine O’Donnell is best known for her unusual background and pronouncements that sounded just plain weird. Her “I am not a witch” TV spot will be studied by political science undergrads for years.
Ms. O’Donnell’s problem also may be one of geography. Delaware is a politically moderate state, and a CNN/Public Opinion Research poll earlier this month finds Coons with a 68-22 percent advantage among moderates.
“She’s running in absolutely the wrong place,” Fairleigh Dickinson political science professor and survey analyst Dan Cassino told the News Journal newspaper in Delaware. “If she were in Kentucky or Alaska, she’d be winning.’’
In Delaware, the Daily Beast’s Election Oracle says, O’Donnell has only a 10 percent chance of winning.
Marco Rubio in Florida
Marco Rubio is still ahead, but his margin is slipping in Florida’s three-way race, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Thursday.
Mr. Rubio has 42 to 35 percent for Gov. Charlie Crist, who’s running as an independent. Democrat Kendrick Meek trails at 15 percent. Two weeks ago, Rubio led Governor Crist by nearly twice that margin (44 to 30 percent) in the Quinnipiac poll.
A TCPalm.com/Zogby poll of likely voters has essentially the same result and trend.
“I don’t think you can put a fork into it quite yet,” University of Florida political science professor Daniel Smith told TCPalm.com. “Mark Rubio’s lead is now outside the margin of error, but the fact of the matter is we don’t know how the undecided will break. They’re not often given the opportunity to vote for a third party candidate as we have in Charlie Crist.”
Still, Mr. Silver’s model has Rubio winning 43.6 percent of the vote next Tuesday, compared to 31.7 for Crist and 23.7 for Mr. Meek.
In what may be a desperation move prompted by the strength of the tea party movement, Crist has a new TV spot urging Floridians to vote for him as the way to stop “extremism … the road Sarah Palin, the tea party, and Marco Rubio want to take us down.”
Funny, that. Back in 2008, loyal Republican Crist was saying Ms. Palin as John McCain’s running mate would do a “great job” if she had to step in as president.
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