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The Tea Party movement is an American political movement that advocates strict adherence to the United States Constitution, reducing U.S. government spending and taxes, and reduction of the U.S. national debt and federal budget deficit.
Contents
- 2010 election
- 2012 election
- 2014 election
- 2015 elections
- 2016 presidential election
- Tea Party ground gameGOTV before 2012
- Challenge of the ground game for the Tea Party in the 2012 election cycle
- References
In the 2010 midterm elections, The New York Times identified 138 candidates for Congress with significant Tea Party support, and reported that all of them were running as Republicans. According to a calculation on an NBC blog, of the candidates that were backed by a Tea Party group, or identified themselves as a Tea Party member, 50% were elected to the Senate and 31% to the House. In addition, research by economists Andreas Madestam of Stockholm University, Daniel Shoag and David Yanagizawa-Drott of Harvard University, and Stan Veuger of the American Enterprise Institute estimated that the Tea Party movement protests generated 2.7–5.5 million additional votes nationwide for the Republican Party in the 2010 House elections.
2010 election
In the 2010 midterm elections, The New York Times identified 138 candidates for Congress with significant Tea Party support, and reported that all of them were running as Republicans—of whom 129 were running for the House and 9 for the Senate. The Wall Street Journal – NBC News poll in mid October showed 35% of likely voters were Tea-party supporters, and they favored the Republicans by 84% to 10%. The first Tea Party candidate to be elected into office is believed to be Dean Murray, a Long Island businessman, who won a special election for a New York State Assembly seat in February 2010.
According to a calculation on an NBC blog, 32% of the candidates that were backed by the Tea Party, or identified themselves as a Tea Party member, won the election. In the primaries for Colorado, Nevada and Delaware the Tea-party backed Senate Republican nominees defeated "establishment" Republicans that had been expected to win their respective Senate races, but went on to lose in the general election to their Democrat opponents. The three Senate nominees were seen by many in America and the media as either amateurs or too far-out there to be electable as their positions on certain aspects were viewed as extreme. Several of the Tea Party-endorsed candidates won victories against established Republicans in primaries, such as Alaska, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Nevada, New York, South Carolina, and Utah.
There were allegations of Democratic candidates planting "fake" Tea Party candidates in Florida, Michigan, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.
2012 election
For the 2012 election, four of the 16 Tea Party candidates won a seat on the Senate, and Tea Party Caucus founder Michele Bachmann was re-elected to the House. The media, such as ABC and Bloomberg, commented that Tea Party candidates had less success in 2012 than in 2010.
In February 2011, the Tea Party Patriots organized and hosted the American Policy Summit in Phoenix, Arizona. The 1,600 attendees were polled regarding their preference for a 2012 presidential candidate. Herman Cain, the first of the 2012 candidates to form a presidential exploratory committee, won the poll with 22%. Runners up were Tim Pawlenty (16%), Ron Paul (15%) and Sarah Palin (10%). Ron Paul won the Summit's online poll.
In September 2011, CNN and Tea Party Express co-hosted a Republican primary debate among presidential candidates that featured questions from various Tea Party groups.
2014 election
The Washington Post said in July 2012 that the Tea Party "is no longer the rising tsunami it appeared to be in 2010. Largely gone are the disorderly rallies, colonial-era costumes and fixations on fringe issues, such as the provenance of the president's birth certificate. Instead, the movement has retooled into a loosely organized network of field operations that, as in Texas, pushes Republicans toward more strident conservative positions and candidates, while supplying ground troops across the country for candidates and big-money conservative groups, such as the Club for Growth and Americans for Prosperity."
Tea Party members now tell stories of mailing literature from their laundry rooms, manning phone banks, knocking on doors, and driving over 34,000 miles in their cars to build support for legislation. The Tea Party Patriots now offer free, on-demand, online grassroots training programs. The Tea Party has partnered with seemingly unlikely groups, such as the NAACP and the Sierra Club.
In the 2014 elections in Texas, the Tea Party made large gains, with numerous Tea Party favorites being elected into office, like Dan Patrick as Lieutenant Governor, Ken Paxton as Attorney General, in addition to numerous other candidates.
2015 elections
In the 2015 Kentucky gubernatorial election, Matt Bevin, a Tea Party favorite who challenged Mitch McConnell in the Republican primary in the 2014 Kentucky Senate election, won with over 52% of the vote, despite fears that he was too extreme for the state. Bevin is the second Republican in 44 years to be Governor of Kentucky.
2016 presidential election
The 2016 Republican presidential primary featured three U.S. Senators, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, whose elections to the U.S. Senate were broadly attributed to Tea Party movement support. The ultimate winner of the Republican presidential primary, Donald Trump, praised the U.S. Tea Party movement throughout his 2016 campaign. In August 2015, Trump told a Tea Party gathering in Nashville that "The tea party people are incredible people. These are people who work hard and love the country and they get beat up all the time by the media." In a January 2016 CNN poll at the beginning of the 2016 Republican primary, Trump led all Republican candidates modestly among self-identified Tea Party voters with 37 percent supporting Trump and 34 percent supporting Ted Cruz.
Trump's candidacy was met with varying reactions by the Tea Party movement's founders and organizations. National Tea Party movement co-founder and leader Michael Johns endorsed Trump immediately following Trump's June 2015 announcement of his candidacy and defended Trump throughout the contentious Republican primary. However, Tea Party Patriots, a national Tea Party organization, endorsed Cruz in the presidential primary.
Tea Party ground game/GOTV before 2012
The Tea Party began life as a protest movement, not as an organization that works on political ground games or Get Out The Vote (GOTV) efforts. One of the first national signs of the Tea Party's efforts to organize voters came with the election of Scott Brown in the contest to fill the remaining two-year term of the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. Tea Party activists nationwide made a mass pilgrimage to the Bay State to support his unlikely campaign and ultimate win over Democrat Martha Coakley. Democrats have said as late as September 2010 that the Tea Party could not match their ground game and was mostly hype. The Democrats have the advantage in better organization, an older volunteer organization and personal connections between volunteers and voters.
On November 2, 2010, Fox News reported that the Democrats did not dispute expectations that they would lose the House, and that their vaunted campaign operation faced a less polished ground game infused with the energy of the new Tea Party. The Tea Party helped deliver to Democrats what President Obama called a "shellacking" in the mid-term elections. On November 10, 2010, FreedomWorks announced the national rollout of "FreedomConnect", which they touted as a "grassroots action center that will revolutionize the ways in which FreedomWorks members, 9/12ers and tea party groups across the country communicate and organize in 2011 and beyond".
Challenge of the ground game for the Tea Party in the 2012 election cycle
The ground game was considered to be a major challenge for Tea Party candidates in several important contests in 2012, including Wisconsin's recall election of Gov. Scott Walker and the Texas GOP Senate primary race between "establishment" candidate Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and Tea Party favorite Ted Cruz.
Early in the election cycle, Democratic allies had expressed confidence in the strength of their own ground game. In September 2011, Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa delivering a speech to introduce President Obama to the gathered crowd, said "We got to keep an eye on the battle that we face: The war on workers. And you see it everywhere, it is the Tea Party.... We're going to win that war.... President Obama, this is your army.... We are ready to march. Let's take these sons of bitches out and give America back to an America where we belong." Similarly, Organized Labor in Wisconsin hoped its ground game would give it the edge. According to Karl Rove, Democratic Party Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz also boasted on CNN in May that the Wisconsin recall would be the "dry run we need of our massive, significant dynamic grass-roots presidential campaign".
When challenging GOP "establishment" opponents, the Tea Party faced opposing ground games of various size and sophistication. In Texas, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst hired "ground game expert" Kevin Lindley, who had run Gov. Rick Perry's campaigns, while in Indiana Richard Lugar no longer lived in the state and developed a reputation for being out of touch with voters there.