The tea party may have been built by the grass roots, but in order to survive, it’s going to have to rely on the Beltway political machines and big money groups it once disparaged.
Tea party activists always worked alongside like-minded conservative organizations, but they failed to capitalize on the anti-Obama momentum in 2009 and 2010 to build their own infrastructure and war chests. That means national groups like American Majority, the Club for Growth and the Koch brothers-linked Americans for Prosperity are essentially in the position to determine if GOP incumbents face serious primary challenges.
Potential prime tea party targets include GOP senators up for reelection in 2014 — Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. Conservative activists would also love to hit back at the 33 Republican senators and 85 representatives who voted last week to raise taxes on the wealthy as part of a deal to avert the fiscal cliff.
The tea party “is in disarray,” said Erick Erickson, the editor of RedState, a blog that helped crystallize the fiscally conservative ethos of the populist movement. Going forward, tea partiers will “either be within the conservative movement as part of that movement or they won’t be effective.”thought they were up and running on all 4 cylinders? guess they are finding out they too have morning breath, and less and less people are willing to endure their odorous existence,
will this mean their search for funding and support by those they helped to place them in "we the people's" gov't to obstruct and stall it's admin. will start to turn their backs and like the laws they have pushed losing favor?
Polls have shown Americans turning away from the tea party: 24 percent of likely voters considered themselves tea party members in April 2010, according to a Rasmussen survey. Now, only 8 percent say they’re tea party members.
