Where did the tea party go? Into the trenches
(Read article summary)National polls show tea party support withering among some Americans, but don't count the 'taxed enough already' crowd out just yet. They are crafting a from-the-ground-up strategy for 2012.
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.
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