I’ll admit that I’ve lost track of all the candidates who were TP-identified (or TP-enabled) but early results seem to indicate that they’re not exactly taking the country by storm. Of the ones I can remember, Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell have lost, Rand Paul has won and Joe Miller may still lose to write-in votes for Lisa Murkowski.
Who else ran under the Tea Party banner and how did they do?
Carl Paladino was the Tea Party-supported candidate for New York governor, and he lost pretty badly to Andrew Cuomo. I don’t think that the Republican establishment candidate, Rick Lazio, would have done any better, though.
Marco Rubio won a Senate seat in Florida, with Charlie Crist running as an independent. Democratic candidate Kendrick Meek won a smaller percentage of the vote than Alvin Greene in SC, whom I would have thought was the flag-bearer for the rock-bottom of Democratic votes. Go figure.
The Tea Party has to take the fall for not unseating Harry Reid, Angle started out with a 12-point lead in the polls and whittled it away.
The revolution was televised, and it turned out to be Al Capone’s vault.
The TP also takes the blame in Delaware, and possibly Colorado.
IMHO, the problem that the TP has is its populist nature. As part of its “the people versus the government” ideology, it buys heavily into the myth that “politicians” are Bad, and “ordinary people” are Good. As a result, they tend to nominate people who are not equiped with political skills, have not been vetted by a career in politics (& thus tend to carry hidden baggage), and do not have a resume with significant accomplishment.
The TP candidates that were politicians did well, e.g. Rubio & Toomey. Where they failed were the non-politicians or minor league politicians who were out of their league, e.g. Angle, Miller, O’Donnell, Paladino.
I’m not sure how the movement affected the House, Governor and other state races…
…either they had a big positive effect…
… or it was just “normal” voters who kicked Democrat butt.
The New York Times has a map here that can be played with:
it identifies 129 seats with a tea party candidate on the ballot. of those, the Democrats won 82, Republicans won 39, and in 8, the Times still hasn’t declared a winner.
My early take on it, without having gone into all of the explicitly “Tea Party” races, is that the traditional conservative Republicans endorsed by the Tea Party did well. The non-politician candidates did poorly, especially ones that primaried more traditional GOP candidates. Counter-examples welcomed.
I was, in fact, a bit struck by how poorly non-politicians and self-financed politicians did in a year that was supposed to be about “voting the bums out”. Did any true “outsiders” win Senate seats besides Rand Paul (who of course has a political lineage and name to help)?
Crist drew about half of the Democratic vote, plus the vast majority of the independent vote, thanks to his veto of the (Republican-controlled) state congress’ teacher pay reform bill. Meek really did everyone a disservice by not dropping out, although in the end it looks like Rubio would have won no matter what.
Florida was a clean sweep for the Tea Party, pretty much. Former health care executive and human vulture Rick Scott took the governorship and large-breasted Palinite Pam Bondi took the AG seat (which is important because we have a pending suit against the Federal HCR law).
Ron Johnson in Wisconsin. Although I don’t think he worked in a lumberyard there.
Sounds like the TP was a net drag on the GOP this year.
That might be true, but doesn’t folllow from CA’s cite. I would speculate that the vast majority of TP House candidates were not incumbents, and even in an anti-incumbent climate, the vast majority of incumbents win.
Eh, incumbents by definition aren’t Tea Partiers. They may court them, they may align themselves with them, they may even call themselves Tea Partiers… but in what’s marketed as a revolution, incumbents don’t count.
That claim is only relevant here if the NYT is using the same definition.
What definition ARE they using, by the way? Seriously, it’s not clear to me. As I hover around that map, I’m seeing a bunch of Independent candidates, but that’s not exactly a meaningful identifier.
I think they’re using candidates endorsed by a tea party group.
But that’s going to be any republican, absent a tea party candidate in that race.
I don’t think the tea parties formally endorsed every Republican candidate, did they?
Ah yes, thanks. That’s the one I couldn’t remember.
He did not defeat a party-backed candidate in a primary, but is clearly a political newcomer.
That would be a good definition to use if the agenda was to minimize the effect of the tea party movement.
I’d suggest that they affected turnout in a way that got a good number of Republicans elected.
Well Tea Partiers tend to vote Republican if there are no Tea Party candidates to vote for. So let’s say you get a Tea Partier to the polls cause he’s so enraged and all that sick people are getting health care. There are 14 contested races, two with Tea Party candidates. He votes for the two Tea Partiers and the 12 Republicans. Net win for the Pubs, no matter how the two races with Tea Party candidates go.