I doubt there will be a tea party exodus. The tea party is about 15% of the electorate, and about 15% of the electorate are liberals. I don’t see liberals engaging in an exodus to the green party and tea partiers engaging in an exodus to the constitution party. This is a two party system, and everyone knows it. If all the tea partiers start their own party, then that means democrats win the elections. I doubt they do that anymore than progressives would vote for the green party in a swing state. My interests align with the greens and social democrats more than the democratic party. But if the race is close, I’m voting democrat. I’m sure the tea party is the same.
I am assuming the tea party will pretend to be more moderate, but it will be pretty transparent and obvious that nothing has really changed. That is probably their next agenda.
As long as the tea party has a strangehold on the GOP primaries, they will have a lot of control over the party. And since the party has become a bastion for know nothings and people who are hostile to reality, the concept of negative consequences for putting the most extreme 15% in charge of elections where you need 51% of the vote will elude them.
That is a good point. As it is, the tea party has only had a so-so record of marginalization, and that is only in the senate.
Since house districts are gerrymandered the tea party candidate will win. but in the senate since you run for the whole state, the tea party has been a disaster. they have probably cost the GOP 3-8 senate seats in the last 2 election cycles.
But you have to balance that against the turnout difference in 2010. 50 million GOPers voted, 40 million dems voted (the 2010 election wasn’t a political realignment to the right, it was about the fact that the democrats stayed home and the republicans voted). The result was the GOP won in a massive landslide, and during that election something like 2/3 of republicans said they identified with the tea party (the tea party has become less and less popular as time passes).
Mitt Romney was never the tea party candidate. The tea party tried to derail him. But Romney lost in part because he tried to win their support by being hostile to women, gays, latinos, people who believe in science and young people. So the tea party arguably did sink him.
well, one thing iI know for sure, the Tea Party just had a meeting in a small Hampton Inn conference room in a town outside of Phoenix, Arizona. Walking past the room a few times, it looked like about an hour + of a middle aged black man in a suit giving a speech at a podium to about 25-30 retiree aged white people. My overheard comments included the speaker talking about “what you see and hear on CNN isn’t the real truth” and in the hall comments after the meeting where about “well, after these last four years, we’ll see how much worse things get now” and a comment about how “its actually kind of amazing that even intelligent people I know don’t see what is happening”