Vindicator Logo

‘Tea Party’ tempest is brewing

Tuesday, June 4, 2013

The “tea party” is back and is brewing trouble for the Republican establishment.

After the GOP debacle in the 2012 election, when Republicans not only failed to win the presidency but blew a chance to take over the Senate, party leaders paused to consider what had gone wrong.

The Republican National Committee issued a scathing report warning that the party was in “an ideological cul-de-sac” and resolved to act friendlier toward women, minorities and low-income voters. Strategist Karl Rove said the lesson was to nominate more moderate candidates and set about raising money to do just that.

But tea party and other conservative leaders, undaunted, drew the opposite conclusion. “It was not conservatives” who lost those Senate races, 19 of them wrote in a joint attack against Rove’s efforts. “Not one moderate challenger won.” The solution, they argued, was to swing further right, not toward the center.

Fired up

The tea party is as fired up as ever, even though the movement is smaller now than in its heyday of 2010. In one recent poll, only 22 percent of American voters said they considered themselves tea party supporters, down from 30 percent three years ago.

But the grass-roots small-government movement has proved remarkably resilient. According to Harvard political scientist Theda Skocpol, more than 350 tea party organizations are still operating; that’s roughly two-thirds of the number that sprang up in 2009 and 2010. And they have been recently re-energized by the outbreak of scandals and quasi-scandals in the Obama administration, including one that amounts to a political windfall: the discovery that the Internal Revenue Service targeted tea party groups’ applications for tax-exempt status for extra scrutiny.

The approach of congressional primary elections makes the tea party a major force too. The groups have a track record of turning out in force for primaries, and adherents are an essential source for donations and volunteers in Republican campaigns.

The problem, of course, is that this majority faction inside the party holds views often at odds not only with a majority of all voters but with the rest of the GOP.

According to polling that Ronald B. Rapoport of the College of William & Mary and his colleagues oversaw, 63 percent of tea party Republicans want to limit immigration; only 48 percent of non-tea party Republicans agree. Among tea party adherents, 76 percent want to abolish the U.S. Department of Education; only 10 percent of non-tea party Republicans agree.

Most strikingly, when asked whether it was more important to cut the deficit or create jobs, 63 percent of tea party supporters opted to cut the deficit first. Among non-tea party Republicans, 53 percent put jobs first.

That polarization already spells trouble in the House, where tea party members recently balked at “reform conservative” proposals offered by their own majority leader, Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va., beginning with a bill to increase funding for high-risk health insurance pools as an alternative to Obamacare. (Spending was spending, the conservatives objected; they opted for another vote to repeal Obamacare instead.)

‘Bunch of squishes’

It spells trouble in the Senate, where the tea party’s newest star, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, has brought old-guard GOP leaders to the edge of rage by publicly criticizing them as “a bunch of squishes.” He and other tea party senators have succeeded in blocking House-Senate budget negotiations, charging that talks might lead to a deal to raise the federal debt ceiling, which they oppose.

And he’s not wrong: Some Republicans do want to compromise with President Obama over the debt ceiling. In the short run, GOP leaders don’t want to be blamed by the White House for touching off a financial crisis that might interrupt the economy’s recovery. And in the long run, many in the GOP establishment — including House Speaker John A. Boehner, R-Ohio — worry about being branded the party of austerity.

“If we become the party of austerity, then President Obama and the Democrats become the party of economic growth,” said David Winston, a political strategist who has advised Boehner.

But tea party members aren’t as worried about winning elections. According to another Rapoport survey, roughly three-fourths of tea party activists say they would prefer a strongly conservative candidate who’s likely to lose over a moderate candidate who’s likely to win.

Doyle McManus is a columnist for The Los Angeles Times. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.