The Wall Street Journal fronted a good story today about how Tea Party groups in several states have worked to build closer ties among themselves and with lawmakers as they try to exert greater influence on public policy. The fruits of their efforts, as writer Neil King points out, will be on display at a conference beginning Friday in Richmond, Va.:
Around the country, tea-party groups are building increasingly sophisticated political organizations and overcoming early bickering to push legislative platforms, elect their own delegates, shake up statehouses and even form alliances with the Republican Party establishment they profess to dislike.
Nowhere is this evolution more vivid than in Virginia, where a federation of more than 30 groups scattered across the state now has the ear of the Republican governor, top state legislators and the state’s congressional delegation.
This isn’t a new phenomenon. Though each group within the movement is intent on maintaining its autonomy (members are animated, after all, by a general distrust of government) Tea Party leaders have long been conscious of the challenge their leaderless structure poses. In recognition of this, patchwork organizations have banded together in an effort to police renegade factions—for example, when the self-appointed National Tea Party Federation denounced Tea Party Express leader Mark Williams for penning a satirical paean to slavery. They’ve also been aware of the need to build organizations that help them shape the energy in the movement into an electoral force, not just in 2010 but for years to come. One referred to This is a task that groups like FreedomWorks or Americans for Prosperity, who are staffed by professional conservative operatives, have been plugging away at for months.
The question of whether the Tea Party could hamper Republicans by backing third-party spoilers in competitive races has largely been discarded. It will be a force for the GOP on Nov. 2; 92% of its adherents, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll, say they are certain to vote, and in very few cases will they cast ballots for Democrats. Weak Tea Party candidates like Christine O’Donnell and Sharron Angle have boosted Democrats’ chances in certain elections, but on balance the Tea Party movement will benefit Republicans because they are, in fact, Republicans–71% of the GOP considers themselves Tea Party supporters, according to a WSJ/NBC News poll included in the story.
The battle to watch, then, is the one for the soul of the party. The GOP’s courtship of the movement has been uneasy; Republicans are keen to bring natural allies into the fold, but while those allies are eager to affect party policy, they profess disgust at many mainstream Republicans and don’t want to be co-opted. Republican leadership has taken pains to present their interests as simpatico; take the party’s recently unveiled Pledge to America, which was loosely modeled on the Tea Party’s Contract from America and which kowtowed to its ideology in certain respects, such as the provision that each bill passed cite the constitutional authority that justifies it. The Tea Party has obviously yanked the GOP way to the right. (In the WSJ/NBC News poll, just 30% of respondents said the movement had “too much” influence on the Republican Party; one third said “just enough,” while 18% said “too little.”) Angle wasn’t wrong when she told Tea Party candidate Scott Ashjian that her candidacy had painted the GOP into a corner. “The machinery that has endorsed me, they have no choice,” Angle said. “It’s me or Reid…[The Republicans in DC] don’t want me back there…because they know I’ll shake this mess up.” For Republicans, the alliance will likely be a Faustian bargain–a jolt at the polls next month in exchange for a whole lot of trouble in the future.