Chapter 10: The TEA Party is Dead
As part of my TEA Party +15 celebration I am serializing my 2019 book The Rise and Fall of the TEA Party. A chapter will appear each Tuesday until the 15th anniversary on February 27.
“The TEA Party is Dead. Good Riddance.” – Headline from a post by Erick Erickson, The Resurgent, September 1, 2016.
Arguably Erickson's declaration may have come a few years too late, but after the staggering blow of losing the 2012 election there was a definite retrenchment and a new tone of cynicism bordering at times on paranoia within the TEA Party.
Even before the media networks called the race for Barack Obama, the finger pointing began. One day before the balloting, TPP's Jenny Beth Martin contended that the TEA Party's appeal was to independent voters:
It is election time again. Which means it is time again for the beltway establishment media, and politicians from both sides, to begin laying the groundwork to blame whatever happens on November 6th on the tea party.
These are the same folks who convinced themselves, and perhaps convinced you, that when the tea party delivered the biggest political shift in America in 62 years – a “shellacking” by the President’s own admission – that it was somehow a loss. And that so-called “loss” was the Tea Party’s fault.
(…)
Tea Party independents left the left (-14%) and flooded the right (+13%) in the 2010 “Tea Party Elections.”
That’s right. We appeal to the independents. Tea Party independents.1
Unfortunately, those independents didn't show up in large enough numbers to swing the election, so the next agenda item for Martin on election night was to blame the establishment and their selected candidate:
We wanted a fighter like Ronald Reagan who boldly championed America’s founding principles, who inspired millions of independents and ‘Reagan Democrats’ to join us, and who fought his leftist opponents on the idea that America, as founded, was a ‘Shining city upon a hill.’
What we got was a weak moderate candidate, hand-picked by the Beltway elites and country-club establishment wing of the Republican Party. The Presidential loss is unequivocally on them.2
And if that wasn't enough, Martin added the next day that the loss was also on the mainstream media:
The dereliction of duty by the media is both dishonest and harmful to our great country. We have to keep the pressure up so the media remembers it is supposed to hold politicians accountable, not cover for them.
We all know last night’s results were disappointing, and the media is to blame for that. Had another politician been President, he or she would have rightly been hammered by the media for what happened in Benghazi.3
It was a vineyard's worth of sour grapes coming from the leader of the primary grassroots TEA Party organization. (By contrast, the one public statement coming from a member of the TPX was more philosophical: in the stable full of excrement, there had to be a pony someplace.)4
It was no surprise, though, that the establishment pushed back. After laying out how conservative Mitt Romney's platform was, columnist Ann Coulter placed some of her blame for Mitt's loss on circumstances, but heaped more on the TEA Party:
Having vanquished liberal Republicans, the party's problem now runs more along the lines of moron showoffs, trying to impress tea partiers like Jenny Beth Martin by taking insane positions on rape exceptions for abortion – as 2 million babies are killed every year from pregnancies having nothing to do with rape.
Romney lost because he was running against an incumbent, was beaten up during a long and vicious primary fight, and ran in a year with a very different electorate from 1980. At least one of those won't be true next time. But we're not going to win any elections by telling ourselves fairy tales about a candidate who lost because he wasn't conservative enough, articulate enough or mean enough.5
That all may be true, but 2½ years later Ann was one of the first behind a candidate who wasn't necessarily conservative or articulate in Donald Trump, believing he could win from the start.6 To her, Mitt Romney was “the best (candidate) that we ever had until Trump.”7 (Perhaps his “you're fired!” reputation made him mean enough?) My apologies for getting ahead of myself, but that had to be said about the prolific and controversial Coulter.
Billed as a “former research director for the RNC,” David Welch went several steps beyond Coulter in a scathing New York Times editorial:
(Jeb) Bush and (Chris) Christie (as governors) best represent realistic, levelheaded conservatism. Both have crossed the aisle numerous times to the betterment of their states. Yet they enjoy sterling reputations in the party. This occurs when common sense trumps partisanship.
This is not to say that the only way forward is by tying the party to bipartisanship. But it does mean a willingness to fight those who claim the name of the party but not its ethos.
In a recent interview, the bête noir of both the left and the Tea Party right, (Karl) Rove, suggested that his organization, American Crossroads, might become active in Republican primaries during the next election cycle. If Crossroads and the old-guard Republican committees sided with sensible candidates early on in the primaries and, if need be, ran ads against extreme members of the party, they could do much to bring some sense back to the Republican landscape.
Our modern-day Buckley’s denouncement of once fringe Tea Party candidates should be forthright. Whether it’s Bush, Christie or a party institution, there must be one clear message: no unserious candidate need apply.8
So who was correct? Was it the group that said Mitt Romney was a squishy moderate, or those who agreed the TEA Party “forced Romney too far to the right and didn’t give him the room (or the trust) to move back toward the center”9 for the election? And what about an argument presented by Republican strategist Sara Fagen, who postulated during the campaign10 that Romney was a “bridge candidate” between the Baby Boomer generation and younger Republican leaders like Paul Ryan, Chris Christie, and Bobby Jindal?
That “bridge candidate” contention may have made more sense in the immediate aftermath of the 2012 campaign, but instead the largest plurality of Republican voters in 2016 chose the oldest man ever to become President in Donald Trump, who was the first President to be elected while in his seventies. (Had she won, though, Hillary Clinton would have been the second-oldest, about eight months younger than 69-year-old Ronald Reagan.) I'll get to some of the reasoning in a later chapter, but in the 2016 campaign Trump defeated a slew of younger conservatives – four of them still in their forties, a group that included the aforementioned Governor Bobby Jindal and his cohort Scott Walker, along with Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.
In politics perception is reality, and the biggest problem in Mitt Romney's campaign was that he was the wrong candidate at the wrong time. To be quite honest, Romney's year may have been 2008, although he would have been hard-pressed to win that election given the brutal economy and media-fueled perceptions about how George W. Bush was to blame for it (as opposed to the Pelosi-Reid Democratic Congress that came into power just before things began heading south in a hurry.) But compared to the low-energy, devoid of excitement campaign of John McCain – one where conservatives felt the bottom of the ticket (Sarah Palin) should have been the top – a 2008 Romney general election campaign would have featured a technocrat Beltway outsider with a business background and the bona fides of being the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics savior11 that may have been sold as just what the doctor ordered to address the serious economic issues at the time. With Romney as President, the TEA Party likely would have been a little-remembered libertarian-sponsored series of events because Mitt would have chosen a different path to address the Great Recession.
But in 2012 with the TEA Party in place on one side and a President that escaped significant media scrutiny12 in Barack Obama on the other, Mitt Romney did the best he could under the circumstances – there were just too many people who believed that Obamacare would eventually work (remember, it was still a couple years away from full implementation; while its most popular reforms were already in place at that time, we had yet to completely live out what was in the bill once it passed) and were convinced the economy was thisclose to turning around. The little prosperity we had was thanks in large part to an energy boom Obama tried to thwart through regulation and lack of progress on the Keystone XL pipeline, yet take credit for on the job creation side.
With respect to the TEA Party, their lack of enthusiasm over Romney was apparent. Unlike the situation in Wisconsin a few months earlier where volunteers were readily willing to help out Governor Scott Walker, at campaign's end the TPP was forced into gimmicks and giveaways just to get volunteers to make phone calls for Romney and others on the GOP list.13 Generally the concept of Romneycare was pointed out as a reason TEA Party regulars were suspicious of Mitt, but in truth the program was more constitutional than Obamacare, which passed muster with the Supreme Court only because the mandate involved was twisted into a tax for the sake of the decision. (That verdict made TPP leadership physically ill.)14 Romney noted “there are a number of things I like”15 about Obamacare, but his plan called for more state-level involvement: converting Medicaid to a block grant program was the primary example.16 “I believe in the Tenth Amendment,” said Romney, and his program would have better utilized it.17 Obviously the few libertarian purists remaining in the TEA Party would still object to the revision of a government entitlement, but those who would complain about such a program would find it easier to do so in Albany, Sacramento, or Springfield than in faraway Washington, D.C.
The fact that Romney conceded the argument about Obamacare by vowing to “repeal and replace” it, though, put him squarely in a space where he was the squishy moderate, simply tinkering around the edges of a bill where we had not yet fully found out what was in it despite the fact it had long since passed. Those who believed that health care was a right weren't going to vote for an imitation when they had the real thing in Obama and those who believed the previous system only needed tweaking and not replacement with Obamacare were left wanting by Romney's embrace of the new system. Perhaps it worked on a state level, but New Mexico is not New Hampshire and Michigan is not Massachusetts. And Mitt Romney won none of those states, even though some believed he somehow could.
Having failed to influence the Presidential election, there may now have been the sense inside the Beltway that the TEA Party was toothless. At least Speaker of the House John Boehner thought so:
This has been the most misreported story of my two years' tenure. We don't have a Tea Party caucus to speak of in the House. All of us who were elected in 2010 were supported by the Tea Party.
These are ordinary Americans who've taken a more active role in their government. They want solutions, but we've all come a long way over the last two years. I think we all understand each other a lot better.18
To no one's surprise, Boehner's remarks didn't sit well with the TEA Party or their media allies. Breitbart writer Matthew Vadum charged that “Boehner almost immediately began waving the white flag in their view in front of the newly re-energized Democrats.”19 Thundered TPP's Martin, in a piece titled “John Boehner Just Denied You Exist”: “There is no way I will let the establishment blame you for their losses.”20 But they did anyway, because shifting blame is what they do.
Later on Jenny Beth continued with the us vs. them rhetoric, adding in response to a conciliatory “Fox News Sunday” appearance by Weekly Standard editor William Kristol where he called for tax increases for the wealthy,21 “(The establishment) views the GOP as a good in and of itself. Getting the Republican Party back in power is the goal of the establishment. Never mind what the party stands for, or what principles it has to abandon to gain said power. Power is what drives most of these people, whether they be politicians or pundits.”22 (Italics in original.) By this point, the TPP was calling for an all-out war23 against the establishment.
(Meanwhile, the Left was striking back: Michigan entrepreneur Clint Tarver was the victim of a union-led war against his business, a battle he unknowingly entered by catering to an Americans for Prosperity group counter-protesting in a tent at a Lansing rally against a right-to-work proposal.24 Tarver wasn't seriously injured, but his catering equipment failed to survive the onslaught.)
And while the blame game between establishment and TEA Party was in full swing, a key TEA Party support group was undergoing an upheaval. A month after the election, it was learned that FreedomWorks leader Dick Armey was resigning as chairman, citing “serious differences of opinion about the process of how you do business”25 with Matt Kibbe, the CEO and president of the organization. Armey wasn't the only one who left, either: another key defection was Brendan Steinhauser, the man who put together the Taxpayer March on Washington (a.k.a. the 9/12 Rally) and from that success became FreedomWorks' Director of Campaigns.26
Steinhauser's loss was key because, under his tutelage, FreedomWorks had evolved from putting together large protest rallies to setting up the grassroots training that created political activists out of ordinary citizens. Unlike the Tea Party Patriots, which was set up as an umbrella organization to band together local TEA Parties, the candidate- and election-driven Tea Party Express, or FreedomWorks' sibling organization Americans for Prosperity with its own sponsorship of bus tours and organizational structure of its own local and state chapters – some of which were former or split off from local TEA Parties – FreedomWorks had more or less remained behind the scenes and tasked itself with activist training.27
While it was always argued by the Left that FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity were the two key reasons the TEA Party was political Astroturf – simply a mob which was bought and paid for by the Koch brothers – the fact that the TEA Party survived through three election cycles (and influenced 2016 in a different way) argues that it was larger than just these Beltway-based organizations. Certainly they worked hand-in-glove with one another, but not all local TEA Parties used the national assistance nor did every issue the movement attempt to address fall onto the radar screen of the economic platform promoted by the groups (and, by extension, the Koch brothers.)
A good case in point for this line of contention came after the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Just days before a school full of children, teachers, and staff would have been released to enjoy their Christmas break, 26 of them were instead mowed down on December 14 by gunman Adam Lanza, who began the spree by murdering his mother at their home and ended it by taking his own life at the school.28
Before the bodies had even been buried, there were calls from Congress for stricter gun control standards, especially since Lanza's primary weapon was a semi-automatic AR-15 “assault rifle.”29 While President Obama stopped short of explicitly calling for gun control, it was easily read between the lines in his remarks later that fateful Friday:
As a country, we have been through this too many times. Whether it’s an elementary school in Newtown, or a shopping mall in Oregon, or a temple in Wisconsin, or a movie theater in Aurora, or a street corner in Chicago – these neighborhoods are our neighborhoods, and these children are our children. And we're going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics.30
Because of the reputation that preceded Barack Obama and Democrats in Congress, there were a subset of TEA Party irregulars who believed the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax31 32 or blamed other factors,33 but others saw it more as a general threat to our Second Amendment rights. Defending the Second Amendment meant that for a brief period the outdoor TEA Party rallies returned, some complete with loaded weapons. “This is the fundamental issue on the founding of our nation,” said Tampa TEA Party leader Tom Gaitens to the Associated Press.34
Under the white-hot post-tragedy spotlight, gun control was a troubling issue for a moment. But as the uproar over Sandy Hook faded from the political conscience after the holiday season passed, Congress found other things to preoccupy it – in part because no ban on so-called “assault weapons” was going to pass in a Republican-controlled House.
These issues, not necessarily economic but important to our freedom nonetheless, became more of a rallying point as interest in fiscal issues waned. Activists were now used to the ebb and flow of government spending, and realized the impasse was now probably going to last until Barack Obama left office in early 2017.
And if more proof wasn't required that the finger pointing between the TEA Party and Republican establishment was leading to a messy divorce that would have lingering consequences, the March 2013 release of the RNC's “Growth and Opportunity Project” served as the separation papers.35 Two key platform planks which were dear to much of the rank-and-file of the TEA Party – enhanced immigration reform and a return to a more traditional view on social issues – were tossed aside.
We… believe that comprehensive immigration reform is consistent with Republican economic policies that promote job growth and opportunity for all.
(…)
On messaging, we must change our tone – especially on certain social issues that are turning off young voters. In every session with young voters, social issues were at the forefront of the discussion; many see them as the civil rights issues of our time. We must be a party that is welcoming and inclusive for all voters.36
This was treated as a revelation by establishment Republicans like Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post, who crowed:
Given that many of its most popular leaders endorse immigration reform this may not cause as much of a stir as it would have 6 months or a year ago. Don’t be surprised, however, to see a backlash from those appealing to anti-immigration exclusionists. It would be a mistake for established conservative media outlets to pander to those voices.
(…)
These passages may very well raise the hackles of many social conservative activists and some elected officials. But by not asking for endorsement, merely toleration of a variety of positions on gay rights and marriage, the report aims to take the issue off the national political table.37
As we later learned with their dogged opposition to the Gang of Eight, TEA Partiers were not hungering for comprehensive immigration reform, which was indeed properly addressed at the federal level. (Their lack of motion, however, led states like Arizona to make their own attempts38 to enforce federal laws.) Three years later, the gay rights issue was nationalized by the Supreme Court's Obergefell decision, which took the same-sex marriage issue off the table but ignored the idea of the Tenth Amendment and letting states decide. In that decision, the SCOTUS instead ran roughshod over the will of the people in the group of states that turned down same-sex marriage at the ballot box in recent years and created a new “right” from thin air.
Yet even as it was claimed any “very informal” ties regarding these topics weren't collusion but were on a “case-by-case basis,”39 the TEA Party's growing orthodoxy on social issues was shooing its libertarian element out the door, too. Orlando-based TEA Party leader Phil Russo, who earlier in this book was critical of the Tea Party Express and its impact, called it quits on the movement itself in a very public way by claiming the TEA Party had fallen due to “hypocrisy and racism”:
Sadly, what began as a genuine opportunity to make this country more free has deteriorated to racist name calling, fear of anyone with brown skin, and an irrational focus on Sharia law.
(...)
It’s so sad to me that a movement that began as an organic reaction to big government has been hijacked by the right. The Tea Party’s slogan was, “fiscal responsibility, limited government, and free markets” – but it has now become the religious right in tri-corner hats.
(…)
Hypocrisy and racism are what drove independents who voted Republican in 2010 away from the Tea Party. The same thing has happened with the Libertarians, like me, who were part of the original Tea Party. We have been driven away from the rallies and the meetings because what was supposed to be a movement about fiscal issues has become the activist-wing of the GOP. If you don’t think every Muslim is a terrorist you are not a real Tea Party member. If you think that the U.S. Constitution does not say anything about drugs, and that therefore, under the 9th and 10th Amendments the issue should be left to the states, you are not a real Tea Party member. And when you use the Constitution to prove to them that they are wrong it sends them into fits.40
But there was also a reality libertarians had to face, too: “Tea Party libertarians may be vocal and active, but they simply don't have the numbers if evangelicals stay home,” wrote author David Brody. “That's the plain hard truth.”41
Looking at hard truth from a different perspective, North Carolina TEA Party leader Ralph Reagan, who you'll recall was also a Republican Party chair in the Fayetteville area, complained that “every time the D.C. GOP caved on something we were blamed.”42 This dichotomy between TEA Party and Republican Party eventually cost him his county chairmanship.
So as the TEA Party was losing ground with establishment Republicans, dropping libertarians like a bad habit, and shedding popular support thanks to continuing negative press, the perception of it stopped being positive and began being tossed around as an epithet by the Left – i.e. a conservative Republican was now a “TEA Party politician.” Some politicians, such as Virginia's upset 2014 primary winner Dave Brat – who knocked out the “establishment” favorite in House Majority Leader Eric Cantor – ran away from the “TEA Party” label even if they agreed on most issues.43 The only time the TEA Party got any love was when it went against those entities perceived to be its corporate masters, such as the birth of the “Green Tea Coalition” in Georgia44 (and later Florida),45 which combined local TEA Party chapters and left-wing environmental groups that supported enhanced measures promoting solar energy in opposition to each state's AFP chapter.46
At the same time, those who doggedly remained passionate TEA Partiers were having a harder and harder time motivating others to participate in protests. Take for example this abortive Florida protest against Senator Marco Rubio, who drew the TEA Party's ire by participating in the Gang of Eight.
One sweltering July day, a half-dozen tea party protesters gathered under a tree in front of Rubio's Miami office, seeking shade as they denounced his support for an immigration overhaul. But the protest soon turned into more of a support group, with the four men and two women grousing to each other about how Rubio had turned into a "back-stabber," a "liar" and a "flip-flopper."
Juan Fiol, a real estate broker who organized the protest, kept looking at his phone, waiting for calls from fellow tea party supporters that never came.
"It was supposed to be a big event," he said as he waved a large "Don't Tread on Me" flag.47
The argument could easily be made – particularly with the hindsight of half a decade – that the TEA Party was successful in staving off amnesty via Congressional means, forcing Barack Obama to do it piecemeal through, among other actions, the executive-ordered Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, better known as DACA. These activists' behind-the-scenes action were effective enough to work in some cases – just ask Joan Fabiano, who I previously introduced to you in this book48 – but it didn't change the perception the TEA Party was yesterday's news.
This was particularly true when the Congressional GOP caved on the prospect of shutting down the government in October, 2013. Gleeful Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson gloated that “President Obama’s victory this week (on the budget deal) was as complete and devastating as Sherman’s march through the South.”49 (An interesting analogy to be sure, given subsequent events.) A few months later, on the movement's fifth anniversary of its Tax Day protests, Nicole Hemmer of the fading weekly U.S. News and World Report summarized the TEA Party as “withering” because of its “waning popularity and disastrous electoral record.”50
This came shortly after the Tea Party Patriots hosted a fifth anniversary rally remembering the original Chicago Tea Parties in Washington, D.C. But instead of fiscal issues, a number of speakers addressed the age-old charge of racism within the movement's ranks and TEA Party favorite Rand Paul warned the group, “If we want a bigger crowd and we want to win politically, our message has to be a happy message, one of optimism, one of inclusiveness, one of growth.”51 This was a departure from the hardline message the pre-2012 TEA Party had, and this mellowing of tone, combined with primary victories for incumbents like Rand's fellow Senator Mitch McConnell, who “crushed the Tea Party”52 later that spring, led pollster Nate Silver to declare the “Tea party has outlived its usefulness” as a political term.53
Perhaps the new version TEA Party may have been portrayed as looking for “smart, educated candidates” like successful Senate hopefuls Tom Cotton in Arkansas and Ben Sasse in Nebraska,54 but simply put they were still taken as just another subset of the mainstream Republican Party.
This perceived need to compromise, at least a little bit here and there, wasn't lost on other observers of the TEA Party.
There's no doubt that Tea Party members have not learned the art of compromise, and as the movement moves forward Tea Party congressmen are either going to have to grow their legislative majority so they can call the shots or figure out a way to compromise without sacrificing their principles.55
Yet our old friend Theda Skocpol warned the Left that, “The Tea Party was supposed to be dead and the GOP on the way to moderate repositioning after Obama’s victory and Democratic congressional gains in November 2012...(but) Tea Party influence does not depend on general popularity at all. Even as most Americans have figured out that they do not like the Tea Party or its methods, Tea Party clout has grown in Washington and state capitals.”56 (Italics in original.) That much was true, but it came with a caveat.
The methods of the TEA Party, as a matter of fact, were becoming less and less distinguishable from those of the mainline Republican Party. Infighting on allocation of resources led longtime TPX leader Amy Kremer to split with the group57 in April, 2014 when the TPX decided to back Florida Congressional candidate Curt Clawson with several days of activities to begin its ninth bus tour “Fighting For Liberty” and ignored the state of Kentucky, where Kremer wanted to back Senate challenger Matt Bevin – the one who was eventually “crushed” by Mitch McConnell. That relatively modest bus tour, and a small-scale one in Mississippi to back Senate challenger Chris McDaniel, would be the extent of the 2014 bus tours for the Tea Party Express as it backed away from the rallies and instead offered simple, far less expensive press release endorsements.
Meanwhile, the 2014 campaign cemented Jenny Beth Martin's status as one who made her living in the shadowy world of political consulting. Once the Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund was created in early 2013, the onetime philosophy of neutrality among TEA Party leadership was no more. The fund would spread millions of dollars around for the 2014 cycle, with all of it aiding Republican candidates. Certainly Martin would try and put her spin on GOP success in the 2014 midterms, to wit:
The tea party provided more than winning ideas to this Republican wave; our intensity was palpable in the lead-up to November 4. We knocked on tens of thousands of doors. We made 2.4 million get-out-the-vote phone calls in key battlegrounds like Iowa, Georgia and Kansas, often for candidates we didn’t originally support or endorse in primaries.58
While all of this may be factually correct, it also showed the focus on the volunteers was not there like it was in 2010 and 2012. Knocking on “tens of thousands of doors” may sound impressive, but Senate races affected millions of doors in 2014; moreover, robocalls can be made a thousand or more at a time. It was more troublesome to get volunteers for GOTV efforts for these Senate races, as opposed to local and state contests where TEA Party contenders did better.
The distinction of the 2014 Senate election, though, was the number of TEA Party favorites who lost primary challenges against incumbent or more establishment-favored GOP candidates. Matt Bevin in Kentucky, Chris McDaniel in Mississippi, and Milton Wolf in Kansas were among that group of challengers who lost, with all three incumbents who defeated them eventually returned to the Senate. While the triumphs of Tom Cotton in Arkansas and Ben Sasse in Nebraska were looked at as TEA Party wins, Cotton was unopposed in his primary and several groups jumped on the Sasse bandwagon late, originally favoring Shane Osborn, the former state treasurer who bowed to Sasse in the primary.
With the preferred “establishment” candidates mostly in place, in the 2014 midterm the GOP eliminated three Senators who were seeking their first re-election (having come in on the 2008 Obama wave), defeated one Democratic appointee, and picked up the seats of three other retiring members on their way to regaining control of the Senate after eight years out of power. Just like Nancy Pelosi lost her gavel after the 2010 midterms, Harry Reid would no longer be the Senate Majority Leader and would have to endure his final two years there in the minority. It was four years and one candidate in Sharron Angle too late for those who were passionate about the TEA Party, but better late than never. (By comparison, the initial TEA Party wave of 2010 only lost two of the 12 Republicans newly elected in 2010 in the 2016 election – Mark Kirk, who represented the deep-blue state of Illinois, and Kelly Ayotte, who lost by barely 1,000 votes out of over 738,000 cast in New Hampshire. Arguably a revitalized TEA Party there would have held Ayotte's seat, although Hillary Clinton's victory margin in the Granite State was similar.)
Even with that measure of electoral success, however, there were signs of serious trouble associated with the TEA Party. A rampant factor in their demise was the rise and success of so-called “scam PACs,” described in Politico by campaign finance lawyer Paul Jossey this way:
A small group of supposedly conservative lawyers and consultants saw something different: dollar signs. The PACs found anger at the Republican Party sells very well. The campaigns they ran would be headlined “Boot John Boehner," or “Drop a Truth Bomb on Kevin McCarthy.” And after Boehner was in fact booted and McCarthy bombed in his bid to succeed him, it was naturally time to “Fire Paul Ryan." The selling is always urgent: “Stop what you're doing.” “This can’t wait.” One active solicitor is the Tea Party Leadership Fund, which received $6.7 million from 2013 to mid-2015, overwhelmingly from small donors. A typical solicitation from the TPLF read: “Your immediate contribution could be the most important financial investment you will make to help return America to greatness.” But, according to an investigation by POLITICO, 87 percent of that “investment” went to overhead; only $910,000 of the $6.7 million raised was used to support political candidates. If the prospect signs a “petition,” typically a solicitation of his or her personal information is recorded and a new screen immediately appears asking for money. Vendors pass the information around in “list swaps” and “revenue shares” ad infinitum.
Starting a new PAC is easy: Fill out some paperwork, throw up a splash-page website, rent an email list, and you’re off. It’s an entrepreneurial endeavor. Through trial-and-error, operatives test messages to see which resonate best and are most likely to get them and their vendors paid.59
And so on and so forth, in a never-ending cycle of fundraising.
Erick Erickson, then of RedState, was one of the first to sound the alarm on this,60 and he was joined by a larger Politico investigation61 into these “scam PACs” that mainly traded on TEA Party-favored candidates and causes. The incessant fundraising off TEA Party regulars, who skewed heavily toward those 60 and over who had the disposable income to use for political causes, made consultants – a group of characters who often countered that doing mass e-mail appeals wasn't as cheap as those on the outside of the business thought – fabulously wealthy for next to no effort, while achieving little to assist actual candidates who could have used the funds if they were given directly. Oftentimes less than 10% of the money raised by a PAC would go toward candidates, with much larger amounts used to pay for more fundraising. To remind you again, look back at Chapter 8 at the disparity between the money raised and assistance provided by the Tea Party Express in one election cycle and imagine it multiplied by a factor of 10 or more.
Even a group like the Tea Party Patriots, which had separated its PAC side from its organizing side, revealed in their annual report – a glossy, full color pictorial that bragged about their key achievement, firing Speaker John Boehner – that in 2015 they had spent just under $10 million, with nearly half of that ($4,621,263 to be exact) allocated to “Recruiting & Development Communications” ($2,903,821) and “Operations and Administration” ($1,717,442).62 By this point, argued Michigan TEA Party leader Joan Fabiano, the TPP was “another bureaucracy (and) not necessarily organic.”63
Yet where did the money go? Chances are it went into the pockets of those running the PAC, and not the candidate. In the meantime, the grassroots were being starved of their fiscal fertilizer:
By sapping the Tea Party’s resources and energy, the PACs thwarted any hope of building the movement. Every dollar swallowed up in PAC overhead or vendor fees was a dollar that did not go to federal Tea Party candidates in crucial primaries or general elections. This allowed the GOP to easily defeat or ignore them (with some rare exceptions). Second, the PACs drained money especially from local Tea Party groups, some of which were actively trying to grow the movement electorally from the ground up, at the school board and city council level. Lacking results five years on, interest in the movement waned – all that was left were the PACs and their lists.64
This pointed out another issue. A real problem the TEA Party had was having the same old people represent it in the media. When it first began, the spokespeople for the TEA Party were average, everyday people – maybe even your neighbor, the guy in your bowling league, or the lady who sits a few pews behind you at church. But now all America heard from the TEA Party came from the same old recycled guests one came to expect from inside the Beltway, and suddenly it seemed a lot less of a grassroots thing.
There were people who understood this, but they were too few and far between. Michael Johns, an original TEA Party leader from Philadelphia, explained:
In 2015, the Tea Party and patriot movement’s top priority must be communicating and impacting public opinion and explaining why and how Tea Party principles can make America great again: creating jobs and economic prosperity, restoring rigid adherence to the U.S. Constitution, and restoring a strong America that can defeat serious national security threats. We must demonstrate to the American people, as they already seem to be recognizing, that liberalism is a false religion ultimately about the manipulation of society for political ends.65
Joan Fabiano added that the press didn't want to interview local TEA Party organizers. They were “lazy” and once national spokespeople from the TEA Party came out, they became the go-to source – thus, the media created the spokesperson problem. “That did not sit well with TEA Party people,” she added. It was “a false dynamic created by the press.”66
But boxed into a corner by a resurgent “establishment” GOP, scammers preying on its faithful to enrich themselves, and increasingly negative coverage of the same Beltway insiders creating a poor perception for this onetime champion of the grassroots, the TEA Party was on the verge of being wasted and exhausted. To me, the tale of the TEA Party's fate was best told by Gallup, whose final poll asking about the popularity of the TEA Party was conducted in October, 2015. At that time they registered just 17% support – an all-time low in popularity67 – so Gallup stopped asking the question.
The perfect way to complete the circle on the demise of the TEA Party is to note the resignation of Keri Carender from the Tea Party Patriots in order to raise her daughter. Back in my first chapter I introduced Carender as one of the first to hold a “Porkulus” event in February, 2009, a prototype for what would become the Tax Day TEA Parties. With her newfound passion, Carender joined the TPP later that year and, according to the release announcing her departure, “has served as a local and state coordinator, barnstormed the country, served as a spokesperson for our organization in the media, headed up our field team by providing support to the local coordinators around the country, and she injected much needed levity and humor when times were grim to remind us that we can be happy warriors.”68
What Keri wrote in response was, perhaps, a fitting eulogy for the movement.
I believe that the power of good people will triumph over the corruption of the evil people. I believe in the power of this movement because it comes from the millions of grassroots people across the nation, taking action and standing up for principle. And, though we’ve seen over and over how the corruption can ensnare so many once well-intentioned warriors that move to D.C., I am confident that the heart of the movement will not be corrupted because the heart will never live inside the beltway. We will persevere against everything the swamp wants to throw at us, and we will not be taken in. I truly believe this with all my heart.69
Perhaps the heart would never live inside the Beltway, but many of those who took advantage of and profited off the name were now denizens of the nation's capital. And once they got there, they seemingly forget why they were sent, succumbing to that age-old siren song of political power.
Greed wasn't the only factor in the fall of the TEA Party as a political entity, though. The next three chapters are going to look more in-depth at other causes: the effects of the infusion of social conservatives into the growing movement, those organizations that sprang up to counter the TEA Party like the Coffee Party (among several others), and finally the view of the TEA Party from across the bridge, as skeptics on the Left were quick to point out its hypocrisy and trouble with staying fiscally conservative in deeds as well as in words.
Notes - bearing in mind some of these links may now be dead ones:
1 http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2012/11/05/tea-party-independents/
3 https://www.teapartypatriots.org/content/omaha-nebraska-where-americans-are-taking-a-stand/
4 http://www.teapartyexpress.org/5907/the-pony-in-obama-winning-a-second-term#more-5907
5 http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2012-11-21.html
6 https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/05/04/flashback _june_2015_bill_maher__his_audience_laugh_at_ann_coulter_for_saying_trump_could_win.html
7 https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/09/ann-coulter-donald-trump
8 https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/04/opinion/where-have-you-gone-bill-buckley.html
9 http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/09/how-tea-party-killed-mitt-romney/#
11 https://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/19/us/politics/19romney.html
12 One example: http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2014/01/making-the-rounds-barry-soetoros-columbia-university-school-id/ Perhaps this is “fake news” but look at how much mileage the “fake but accurate” George W. Bush Air National Guard story received. As I have noted in previous chapters, the Left does its best and most dogged investigation on the Right and never shines a light on its own.
13 https://www.teapartypatriots.org/content/how-easy-is-it-to-save-your-country-watch-this/
14 https://www.teapartypatriots.org/content/the-tea-pot-is-boiling/
16 http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1211516
19 http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2012/11/09/boehner-mocks-tea-party/
20 https://www.teapartypatriots.org/content/john-boehner-just-denied-you-exist/
23 https://www.teapartypatriots.org/content/war/
24 http://www.mlive.com/lansing-news/index.ssf/2012/12/lansing_business_owner_alleges.html
25 http://dailycaller.com/2012/12/05/why-dick-armey-resigned-from-his-tea-party-organization/
26 https://www.buzzfeed.com/rosiegray/freedomworks-also-lost-their-director-of-campaigns
27 https://www.buzzfeed.com/rosiegray/inside-the-tea-party-factory
28 http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2012/12/us/sandy-hook-timeline/index.html
29 Contrary to popular belief on the Left, the “AR” in AR-15 does not stand for “assault rifle.” It stands for ArmaLite, the company that developed it.
31 http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/09/the-sandy-hook-hoax.html
32 http://www.chronicle.com/blognetwork/tenuredradical/2013/01/sandy-hook-massacre-a-left-wing-hoax/
34 http://www.cleveland.com/nation/index.ssf/2013/02/gun_control_is_new_focus_for_t.html
35 https://gop.com/growth-and-opportunity-project/
36 Ibid. Pages 76 and 22, respectively.
37 https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2013/03/18/gop-autopsy-report-goes-bold
39 David Brody: The Teavangelicals: The Inside Story of How The Evangelicals and The Tea Party are Taking Back America (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2012) p. 19.
41 A longer discussion of this point comes at Brody, p. 63.
42 E-mail exchange with Ralph Reagan, January 1 and 9, 2018.
43 https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/25/dave-brat-tea-party_n_5531531.html
46 https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/green-tea-party-solar
47 https://www.yahoo.com/news/tea-party-plans-abandon-gop-stars-083902786.html
48 http://www.bridgemi.com/public-sector/kitchen-table-politics-tea-party-leverages-social-media-advance-causes Joan Fabiano was an early leader who revealed some of her tricks of the trade in this article. She was also kind enough to contribute elsewhere to this book in a separate interview, for which I am thankful.
50 https://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/nicole-hemmer/2014/04/15/on-tax-day-the-tea-party-is-withering
51 http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2014/02/27/top-tea-party-group-celebrates-five-years/
52 http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2014/politics/hamby-midterms/
53 https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/tea-party-has-outlived-its-usefulness/
55 Brody, p. 185.
56 https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/12/why-the-tea-party-isnt-going-anywhere/282591/ Emphasis in original. She added that “at least three successive national election defeats” would be necessary to kill off the TEA Party.
58 http://dailycaller.com/2014/11/05/tea-party-values-and-enthusiasm-pave-the-way-for-gop-victory/
59 https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/08/tea-party-pacs-ideas-death-214164
60 https://www.redstate.com/erick/2014/12/22/the-latest-tea-party-scam-called-from-202-750-2399/
61 https://www.politico.com/story/2015/01/super-pac-scams-114581?o=0
62 https://www.teapartypatriots.org/2015-annual-report/
63 Notes from telephone conversation with Joan Fabiano, February 25, 2018.
64 https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/08/tea-party-pacs-ideas-death-214164 Overall, this was a very instructive piece by Paul H. Jossey because fiscal issues were always there for local TEA Party units.
65 http://www.teapartytribune.com/2016/01/30/the-tea-party-then-and-now/
66 Notes from telephone conversation with Joan Fabiano, February 25, 2018.
67 http://news.gallup.com/poll/186338/support-tea-party-drops-new-low.aspx
68 https://www.teapartypatriots.org/news/statement-on-keli-carenders-resignation/
69 Ibid.
Next Tuesday will continue my series with Chapter 11: Of God and Man in the TEA Party.
In the meantime, you can buy the book or Buy Me a Coffee, since I have a page there now. And remember…
Thanks for the background and analysis. Hopefully we can learn something before it's too late.