26 October 2010

Small but Enthusiastic Movement Influencing Midterm Elections

By Michelle Austein Brooks
Staff Writer

Washington — It is a story nearly all American students learn: In December 1773, angry with British tax and trade policies, colonists sneak aboard British ships in the Boston harbor and dump the cargoes of tea overboard. The Boston Tea Party, as it came to be called, shaped America’s independence movement.

Today, a small but enthusiastic group of Americans is using this event to symbolize their frustration over U.S. economic policies and are playing an influential role in the 2010 midterm elections.

The tea party is a coalition of national and local groups that share an interest in reducing the role of government in American life and lowering government spending.

The tea party is not a political party and has no single leader. It is a movement, New York Times reporter Kate Zernike told journalists at the State Department’s Foreign Press Center October 22, “but it’s also become a state of mind.”

In an April 2010 New York Times poll, 18 percent of Americans identified themselves as tea party supporters. But the number actively involved, for example by donating money to candidates or attending rallies, is closer to 4 percent.

Supporters tend to be male, white and over the age of 45, and most have supported Republican candidates in prior elections. The movement was started primarily by people in their 20s and 30s, but older Americans were drawn to the movement as it grew in spring 2009 because of “frustration or an anger about the economy” and President Obama’s health care plan, Zernike said.

It can be difficult to define who is a tea party candidate since it is not an official party. Some are running for office for the first time, having gotten involved through tea party activities. Others have run for office before, but are finding unusually high levels of support because of the movement’s enthusiasm, Zernike said.

The New York Times says there are about 139 tea party candidates running for Congress, all running as Republicans. Most of them are “running in districts where the demographics are really lined up against them,” Zernike said. In these historically Democratic districts, the Democrat is “overwhelmingly favored to win.”

About 35 candidates are in competitive races, “meaning that the tea party candidates actually stand quite a good chance of having a fairly sizable caucus” in Congress, she said. November 2 is Election Day.

Much as Obama’s supporters did in 2008, the tea party movement has used social media to increase its numbers and energize its voters. Enthusiastic voters can play an especially large role in midterm elections, where voter turnout tends to be lower than in presidential-election years, Zernike said.

The tea party’s influence was felt strongly during primary elections. Grass-roots organizers were so effective in some races that their candidates defeated longtime politicians supported by the national Republican Party.

CHALLENGE FOR REPUBLICANS

“The ultimate test of the tea party will be if [its candidates] end up actually hurting the Republican Party more than they help,” Zernike said.

Some of the party’s primary victories have presented challenges for the Republican Party. In Delaware, tea party candidate Christine O’Donnell won the state’s Republican primary election for Senate. O’Donnell won “because the tea party groups were incredibly well organized at a grass-roots level,” Zernike said.

The national party had supported a Republican congressman who it believed was moderate enough to win a Senate seat that had long been occupied by Democrats. Polls suggest O’Donnell is trailing the Democratic candidate by as much as 17 percent.

“Democrats have portrayed a lot of these candidates as too extreme for their districts,” Zernike said. “It’s a question of whether the enthusiasm carries the day or whether the extremism carries the day.”

The tea party movement started as a group concerned about economics and government spending, but “it has attracted some people who feel that a tea party rally is a place to express some ‘out there’ views.” Among some of the more unusual views is a belief that the United States should abolish the Department of Education or the income tax.

The tea party candidates with the best chances of winning are in districts that typically support Republicans, Zernike said. “On the other hand, there are some districts that lean Republican where the Democrat is doing well because there’s a tea party candidate and the Democrat has been able to say this candidate is too extreme for this district.”

A THIRD PARTY?

This type of “conservative insurgency” movement is not new in American history, Zernike said, citing the 1960s as an example in which people frustrated with economic and social policies organized around candidates like Barry Goldwater, who ran for president but did not win.

But tea partiers are not seeking to create a political party, looking at the example of Ross Perot in 1992, Zernike said. Perot ran for president as a third-party candidate and garnered most of his support from Republican voters. “All it did was divide the vote and drive the election to [Democrat] Bill Clinton.”

For more on U.S. elections, see America.gov’s Frequently Asked Questions on elections.

(This is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://www.america.gov)