…that were shown to be false in yesterday’s voting. I won’t miss either Lugar or (especially, given his behavior in space policy) Hatch.
33 thoughts on “Two Myths About The Tea Party”
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…that were shown to be false in yesterday’s voting. I won’t miss either Lugar or (especially, given his behavior in space policy) Hatch.
Comments are closed.
The TP turned out in mass to try and prevent the passing of Obamacare but while it is a protest movement it is not a protesting movement. Other than making their displeasure known, right now there is little to be accomplished by milling around in the streets holding signs.
The TP shows up at the ballot box and that is the strength of a movement not how many days in a row they can riot in the streets.
What is the over/under on Matula coming into this thread and saying that the Tea Party holds sway over the GOP, given that he pronounced the Tea Party dead?
Yes, get rid of the existing Republicans so its easier for Democrats to win those districts in the fall. Great strategy, replacing candidates likely to win easily with outsiders. It worked well in the 2010 Senate elections in Alaska, Nevada and Delaware…
Indeed; I recall how those losses were only the harbingers of the crushing Republican defeats — at all levels of government — in 2010, forever destroying the GOP’s influence in American government.
Akatsukami,
Not sure exactly as to your point as all three Tea Party candidates lost what should have been guaranteed wins for Republicans.
“Yes, get rid of the existing Republicans so its easier for Democrats to win those districts in the fall. Great strategy, replacing candidates likely to win easily with outsiders”
The number of strawmen is nothing short of colossal.
Apart from the snark of what you are responding to, where are the strawmen?
There are always engineering tradeoffs, even in election contests, where a primary election of a more ideologically committed candidate to your base poses a non-zero risk of being less appealling to the broader set of voters.
It is indeed arguable that the GOP could have gained a majority in the Senate were it not for the named contests.
I think this myth about gaining the majority in 2010 needs to end. Only 1/3 of the Senate is up for grabs at any given time. Even winning a majority, which the Republicans did, doesn’t mean a majority can be obtained in one election cycle. So lets look at the facts:
In October 2010, the Senate was 57 Ds to 41 Rs. 37 seats were up for grabs, with only 34 being full terms. Of those seats, 19 were Ds to 18 Rs.
Republicans had to maintain all 18 seats, and gain 10 more. That’s 75%. What Republicans accomplished with Tea Party support was getting 24 of the 37 seats. That’s 64% of the seats up for grabs.
Typically, when a party garners 64% in an election, that’s a landslide. This notion that the Tea Party had a negative impact, is similar to the morons claiming yesterday that Romney lost big in Super Tuesday.
Leland,
Without the Tea Party the Republicans would have had 3 more Senators, making the Senate at least a 50-50 tie.
Without the Tea Party there are many elections the Republican wouldn’t have won (e.g., Massachusetts, Wisconsin). The Tea Party tried to get the most conservative candidates it could in every race. In three of them, they overreached, but it was still a net gain overall. And the same thing will happen this year. It’s very likely that the Republicans will take the Senate, and gain even more seats in 2014, and have a much more conservative Congress than it would be without the Tea Party.
But please, feel free to continue your delusions.
Rand,
If that is their goal in 2012 then they need to be focusing on the seats held by Democrats and not wasting money on those already held by conservative Republicans.
Take for example this winner:
Podiatrist, Iraq war vet, Brad Wenstrup defeated Ohio Rep. Jean Schmidt by 6 points.
Wenstrup defeated Schmidt without running a single television ad — using only radio, direct mail and automated calls to reach voters.
I saw Wenstrup on TV yesterday in an interview. Among the many things he said, one was that he courted and worked with…..
the Tea Party…..
From a Roll Call article:
“Wenstrup polled the race once in mid-February, Shrive said. The survey showed everything had to break their way in their campaign to win. So, night after night, Wenstrup went out to meet voters.
Meanwhile, Schmidt’s antagonists in the district beat the drum for her defeat, including the tea party group COAST. ”
That’s the Tea Party………
To continue from the article:
“….Schmidt’s recent run-in with the House Ethics Committee played a primary role in the tea party group’s argument to voters.”
This guy looks and sounds pretty solid to me, although I confess I don’t live in Ohio so I wasn’t closer to that contest.
So here we have a replacement that TM castigates and who claims the replacements are weaker than the people they replaced.
Strawman.
Top.
Strawman.
Gregg,
Yep, eating their own. Rep. Jean Schmidt (R) who has served since 2005 was known as one of those questioning if President Obama was born in the U.S.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/07/campaign-for-primary-accountability-super-pac_n_1328012.html?ref=politics
So if guess what. If Brad Wenstrup does win in the fall (and the incumbent advantage is now gone for the Republicans) you end up with someone just as far to the right but now without the seniority that Rep. Schmidt had. So explain to me how this advances the Tea Party agenda?
Thomas Matula wrote:
“Yep, eating their own. Rep. Jean Schmidt (R) who has served since 2005….”
Strawman #512 – it doesn’t matter how long they’ve been there. It matters what they do. Ted Kennedy was there since the Jurassic times yet I didn’t like what he did….
Strawman #513 – That the GOP traded strong candidates for weak ones.
Well there’s scads of data to show this didn’t happen in this case. All you have to do is read.
TM continues….
“If Brad Wenstrup does win in the fall (and the incumbent advantage is now gone for the Republicans) you end up with someone just as far to the right but now without the seniority that Rep. Schmidt had. So explain to me how this advances the Tea Party agenda?”
Read the Roll Call Article And you will see things like:
““Jean has always had some tough races, but she’s always sort of hung on and won, so I guess I expected that again,” fellow Ohio GOP Rep. Jim Jordan said Wednesday. ” and “She’s always struggled,” Matt Parker, an Ohio Republican operative, said. “Rob Portman used to carry that district very handily when it was his, and she just always struggled.”
So she wasn’t strong in her state…..
Next……
“Instead, a perfect storm of ethics woes, new territory in her district, super PAC spending and voter agitation with her politics and personality contributed to her defeat.”
Next…….
“Schmidt’s ethical woes started when she accepted $500,000 worth of legal expenses from a Turkish-American interest group. The legal fees stemmed from several matters involving David Krikorian, the Democratic opponent in Schmidt’s previous bid for re-election.
Armed with a PowerPoint, Krikorian’s attorney, Christopher Finney, made the rounds to tea party meetings in Schmidt’s redrawn district in the weeks leading up to the primary with a presentation titled: “A Broken Ethics Process: A Case Study on Jean Schmidt.”
“When they realize the enormity of the problem and the obviousness of the violations, I literally have people coming up afterwards and thanking me for doing the speech,” Finney, a self-identified Republican, told Roll Call in February.
The Ethics Committee concluded in August that Schmidt should not face any sanctions. She was instead told to repay what the committee called an impermissible gift and disclose the sum on amended accounts of her personal finances. But the damage was already done. The matter became a campaign talking point that Wenstrup and his allies regularly brought up around the 2nd district.
For Schmidt, it should have been just another clue she was in electoral trouble.”
Or read this from a Cincinati paper:
http://news.cincinnati.com/article/20120307/NEWS0108/303070154/What-brought-Schmidt-down-?odyssey=nav|head
For loads of reasons, she wasn’t strong.
Carry on in your delusional state.
[[[Armed with a PowerPoint, Krikorian’s attorney, Christopher Finney, made the rounds to tea party meetings in Schmidt’s redrawn district in the weeks leading up to the primary with a presentation titled: “A Broken Ethics Process: A Case Study on Jean Schmidt.”]]]
So the attorney that represented her Democrat opponent in the previous sold the Tea Party on putting her out… Don’t you find that a bit odd?
But we really need to wait and see in the Fall what happens in the district and if this was a good Tea Party move.
[[[[So the attorney that represented her Democrat opponent in the previous sold the Tea Party on putting her out… Don’t you find that a bit odd? ]]]]
Far less odd than a self-proclaimed Republican voting for the Democratic Majority leader in the Senate and claiming that he’s trying to help Republicans win the majority in the Senate. Thanks for making your hypocrisy so easy to note, Matula! 🙂
Leland,
Unlike you I am not a robo-voter. When the party decides to nominate a poor candidate I will vote for the opposition. Its the only way to teach them to make better decisions the next round, and the Republican Party in Nevada has learned that with the appointment of Rep. Heller as a replacement for Senator Ensign and running him in the next election for Senate.
What is a pity is that the Tea Party seems incapable of learning from its mistakes.
Unlike you I am not a robo-voter.
Matula flings poo gets it all over himself:
When the party decides to nominate a poor candidate I will vote for the opposition.
Declares exactly what it is that makes TEA Partiers put up candidates he doesn’t like, because they are tired of the party simply putting forward the next person that “deserves” the nomination due to their loyalty to the party over the voters.
Its the only way to teach them to make better decisions the next round
Indeed, that is the mantra of the TEA party. It’s amazing that with over 2 years of making this statement (more if you include the pork busters movement); Matula is still incapable of learning. Alas, Harry Reid will run again, and Matula’s cocoon will be happy.
From http://news.cincinnati.com/article/20120307/NEWS0108/303070154
“He [Wenstrup] racked up an impressive list of endorsements from tea party organizations in and out of the district, including the Anderson Tea Party, Clermont Liberty PAC, the Ohio Liberty Council.
“I talked to tea party people early on and told them that I supported the basic beliefs of their movement, and they asked me if I considered myself a tea party person,” Wenstrup said. “I told them I wanted them to consider themselves Wenstrup people because I was reaching out to a lot of people.”
COAST leaders organized fundraisers for Wenstrup.”
“She [Schmidt] had a lot of people lined up against her,” said Clermont County Republican Party chairman Tim Rudd, a Schmidt ally. His party’s central committee – about 40 percent of which are tea party members – could not get a majority vote to endorse her in the primary.”
Paul Milenkovic asks:
“Apart from the snark of what you are responding to, where are the strawmen? ”
A few of them are:
That replacing some GOP incumbents makes it easy for the Dems.
Ignoring that some Dems replaced Dems – but no mention of how dumb that might be.
That TM has access to the internal polling data that tells him that they are “…replacing candidates likely to win easily” as if he knew they would win easily.
That the GOP replacements are weak……
Basically what TM is trying to do here is say the Tea Party is powerful without saying the Tea party is powerful – since he pronounced them dead.
Gregg,
Some of the Democrat on Democrat races was a result of redistricting, where two seating members of Congress had to run against each other.
Replacing an incumbent with seniority with some one that never served in Congress is always a poor strategy. First you eliminate the incumbent advantage for the Republicans, and then, if the replacement is elected, they
have to start at the bottom so you wipe out the seniority advantage.
And as I noted below, the Ohio primary is an open one, so it makes just as much sense to claim it was Democrats crossing over to make the opposition easier in the Fall elections 🙂
Strawman #512:
“Replacing an incumbent with seniority with some one that never served in Congress is always a poor strategy. ”
Always?
As I mention in an earlier reply to you seniority isn’t worth spit if the congresscritter stinks. I hated almost everything Ted Kennedy did and he was there for decades. If a non-TK-clone Democrat ran against TK I would have voted for him/her int he primary.
In a heartbeat.
And traded away all that precious seniority.
Marco Rubio is a newcomer – you think he is worthy of being ignored?
Allen West?
Gregg,
Not surprising since you seem to be Republican, but it appears the Democrats never felt that way.
TM assumes without justification that:
“Not surprising since you seem to be Republican,”
Actually I am not a Republican. Thank you for playing.
“but it appears the Democrats never felt that way.”
There were lots of democrats – even in the people’s Republic of Massachusetts – who wished TK would go away. And many more outside the pork-bloated state.
Are you suggesting that no democrat anywhere ever would want to vote out a Democrat even if they hated the Dem’s voting record SIMPLY because of seniority loss?
Twaddle.
Gregg,
All party have divisions. But in a democracy they are settled at the ballot box. I am sure there are Democrats who disliked Senator Kennedy just as their were Republicans who supported him. But the ones that voted returned him to the Senate.
Also you seem to under estimate the importance of seniority in committee assignments and setting agendas in the Congress. Freshmen Senators like Senator Rubio may make much noise, but what is their track record where it matters, in originating and pass legislation the actual work output performance is measured by?
As for your party affiliation, for a Democrat you sure seem to support the Republicans a lot. But tell me, as a Democrat, what Democrats would you like to see running for President in 2016? Or for Senator from MA?
Have to put this reply one level up as the tool used for posts seems to have a level limit.
TM I repeat:
“Are you suggesting that no democrat anywhere ever would want to vote out a Democrat even if they hated the Dem’s voting record SIMPLY because of seniority loss?”
And then you laughably wrote:
“As for your party affiliation, for a Democrat you sure seem to support the Republicans a lot. ”
I’m not a Democrat either.
“But tell me, as a Democrat, what Democrats would you like to see running for President in 2016? Or for Senator from MA?”
As I’m not a Democrat, therefore I can’t answer your question.
Thank you for playing.
I’ll tell you one Democrat I could have voted for, for president – Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
Were I of voting age back then I’d have voted for Truman too.
And just to scramble your brain (though maybe it’s not possible to scramble it any further) I voted for Clinton – the first time.
You really should stick to writing about what you think and stop trying to be cute – you cannot pull it off.
I see, you are just a mystery man (or woman?) looking for debate.
BTW speaking of cute games, it looks like the Tea Party is playing one in Ohio’s 2nd District.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/08/william-r-smith-ohio-second-district_n_1333094.html?ref=elections-2012
[[[Every election night has surprises, it seems. But perhaps one of the stranger results of Tuesday’s primaries was William R. Smith’s apparent victory in his run for the Democratic nomination in Ohio’s 2nd District. Smith spent no money, did no campaigning, and local Democrats never spoke to him.]]]
[[[Caleb Faux, executive director of Hamilton County’s Democratic Party, said he believed a super PAC made robo-calls tying Smith to President Barack Obama and Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). The Cincinnati Enquirer got hold of a robo-call by the Victory Ohio Super PAC, which is not registered with the FEC:
William Smith has an opponent that describes himself as a Reagan conservative. William Smith’s opponent was already sanctioned by the Ohio Elections Commission for not telling the truth. Please don’t make a mistake and embarrass the party. Vote for William Smith, the real Democrat for Congress. This has been paid for by the Victory Ohio Super PAC]]]
So it appears someone also gamed the Democratic side of the race to get a weak opponent for the fall. It will be interesting to see how this turns out. It also shows what is possible when you a few well funded Super PACs to throw monkey wrenches into the election process.
TM warbles:
“I see, you are just a mystery man (or woman?) looking for debate. ”
Ordinarily I’d come right out and say what I am. But you are making such a fool of yourself with your assumptions and games that I’m just letting you continue.
“BTW speaking of cute games, it looks like the Tea Party is playing one in Ohio’s 2nd District. ”
Ok so which is it:
1) Were you wrong when you said the Tea Party was dead and no longer able to affect things?
2) Or are you wrong now when you say the Tea Party is not dead and is able to affect things?
Gregg,
Yes, most BT’s get their kicks that way.
And just because the Tea Party bubble is collapsing doesn’t mean that
pockets of the Tea Party don’t have the ability to monkey wrench some contests. Actually that its to be expected given the deep pockets of the folks backing it and it looks more and more like the results in the Ohio 2nd are mostly the result of deceptive robo-calls by a couple Super PACs misleading voters at the last minute. The big question is why so much effort for an Ohio district that has always gone Republican and which already had a radical right Representative, one that already believes President Obama’s birth certificate is fake. It looks more like a power struggle between the left overs of the Tea Party rather then any sign of their strength.
In defense of TM, the TP candidate where he lives wasn’t necessarily the best choice. Of course that TP candidate (or anyone the GoP could have ran) also had an uphill battle with the resources that Reid marshaled against her.
In defense of reality, the TP was the driving force behind the historic victories of the GoP in 2010.
Something the blogger overlooks is that Ohio is an open primary. And given the small numbers involved it could just as easily been Democrats crossing over to wipe out the incumbent advantage on the Republican side, making those districts easier for the Democrats to win in the Fall.
Why are leftist members of the Democrat Party so interested in the welfare of Republicans?
It’s quite touching…
Yes, isn’t it?