Power Line has a interesting interview with Jon Lerner the Republican campaign consultant that helped Nikki Haley for Governor, and Tim Scott for Congress in South Carolina and Mike Lee for Senate in Utah. Jon has a polling company and has some thoughts in the influence of the Tea Party in these successful campaigns. Here is what Lerner had to say in Power Line’s TEA LEAVES IN LAST WEEK'S PRIMARIES post:
The primary election victories of Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, and Mike Lee last Tuesday all arrived under very different direct circumstances. Yet, despite their major differences, they all had an underlying similarity that speaks to the mindset of Republican voters across the nation in the Tea Party Era.
The mainstream media's caricature of the Tea Party movement as a fringe, or even racist, group of voters could not be further from reality. The Tea Party ethos goes well beyond just those who show up at rallies. The Obama administration has governed so far to the left that it has in a sense radicalized a majority of the Republican Party.
In my primary polling, I have taken to asking this question: "Do you consider yourself to be more closely aligned with the traditional Republican Party, or with the Tea Party movement that has arisen in the past year?" Consistently around half of Republican primary voters now align with the Tea Party. By definition, that goes well beyond a "fringe" group. The Tea Party is all about a series of issues surrounding size-of-government concerns: bailouts, deficits, earmarks, health care takeovers.
In Utah, Mike Lee was able to defeat convention opponent 18-year Senate incumbent Bob Bennett, and primary opponent Tim Bridgewater, by focusing on those very issues. Of course, the radicalizing influence of Obama's governing has not affected Republicans alone. A Democratic U.S. Senator was defeated in a primary this year in Pennsylvania, and another nearly so in Arkansas, because they were not sufficiently liberal for their party's primary voters.
The South Carolina results should definitively put to rest any notion of the Tea Party movement being racist. Indian-American Nikki Haley, and African-American Tim Scott won resounding victories among the South Carolina GOP electorate (one of the most conservative in the nation), and they did so with the open backing of local Tea Party organizations. Republican voters overwhelmingly chose candidates who clearly agreed with the Tea Party philosophy irrespective of race or gender.
Haley campaigned with Sarah Palin and called for term limits and opposed taking Obama stimulus money. Tim Scott wrote the bill in the South Carolina legislature to reject Obamacare, and ran TV ads decrying earmarks, even as his runoff opponent Paul Thurmond (son of legendary Senator Strom Thurmond) played the "bring home the bacon" argument against Scott's anti-earmark position. The Scott campaign was mindful of the potential difficulties that could arise in this campaign because of race, and yet in our polling, there never was any evidence that it was a problem.
The truth is that it's so easy for the media to cast anti-Obama positions in racial terms, but race has nothing to do with it. It's about the massive growth of government, and that's what is galvanizing both the Tea Party movement and Republican primary outcomes.
The best news is that these concerns about government growth, as well as economic stagnancy, go beyond just Republicans. Independents and other groups of swing voters are largely in sync with Republican attitudes on these issues today. It is not dissimilar from how Independents and Democrats were in sync in their views about the Iraq War in 2006 and 2008, with disastrous electoral consequences for the GOP. I suspect we will see a similar shellacking at the polls for Democrats in November.
[My emphasis added]
This is a very different view from what our local Nevada County Democrats, and their fellow travelers, are saying about the Tea Party. It will interesting to see the comments on this post.
I was very pleased to learn that the Tea Party Patriots have come out with strong support for the California Jobs - Suspend AB32 Initiative. The success of the Jobs Initiative will be a measure of their influence in California.
