The Decline and Fade of the Tea Party
Robert Schlesinger

Why moderate Senate incumbents like Olympia Snowe and Scott Brown and other establishment candidates are breathing easier in 2012

Remember the Tea Party? It was all the rage back in '10, inspiring fear in establishment Republicans and loathing in Democrats. The movement became the conservative face of voter anger, taking down incumbents and party favorites in primary after primary.

The net effect was an energy surge for the GOP, though results were mixed in a state by state accounting. Tea Party activism was no harm, no foul in Senate races in Florida, Utah, and Kentucky. But the fringe nominees the movement installed almost certainly cost the GOP the Senate seats in Delaware and Colorado and helped preserve Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in Nevada.

But while the Tea Party undoubtedly -- and unfortunately -- remains influential within the party, for a number of reasons it won't have the same driving, central role in GOP primary politics. Indeed, if 2010 was the year of the Tea Party, 2012 is shaping up to be the cycle in which the establishment strikes back.

Start with this year's crop of GOP incumbents. The two most centrist of the bunch, New Englanders Scott Brown of Massachusetts and Olympia Snowe of Maine, would seem prime targets for the Tea Party's urge to purge moderates. But Brown, who was a Tea Party hero before behaving in office like, you know, a Massachusetts Republican, is largely being ignored by the movement, getting neither a primary challenge nor much support.

Snowe presents a microcosm of the taming of the Tea Party.

She seemed a sure target coming into the cycle, with the Tea Party getting credit for electing Maine Gov. Paul LePage and with state polls showing that many Republicans thought she didn't belong in the party. But having seen the carnage of 2010, she has assiduously courted conservatives, eschewing her centrist apostasies (a rapprochement aided by the fact that her late husband helped LePage as a youth, a debt the new governor repaid with an endorsement). At the same time, voters have seen the Tea Party in office -- specifically the GOP's debt ceiling hostage crisis -- and have been rightfully turned off. "There were people saying, 'Yes, I think we should default,' and there were the rest of us saying, 'You're insane,' " Andrew Ian Dodge, Snowe's long-shot primary challenger, told the Washington Monthly. "Now I'm emphasizing my Tea Party links even less because a lot of people think they are crazy people who almost drove us off a cliff." Dodge was the founder of Maine Tea Party Patriots.

Indeed, experience with the Tea Party has turned voters off.

Jennifer Duffy, a senior editor at the Cook Political Report, argues that a large number of Republicans who cast anti-establishment, Tea Party votes regret their decision, thanks to the likes of Christine O'Donnell and, one supposes, the debt ceiling fiasco. That kind of hindsight is one reason for the Tea Party's diminished status.

Another is that incumbents like Snowe went to school on the lessons of 2010. Sen. Orrin Hatch watched his Utah colleague, Sen. Bob Bennett, get outmaneuvered as Tea Party forces stacked the state convention and denied him renomination. Hatch has toughened his rhetoric, raised more than $6 million, and scored his first perfect 100 rating from the American Conservative Union. He also persuaded Rep. Jason Chaffetz, his toughest potential challenger, to not enter the race. He's still likely to face a challenge from state Sen. Dan Liljenquist -- "Hatch is in significant trouble," says Nathan Gonzales, deputy editor of the Rothenberg Political Report -- but he won't get ambushed the way Bennett did. Neither will Indiana's Richard Lugar. Polls show he's vulnerable, but he has already raised more than $4 million in his race against State Treasurer Richard Mourdock, who has pulled in less than $1 million. There's a good chance the Tea Party won't take down a single Senate incumbent this cycle.

At the same time, other top Senate races look like they'll have establishment candidates.

Though Hoosier Tea Partyers have lined up behind Mourdock, groups in other states remain fractured. They haven't found a challenger for Massachusetts's Brown or Nevada Sen. Dean Heller; they haven't coalesced around a candidate in Missouri or Nebraska, where Democrats Claire McCaskill and Ben Nelson are top targets. In Wisconsin, where GOPers hope to grab retiring Sen. Herb Kohl's seat, former Gov. Tommy Thompson, the embodiment of the staid establishment, is the front-runner while three Tea Party wannabes compete for support. Ditto Michigan, where failed gubernatorial candidate Pete Hoekstra represents the establishment, and Florida, where Rep. Connie Mack is the scion of a prominent political family.

Even in places like Virginia and Texas, where the movement has lined up behind single candidates, they face tough sledding. Virginia Tea Party activist Jamie Radtke is getting little traction against George Allen, a former governor and senator. And in Texas, former state Solicitor General Ted Cruz is the Tea Party candidate, but he is little known and figures to be underfunded compared to Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst.

Here are three good barometers of Tea Party potency next year: the Texas Senate primary on March 6 -- if Cruz beats Dewhurst, it will be a sign the movement still has its uber-mojo; the Indiana primary on May 8, as Mourdock has a clear shot at Lugar in a race that has all the makings of a 2010 Tea Party win; and the Wisconsin Senate primary on September 11, which will test whether conservatives can line up behind one candidate or let another establishment hack slide through.

Right now the betting is on the establishment hacks coming back.