Every race is different. And things happen that are unexpeced in every race. One tea party candidite lost against a committee chairman, but then another won against a committee chairman.
The point is to get as many tea party people elected of course, but these politicians who have successfully defeated tea party candidates will have to be looking over their shoulder when they cast their votes. They are feeling the pressure of the people. And that’s a good thing.
For example ~ and I hate to keep bringing this one up ~ we had the situation where Hatch was second in seniority only to Lugar in the Senate. When your party takes over the Senate the guy with the most seniority is very important in passing out committee chairmanships.
Obviously you can't have a race between Lugar and Hatch ~ since they're in different states (except when they are both in Washington DC all the time), but a sufficiently aggressive group masquerading as a Tea Party grassroots movement could pop up in Indiana and beat Lugar on behalf of Hatch and his lackeys in Utah.
Lo and behold that's what happened.
The folks backing Lugar kept complaining it was "out of state money" backing Mourdock, but they could never tell us which state it was.
Later on when the primaries were held in Utah, the local TEA Party crowd popped up, declared Hatch was OK (although his voting record looks more like Teddy Kennedy's than it ever did Lugar's) and began flowing the stream of TEA Party funding to the Hatch campaign.
So much for integrity in some TEA Party organizations ~ sure wouldn't trust the crowd in Utah, and now I wonder about the crowd in Indiana.
Might watch Mourdock's voting record next year real close ~ bet he ends up kinda' to the Left of Lugar, and Hatch!
Now this sort of thing will happen whenever you have a freefloating political organization ~ all the cells don't work together, nor are all the cells the ones you want. Some of them are CANCER and need to be irradiated or poisoned with chemistry!
At some point we need some WRITERS to lay out the acceptable standards for the TEA Party acting as a faction or group of factions within the Republican coalition, if not as part of a Conservative coalition.
Right now, watching this same faithless crowd telling us how great it's going to be with Hatch back in the Senate, I'm pretty sure they aren't really TEA Party folks ~ more like people who simply wanted their guy, Hatch, to be in a very powerful position in the Senate.
That's pretty standard politics ~ usually doing a bit of rent seeking to get in charge of the national budget. You watch, there will be some major government buildings going up at the base of The Front.