The Tea Party was a new, spontaneous force..it sprung up virtually overnight, and is not organized, but rather a loose amalgam of hundreds of local groups. These are led/dominated by activists, and in many cases it was these same activists who ran. Many of them make lousy candidates, and we saw that in O’Donnell, Angel, and a few others..But the so-called mainstream GOP candidates who lost to the in the primaries coudl have had their support had they been clearly willing to affirm allegiance to the TP principals. They came to the game a little late. Next time the TP will do much better..
Angle and O’Donnell were great candidates. They were left to twist in the wind by their own party.
Also: Angle was defeated by a “mysterious power outage” - after reboot, Reid went up something like 5%. Hell of a way to run an election.